Strategic Discipline Blog

How do great teams come together and win?

What’s the glue holding them together?

What do they have in common?

Shannon Byrne Susko has a wealth of experience leading companies she owned to success, as well as coaching businesses to success now in her role as founder, CEO, and the creator of 3HAG WAY, and Metronomics.

She shared three commonalities all great teams have in our Coaches Convention in San Diego in May:

• A structured repeatable process that all team members follow.
• Clarity of expectations of each other, and a willingness to work hard to develop and maintain high cohesiveness to achieve their team goal together
• A coach who is an expert at the repeatable process, and who ensures the team has clarity of role and position while keeping it highly cohesive and focused on the team result

Let’s explore each of these in this blog to discover the underlying reasons these are critical to your team’s success.

1. A structured repeatable process all team members follow. Patrick Lencioni is quoted, “If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.” The difficulty of accomplishing this is only surpassed by the impact of what this can mean to you and your organization. In sports you can see this in Phil Jackson’s Triangle offense, Vince Lombardi’s power sweep, Bill Belichick’s “do your job” or John Wooden’s High Post Offense, and Seven Point Creed. Your team needs a foundation, a structure, and a system they follow to communicate, interact, and complete their jobs right every time.
2. Clarity of expectations of each other, and a willingness to work hard to develop and maintain high cohesiveness to achieve their team goal together. Possibly nothing gets more overlooked in an organization than clarity of expectations. Starting from hiring, to onboarding, to everyday tasks, few employees know exactly what the result they need to produce is. Ralph Stayer, in Flight of the Buffalo, noted, “Do the people in your company know how well they’ve done before they go home every night? People perform what they measure – help the performers to measure the right stuff.” No wonder Johnsonville Sausage is the No. 1 national sausage brand. Patrick Lencioni, (Leadership Team Measurement – Achieve Results Consistently) in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, believes the ultimate measure of a team is their ability to consistently achieve the results they set. Individual achievements are not the measure of your organization’s success, but the team working together, suppressing individual success for the sake of the team reaching company goals.
3. A coach who is an expert at the repeatable process, and who ensures the team has clarity of role and position while keeping it highly cohesive and focused on the team result. For many years coaching was considered only for those who needed help.  To some hiring a coach suggested their own failure. , the author of the Checklist Manifesto, felt this way, and yet as he describes in To Be Great – Hire A Coach, "It's not how good you are now; it's how good you're going to be that really matters." There are many methods, and systems to help your business grow and for you to succeed as a leader. It’s not necessarily one is right and the other is wrong. It’s for you to choose from the multiple opportunities from these coaching platforms a system you feel will help you achieve results. Choose a coach you feel is compatible with you, and who will help you become the best you can be.

Use these three commonalities to ask yourself, how are you doing? If your business were graded on success in these three areas, how would you score? Is it time to get your organization following this path?

To create an environment where everyone is inspired to give their best, contact Positioning Systems today to schedule a free exploratory meeting.

Growth demands Strategic Discipline.

It’s easy to become discouraged when leading a team/company, or when you struggle to achieve your goals. Reading biographies provides inspiration, recognizing you’re not alone in your struggle. Next blog we’ll discover an innovator who changed how all athletes high jump, and the struggles that inspired him.

Building an enduring great organization requires disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action, superior results, to produce a distinctive impact on the world.

Discipline sustains momentum, over a long period of time, laying the foundations for lasting endurance.

A winning habit starts with 3 Strategic Disciplines: Priority, Metrics, and Meeting Rhythms.   Forecasting, accountability, individual, and team performance improve dramatically.

Meeting Rhythms achieve a disciplined focus on performance metrics to drive growth.

Let Positioning Systems help your business achieve these outcomes on the Four most Important Decisions your business faces:

Positioning Systems helps mid-sized ($5M - $250M+) businesses Scale-UP. We align your business to focus on Your One Thing! Contact dwick@positioningsystems.com to Scale Up your business! Take our Four Decisions Needs Assessment to discover how your business measures against other Scaled Up companies. We’ll contact you.

NEXT BLOG – Struggle and Adversity: A Formula for Innovation