In the first article of this newsletter, we discussed a critical requirement for effective execution of your company’s strategy. While strategy demands strong leadership, it cannot be fully optimized without good teamwork. You can bring the best people together in an organization and engage them around a well-articulated strategy, but if they are not aligned with a common set of goals, the strategy will fail.

LCG consults with many companies that have good people, the right product and a receptive market, but are still not effective in achieving their goals. The CEO or the Board, that requests we define the barriers to execution, are usually frustrated and sensing that failure is eminent. In most instances, the business fundamentals are sound. The strategy may need to be tweaked slightly, but the root of the stagnation is most always the team itself.

Let’s review some recent examples. In Company A, the Sales and Engineering departments were not aligned. The engineers were asking why Sales did not engage them to understand the product more fully so the complete capabilities of the product could be pitched. Sales was frustrated that Engineering did not work with them to meet the customer’s expectations in the right time with the right results. In Company B, the strategy was completely undermined by senior leadership who had no respect for the skills and capabilities of their peers. The well-thought-out strategy, excellent business plan and accurate metrics were ignored by the team members. The CEO was even planning to fire roughly half of the team. All of these dysfunctional behaviors resulted from a complete lack of teamwork.

Many stories have been told suggesting that this basic competency, teamwork, is not a key requirement for leadership. At LCG, we see that teamwork is too often viewed as a soft principle. While movingly articulated, it rarely has a point of accountability and measurement. Yet, the team leader must be able to define goals and guide his or her team to work collaboratively across the functions. He must measure the team’s degree of trust and respect in each other and their fundamental belief in the company’s strategy. Defining goals that link and align functions and measuring their ability to support each other in reaching goals is the true path to teamwork and leadership.