Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Episode Content:

The Anxious Achiever

Maureen Metcalf, founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute, published this article as part of the Forbes Coaches Council. It is a companion to the podcast with Morra Aarons-Mele, the host of The Anxious Achiever, a top-10 management podcast that helps people rethink the relationship between their mental health and their leadership, The Anxious Achiever. 

Building Leadership Cohesion

People talk about leaders aligning around a goal and what happens when leadership teams can’t find alignment. A key underlying factor for this misalignment is the lack of leadership cohesion. In her 2012 book So Far from Home: Lost and Found in Our Brave New World, Meg Wheatley says, “In today’s world, where complexity and change are the norms, leaders must work together cohesively and collaboratively to achieve their goals.”

The lack of cohesion significantly contributes to our misalignment, causing reduced trust, conflict, decreased productivity and increased turnover. For leaders, the lack of cohesion is an energy drain; everything takes longer than it should and is more difficult. While cohesion is crucial, it is rarely discussed in leadership circles.

If cohesion has that level of impact on organizations, how do leaders become more cohesive? Developing cohesion requires a concerted effort by leadership teams.

Confirm the organization’s purpose and values.

The following questions can guide you to help your team align around purpose and values. Purpose and values can be communicated through shared stories. Is the purpose clear? Do you agree with it? Is it a foundation for all high-impact decisions? Do the values serve as the foundation for the culture? Do they guide behavioral norms? Do the values align with your values? Are you proud to work for an organization with this purpose and values? What are your shared stories? Do you have a story of what success looks like?

Develop trust.

Trust is a key foundation for cohesion. It changes and evolves as our relationships evolve. Many of us have had the experience that we “lose” trust after a person violates our expectations. We also have the experience of beginning to trust someone after a period of questions. Mary Jo Bouchard’s trust model provides a solid foundation to explore trust. Each of the six elements (ASC-DOC) impacts how much we trust someone. We may trust their consistency. They are predictable, but we distrust their competence, realizing they don’t have the expertise to deliver on their commitments.

• Authenticity
• Safety
• Consistency
• Dependability
• Ownership
• Competence

How are you building and sustaining trust across your leadership team? Can you use this model to get more granular about where team members trust one another and where trust breaks down? We use the model with the leadership team to help them identify areas of weak trust and agree on behaviors that support a high-trust relationship.

Clear, consistent and transparent communication.

Different organizations have very different norms for communication. Some fall to the side of the need to know, while others build trust through open and honest communication. For leaders to build coherence, it is important to use communication as a key lever to foster trust. Your communication should reinforce each of the six elements of the ASC-DOC trust model. If these elements fall short, you risk reducing trust and coherence. Questions for leaders and leadership teams include: What is our communication cadence? Do we structure our communications to build trust and coherence? Do we consistently connect our communication messages to our purpose and values? Do we integrate our purpose and values into our crucial decisions?

Foster diversity and inclusion.

Cohesive teams can differ constructively. Diverse teams bring diverse points of view and leverage them to accomplish significant goals. The “2023 Edelman Trust Barometer” indicated that distrust is fueling polarization. Very few would help (30%), live near (20%) or work with (20%) someone whose views they disagreed with. In this context, diversity and inclusion can include gender, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation. It can also include different stakeholders and cross-functional groups, and in our divided, politically charged workplaces, it can include purposely inviting people with diverse views across these groups.

Guiding questions to test your performance on fostering diversity and inclusion could include: Is our leadership team diverse? How do we ensure diverse perspectives are considered and integrated into solutions? How do we ensure our culture fuels trust for people who are different?

Foster community.

People perform better and have a greater sense of well-being when they trust those around them to seek their best interests and support them in accomplishing their goals. According to Gallup, “Having a ‘best friend’ at work contributes to a thriving employee experience and to communication, commitment and other outcomes. In fact, recent Gallup data show that having a best friend at work has become more important since the pandemic, even considering the dramatic increase in remote and hybrid work.”

Fostering community is a companion to diversity. How do you foster community across a diverse group of people with multiple points of view? How do you create opportunities for team members to find shared interests when they appear different? How do you promote friendship at work, one-to-one and among groups? Do you have group volunteer projects? Do you celebrate successes? Do you celebrate failures? Do you celebrate people?

Building cohesion among leadership teams is crucial for organizational success when trust is low; distrust breeds polarization. Cohesion enables leaders to come together to solve big challenges effectively with limited energy leakage. Lack of cohesion diverts valuable resources resulting in infighting, slow decisions, unsupportive behavior, undermining activities and, ultimately, reduced organizational performance.