Arrested Development

The timing couldn’t have been any better when I was handed my copy of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team since I was just beginning to grapple with the challenge of building my first fully formed senior leadership team (SLT). With UK headcount past a hundred people and moving from the startup phase into the scale-up territory, the need to rethink how we managed the business had become a flashing red light on my dashboard.

Along with James Kerr’s Legacy, which explored the qualities and principles that define truly exceptional teams, Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions was another significant source of inspiration and insight into what it takes to build and sustain high-performing teams.

Here’s Lencioni introducing the five dysfunctions in this short, 2-minute video.

As a growth business progresses from the adolescent startup phase into the scale-up phase, it encounters a significant increase in operational complexity, and the need for a cohesive and completely aligned leadership team becomes urgent and critical. Failure to navigate this operating model transition risks the prospect of quickly capping out on growth or worse.

Leading up to 2016, we’d had various versions and prototypes of an SLT, but the seats had been occupied by leaders who were very capable but almost entirely functionally oriented, which is hard to avoid in the startup phase when building out the org is the priority and scale issues are still relatively easy to contain and manage.

If in 2016, you’d reviewed how my SLT was performing, it all looked pretty solid; the business was doing well, revenue was doubling year-on-year, we had outstanding functional leadership, and I enjoyed excellent levels of trust and engagement with each of my direct reports on the SLT.

But a serious problem I came to recognise was that while vertical alignment was excellent between me and each member of the SLT who reported to me, then lateral alignment and trust between SLT members was patchy to nonexistent. We might have described ourselves as a team and looked like one from the outside, but a team we were not. The SLT was more like an org chart grouping of senior functional leaders who all happened to report to me, and that was about it.

Plus, with me still mainly operating in startup leader mode, I had become an operational choke point with people still routing many key concerns, ideas or initiatives past me, like an air traffic controller tasked with ensuring no two initiatives or workstreams collided with each other, and everyone landed safely and took off on time.

If I didn’t move to address these issues quickly, our revenue growth curve would soon become inversely proportionate to the upward ramping trajectory of business complexity.

Fortunately for us, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team was a tremendous and timely starting point on that journey to becoming a genuine Team with a capital T.

This period also marked a transition for me since it required me to be a little less focused on driving the everyday operational aspects of running the business and begin setting aside an appropriate amount of time and focus for SLT growth and development. This was easier said than done.

It took a great deal of effort over twelve months to manage the transition, and not only did we make it, but I think we also earned the right to describe ourselves as a genuinely High-Performing Team — and by far the best, most cohesive and successful team I’ve ever been part of, and I suspect will ever be part of.

If you haven’t yet read Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions, consider this the memo you never got.