The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni is a book I reviewed in 2022 in a 5-part series that began with this blog post. One point that I want to revisit is the concept of team membership and your “first team.” As administrators at NYU, we are all members of many teams. Some are temporary and some permanent. I’ll just focus on the conflict you most likely face.
You are the leader of a team. Your team may be a group of individual contributors or, if you are more senior, it is composed of people who lead their own teams. Sometimes it’s even a combination of leaders and individual contributors. You are also a member of your leader’s team. Which team should be or, I’ll go so far to say, must be your first priority?
It is tempting to consider the team that reports to you as your first team. You spend more time with them. They depend on you. You are evaluated on how they perform. However, making them your first team can lead to some unhealthy and counterproductive behaviors. When your direct reports are your priority your team will not collaborate as well.
- They will tend to communicate through you.
- They may look on others as more foreign and not as capable.
- They may start to look to blame those outside the team for their failures rather than holding themselves accountable.
- They will take their cues from you and develop a we/they perspective.
Obviously, this is not good for the organization, and not good for your team.
When your leader’s team is your first team, your people will see themselves as part of the larger organization. They won’t judge their success narrowly, but take pride in broader accomplishments. Communication and collaboration across the organization is better. This can be challenging when not all your peers have the same perspective. You can’t let them stop you from doing the right thing.
There are many things you can do to change course and lean into making your leader’s team your first team.
- Empower your team to talk to whoever they need to in the organization.
- Keep your team informed about what other teams are doing and explain how your team contributes to other team’s success.
- Encourage your leader to set goals that require cross-organization collaboration. This is probably the most important way to build a strong relationship with your colleagues.
- Your team pays more attention to you than you think so your attitude is very important.
Speaking of goals, as you know, setting good goals is critical. Good goals have measurable outcomes, and a great way to show progress towards goals is a dashboard. As you are probably painfully aware we are using more dashboards across all of IT at NYU. The security dashboard is a great example. I have no doubt we could not have achieved the progress we have in securing our data without the dashboard being available to all of us.
President Mills is a big believer in the power of data and dashboards. We are developing more dashboards in NYU IT and you should expect to have access to more of them as time goes on. Dashboards are great, but they are a tool and as such only useful when people use them to make great decisions and drive good behavior.