Do You Have a Leadership Team, or Individual Leaders?

The importance of developing your team to their fullest potential has never been more important. It’s not uncommon for printing company owners and CEOs to invest in leadership training, they send their folks to industry conferences, provide coaching and encourage professional development. These are all highly encouraged and good things to do. The question is are they developing better individual leaders, or are they building a leadership team that can work together and lead the business?

Individual leaders need certain skills to succeed; there’s no question about that. They need effective communication skills, the ability to lead people, and understand financial performance. In addition to that, they are day to day problem solvers and need to execute to the expectations of the department. For a good leader, these skills are table stakes.

Having an effective leadership team looks different though. The members of the team need to make decisions together and challenge each other’s thinking; iron sharpens iron. What separates most teams, is their ability to resolve disagreements and hold each other accountable for results. The accountability part is an area that many teams seem to struggle with. Unfortunately, the default is for the owner or CEO to play referee and decision maker.

A common situation is when sales and operations have a disagreement on a customer commitment. Sales has committed to a delivery date that production believes is unrealistic, and the sales leader is trying to defend their position. The operations leader pushes back because of capacity constraints, and neither really wants to give ground. So, what typically happens? In too many companies, the issue lands on the owners’ desk.

Without an effective leadership team, the owner now must manage another group of people that they hired to lead the company. So, in the end, they really don’t have an effective leadership team as much as they have a collection of functional managers that all report to the same person.

Showing up at the weekly leadership meeting and providing updates, is not the same as having an effective leadership team. Effective teams work on things throughout the week and tackle the issues as necessary. They also understand that they have a role to play in adjacent departments, not just theirs. Everybody is invested in not only the sales results but manufacturing performance and the economic consequences of all their decisions. And guess what, they may not always agree. In fact, a dose of healthy disagreement is encouraged. But strong teams can work through those issues, make decisions, commit to a course of action and hold one another accountable.

Effective teams recognize the success of a company matters more than winning an argument or protecting their own turf.

To get away from the “let’s let the boss decide” mode, leadership teams need to have clarity about the decisions they own, and which ones require the CEOs involvement. They also need to trust one another and have a discipline to challenge each other when necessary.

If you’re an owner or CEO of printing company and want to evaluate your leadership team, here’s a few questions that you should ask:

1. Are the leadership meetings focused on solving business problems, or simply reporting activity?
2. Do disagreements among leaders get resolved without me having to referee?
3. Am I the only one holding people accountable, or do the team members hold each other accountable?
4. Is the best interest of the company being considered or do the needs and wants of individual departments rise at the top?
5. If I stepped away for two, four, or eight weeks, would the leadership team continue to make good decisions and move the business forward?

Building a good team is hard. Not only do you need to focus on developing individual skills, but working as a team is what separates good companies from the others.

Mike Philie helps owners and CEOs in the Graphic communications industry validate what’s working, identify what needs to change, and create a practical path forward.

PhilieGroup | mphilie@philiegroup.com | Linkedin

The preceding content was provided by a contributor unaffiliated with Printing Impressions. The views expressed within may not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of the staff of Printing Impressions. Artificial Intelligence may have been used in part to create or edit this content.