Dads Army and Extraordinary Performance
I recently referred in a conversation with the CEO of a large, global enterprise, to his team as “Dad’s Army”. He looked at me rather strangely, no doubt remembering the ragbag platoons of misfits, reckless youth and old soldiers, who made up the characters in one of British televisions best-loved television series.
But my point was not about the quality of his team, but that the reality of most senior teams is that the leader can rarely determine the players he or she leads. The platoon was made up of who was available in the little seaside town of Warmington on Sea, the talent that existed at that time and in that place. This is not so untypical of the situation leaders often face.
No doubt in the long run, a leader could and should endeavor as Jim Collins would say “to get the right people on the bus”. But this takes time and assumes that the right people are readily available. And it is the fate of many leaders I know, to regularly lose people they would regard as key to their performance to other parts of their organisation. Meantime, business plans need to be met, milestones achieved, change implemented.” The unavoidable question is therefore how should leaders get performance from the team/platoon they’ve got?
First of all, perhaps he or she should consider their own perspective on how performance should be achieved! Do they regard the challenges they face from the perspective of deficit or abundance?
A deficit approach sees challenges as a set of problems to be overcome characterized by:-
- Identifying critical problems and root causes
- Generating options and alternatives
- Selecting and implementing a best fit solution
There is nothing incorrect about this and indeed it is the dominant paradigm of leadership and business.
But there is another perspective, an abundance approach.
This can be characterised as:
- Identifying the strengths of individuals and organisations at “their best”
- Identifying what enables that performance
- Replicating and ensuring those enablers can function
- Focusing on what can really be achieved (which is often extraordinary)
We should not regard an abundance approach as a kind of unrealistic wishful thinking. There are many examples from sport and business, wherein teams devoid of superstars and prima-donnas achieve great success.
Consistently the coach/leader had taken an abundance approach and built extraordinary performance from people’s strength’s and the things that enable the deployment of these strengths. There is increasing evidence that indicates that this shift in mindset and the tools and techniques that accompany it, can be a liberating force on organisational and individual performance. The evidence covers a range of broad factors including: higher stakeholder confidence, productivity gains, customer impact and greater levels of commitment and engagement.
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