“Leadership is helping people succeed, inspiring and uniting people behind a common purpose and then being accountable.” — Paul Polman, Former CEO, Unilever

Similar to Market Index which represents the health of entire stock market and slight change in any of these affects the entire market, Leadership in any Organization also represents the health or Wellness of entire organization. In The Advantage, Author Lencioni explains that “an organization is healthy when it’s whole, consistent and complete, when its management, operations, strategy and culture fit together and make sense. Organization health is always better than Organization intelligence as Healthy Organization can surely be intelligent overtime but it may not be true other way round. Warren buffet hints towards this when he says “he believes the quality of a company’s management is a key factor on whether a stock will be a good investment” Organization health is about effectiveness to manifest vision in to its reality and it can only be done with the help of Great Leaders.

Pat Lencioni also mentions that before he starts consulting any of the organization and before looking at its financial health, within one lunch with Leadership team he can determine the Organization health and understand what are the constraints which does not let it achieves the goal. Most important thing which actually impacts and become barrier to scaling up of any organization is Leadership Health which gives hint of the entire Organization Health or in other words Leadership health is like Index representing the Health of the Organization. So what are those things and Leadership traits which is not healthy and impacts the Health of Organization? In his book The five dysfunction of a Team he mentions five pitfalls prevent most companies or organizations from achieving teamwork.

• Lack of Trust
• Fear of Confrontation
• Absence of commitment
• Absence of Accountability
• Failure to focus on goals

Lets focus on few things Leadership Team do or reflect among each other so as to prevent above dysfunctions in their respective teams. These are not exhaustive list but few important I have come across.

• One Team– When Leadership Team Come together, they should come without the Hat of their Position or departmental hat and come together to find a solution stepping in to each others realms to understand and look for solution for each other. There may be conflict during the meet but before going out of the room, solution should be there on the plate.

• Appreciating the Diversity– When there is conflict between team, it starts with Ego, then trust and then entire communication goes for a toss but if Leader takes a step and go deep to understand each other they come to know that not everyone has same Leadership style and understanding what others are not perfect in. There are many good resources like Myre briggs score , Disc Profile and Kolbe’s 8 profile to understand your leadership style which you can go through and understand the diversity acknowledging the differences and thus appreciate to be a better Team and thus being very very effective.

• Leaner Leadership size – It is a dream of everyone to be part of the Leadership Team and as any Organization scale up and become mature Organization, it is difficult for an Organization to optimize or having a leaner team of Leadership as while growing there is already executive Team, HOD’s and then there are Cofounders who may have managed everything in the Organization but now interested in a passionate project and still in Leadership Team and thus slowly gradually to become Inclusive Team becomes bloated and it becomes very challenging to handle so it is important to maintain the Lean size to make it more effective. The Harvard Business Review analyzes this team size phenomenon, charting its history in The Ballooning Executive Team

• Purpose of the Team – Rather than moving in a Typical Vertical Pyramid way and working to climb the corporate ladder if there are different Horizontal Teams with Defined Purpose and then strategy around it, there will be boundary where other leaders who are not part of it will not cross and they have different purpose defined. Leaders choose or adopt the role they would like to be more effective and will have clear Purpose to be more effective and functional. One may be interested in a Skunkworks project with a small team with a purpose of radical innovation. For example Executive Team has clear Purpose of converting strategy to execution and other Teams like Product Strategy, Technology strategy etc will not be part of Executive Team as they have their own purpose.

• Have a Council – The Author of Scaling up “Verne Harnish” once mentioned that the best thing he has ever read in a business book are 3 pages from Jim collin’s book Good to great which talk about having a mechanism called Council which consists of a group of the right people may be informal body who participate in dialogue and with whom you can bounce ideas with and it is also called “what if ” group only focused in future envisioning. This Team exists as device to gain understanding about all important issues facing the Organization and meets periodically and debate in search of “what if ” kind of solution and eventually you go from a lack of clarity to clarity to eventually good decisions.

Every Organization should have bigger Purpose beyond making more profits for shareholders and Leadership Team being the Index ensures Wellness of all the stakeholders of the Organization which in turn create better value for Organization and supports in scaling up the growth and profit to create a better world together.