Leadership Caffeine: Cultivating the Confidence to Act

The Leadership Caffeine series is over 200 installments strong and is dedicated to every aspiring or experienced leader seeking ideas, insights or just a jolt of energy to keep pushing forward. Thanks for being along for the journey!

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For leaders at all levels, there’s much to gain from James D. Murphy’s excellent book, Courage to Execute: What Elite U.S. Military Units Can Teach Business About Leadership and Team Performance.

In particular, Mr. Murphy’s emphasis on helping us understand the hard, deliberate and very structured work that goes into training and cultivating a team of professionals who are committed to the mission and who trust each other with their lives, is worth the price of admission. (As a side-note, it is hard to not read this book and recognize how far we fall short of when it comes to ensuring the training and development necessary for high performance in our organizations.)

Of the many quotable and thought-provoking items in the book, one that jumps out at me is Mr. Murphy’s perspective on courage. His words: “…but remember, courage is not bravado. Courage is the confidence to act that comes from preparation.”

It’s the lack of confidence to act that I observe as a derailment factor for so many teams from senior levels to functional or project groups. From decisions on strategy (what to do/what not to do?) to approach (how?) to key talent issues (who’s on/who’s off?) to structural, and accountability issues, the lack of proper preparation results in leaders and teams flailing, floundering, bickering or, simply staring at the headlights on key issues.

Effective leaders recognize their role in preparing teams to act, to learn and ultimately to succeed.

5 Things You Can Do with Your Team to Cultivate the Confidence to Act:

1. Strive for crystal clarity for the mission. Whether you are leading the senior management team as CEO or leading a project team, the mission and parameters must be crystal clear. The fuzzy nature of most strategies and the inability of individuals and their work groups to clearly connect their priorities and deliverables to the pursuit of mission objectives is deadly. You cannot over-communicate and you cannot over invest in clarifying the mission to the point of common understanding on your team. Strive to reduce the lofty picture goals to a size that is digestible and actionable at the level of your team.

2. Distill the mission down to navigable, actionable size for your team and be certain that people can talk about it clearly. Knowing the goal is to win the war or move to a new market is one thing, but understanding your role and your team’s role in this goal is essential. In high performing organizations and on high performing teams, the conversation goes like this:

Our team is accountable for producing this portion of our new offering. This new offering is one component of how we are pursuing our strategy to move into this segment of this market for these customers. Our individual responsibilities as team members are… . Our internal customers are department x and y, and we are accountable for these measures of timing, performance and quality to those customers.

Anything short of this level of specificity is just so much baloney. People and teams perform when they can connect their efforts to specific audiences and required outcomes.

3. Teach your team to talk. The collegial talk between most group members on teams is poison for performance. It feels good because it’s non-threatening, however, it skirts the real issues of execution and accountability. Learning to trust each other enough to tackle the hard topics of mission clarity, roles, performance and accountability, is not something that comes easy for any group. It’s also essential for high performance.

Effective team leaders understand the connection between the ability of team members to conduct robust dialog and the courage to take action and they refuse to settle for the happy talk that bedevils most teams.

4. Teach and constantly strive to strengthen decision-making processes and decision quality. Decisions are the precursors to actions for individuals and organizations. Without a decision, nothing happens or nothing changes. Decisions promote movement and importantly, they promote learning and continuous improvement. Effective leaders help team members learn how to frame issues, evaluate options, assess risks and then decide. They also teach their team members to review the outcomes of their decisions in pursuit of learning and improvement.

5. Know that team development is an every day activity and pursue it vigorously. Successful teams are made through the careful and deliberate work of the team leader. From mission clarity to member selection to promoting core values for performance and accountability, team development is THE purpose of the leader. High performance teams are products of hard work, constant scrutiny, continuous coaching and training and the never-ending pursuit of improvement.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Achieving the confidence to act is an outcome of the hard work of team building. Clarity for the mission, confidence and trust between team members and the ability to talk through and evaluate different options and scenarios and then decide, are all key factors. None of these occur naturally in the workplace. How hard are you working at cultivating the courage to act on your team?

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For more ideas on professional development-one sound bite at a time, check out Art’s latest book: Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.