Click here to view the embedded video.

As I reflected on my experiences, I realized that committee leadership isn’t really that different from leading any team inside an organization.  Here are a few observations:

Don’t Jump to Tactics Too Quickly

I was surprised by how often leaders jumped to assigning action items in the very first meeting of a new committee.  Of course, there is always a lot of work to be done, but focusing on tasks too quickly can derail any team.  Before assigning jobs or even asking for volunteers, leaders should:

Help Committee Members Build Relationships

If you want your team to have productive conversations, people need to feel safe speaking up.  Trust is crucial and the only way to build trust is to help people get to know each other on a personal level.  Consider kicking off your meetings with a quick icebreaker.  One committee leader I work with starts every meeting by asking each of us to provide an update on what we’ve been up to since the last meeting.  I am consistently impressed by a) how much fun this is and b) how many connections we uncover. 

Communicate the Big Picture

As the leader, you may know why the committee was formed and where you are headed, the rest of your team doesn’t.  Spend some time talking about the vision for this organization and it’s purpose or mission.  Invite your team to chime in and contribute to the discussion.  Remember that effective visions are not communicated to your team – they are created with your team. 

Uncover People’s Passions

When you are leading any team, it is critical to connect with what people are passionate about.  Doing so becomes even more important when you are dealing with volunteers.  Do you know why each person joined the team?  Do you know what motivates them?  Do you know what sorts of activities energize them, and which derail them?  If you spend some time talking about people’s passions before getting to tasks and accountability, you’ll be able to unleash people’s energy and get tasks done much more quickly. 

For more information on unleashing energy, check out our book, Change at the Core.

Firms often spend a lot of time and money communicating their brand message to the public, but little effort making sure that their employees get it.  This disconnect is a significant problem since it’s the employees who actually interface with the public, consumers, and clients.  Author, speaker, and humorist Elizabeth Freedman provides some great suggestions for how to help employees internalize your company’s brand in her article Building the Brand from Within.

In future posts I’ll discuss many more of the factors that contribute to brand alignment (or misalignment).

There are many aspects of alignment.  Today, I’d like to focus on alignment at the level of the senior leadership team. 

Organization development expert, Tom Wilkes, has worked with many executive teams to improve team performance and organizational outcomes.  As Tom describes it, success hinges on alignment.  He recently shared this simple, but powerful exercise for assessing whether or not your team is on the same page when it comes to priorities: 

• Give each member of the leadership team 3 index cards. 
• Instruct the team to write down the 3 most pressing priorities for the organization (using a separate card for each).
• Gather and post the cards on a wall or whiteboard, grouping them by topic/theme.

One team that Tom worked with had said in advance of this exercise that they were most definitely in agreement on priorities.  After this exercise, they had 36 different topics on the wall – an obviously a lot of work to do to get to agreement and eventually alignment.

For more on assessing and ensuring alignment check out Patrick Lencioni’s book, Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars and Yves L. Doz and Mikko Kosonen’s HBR article, The New Deal at the Top. 

Click here to see the video.  The comments on the same page are also worth skimming.

My rule of thumb in each of this situations is that we can’t expect people to read our minds.  We have to explicitly express our expectations.   If we want to see it, we need to say it.   

Click here to read the whole article. 

According to the Child Development Reference (Volume 6), Parallel Play is a term that was introduced by Mildred Parten in 1932 to refer to a developmental stage of social activity in which children play beside rather than with one another. Children in this stage may comment on what they are doing or imitate what another child does, but they rarely cooperate in a task.

As I watched the dynamic unfold in this boardroom, it occurred to me that parallel play is taking place millions of times a day in meeting rooms across the country.  In order to function effectively as a decision-making body, I believe that each executive team needs to be able to identify when parallel play is occurring, stop working separately, and start working collaboratively.  Of course, this requires consciously paying attention to the processes that are being used to come to a decision, not just the content of the decision itself.  Doing so can greatly reduce the time wasted in meetings and result in better – and more – outcomes.  

My positive experience with WordPress has been similar to my joy at discovering VistaPrint.  For an embarrassing number of years I paid other people a lot of money to design my cards and stationary.   Imagine my excitement when I finally learned that I can do it myself and have great materials produced for a fraction of a fraction of what I used to pay! 

 Power to the People!