Whenever three or more people come together for a sustained period of time, they form unwritten and unspoken contracts. This is as true for leadership teams as it is for any other group.
Subliminal team contracts set the rules for how team members treat each other, who speaks most, whose skills are valued, which qualities are discouraged, whether teams seize or pass up opportunities, and whether your team will strive for excellence or mediocracy. It is crucial to understand the subliminal contract that is dictating your team’s collective thinking and subsequent trajectory. Do you know your team’s subliminal cultural contract?
Insights Into the Collective Mind of Leadership Teams
Although your leadership team lacks a physical brain, it does have a collective mind. Collective assumptions, prejudices, memories, and beliefs all contribute to your team’s shared worldview. Just as individuals have minds that guide their actions and decisions, your leadership team has a collective mind that influences how it functions.
Fear-Based Groupthink and Its Consequences
Leadership teams often spend most of their time in what leadership experts refer as the “Reactive Operating State,” spending their cognitive and emotional energies on fear-based preoccupation with threats and problems. (A groupthink gerbil wheel, so to speak.) While reactive planning is essential to running any enterprise, leadership teams that over rely on reactivity often fail to enter the “Creative Operating State,” a passion-based mode that creates space for potential and perceives developmentally in every direction.
Pursuing Value Extraction: Gerbil Wheel No. 1
The most simplistic of the fear-based leadership styles is called the “Extracting Value Leadership Paradigm.” The world is a battlefield, of sorts, to an Extracting Value leadership team. Work relationships are transactional, humans are born with fixed capacity, the strongest succeed, and knowledge is power; these are all Extracting Value leadership principles.
The cost of Extracting Value leadership myopathy is that your people and teams don’t fully develop and other forms of potential are often wasted. While the Extracting Value paradigm is often productive in the short term, the long-term consequences of being stuck in it are loss of passion, organizational vision, and purpose.
Arresting Disorder: Gerbil Wheel No. 2
The Arresting Disorder leadership paradigm is a step up from Extracting Value. Improving performance is everything to an Arresting Disorder leadership team. Knowledge is fungible. In other words, what worked over here will be expected to work everywhere. Understanding comes from breaking things down and analyzing. Everything is a big, complex machine, and order is created by improving results.
Once again, Arresting Disorder is a necessary part of any leadership approach. It only becomes problematic if your leadership team is unable to transcend it. The risk comes from striving too much for perfection and missing the potential that’s right under your nose.
Evolving Capacity: A New Model for Team Adaptive Development
Organizational culture expert Bryan Ungard teaches us about the Extracting Value and Arresting Disorder leadership paradigms and how leadership teams can get stuck in them. But he also teaches about a progressive leadership worldview called the Evolving Capacity Leadership Paradigm.
Every person, every team, every division, and organization is a unique living system in the eyes of an Evolving Capacity leadership team. They see developmentally in every direction. They develop their employees, their teams, their vendors, their landlords, and so on. Because they are grounded in the passion-based Creative Operating State, Evolving Capacity leaders make space for potential to emerge instead of constantly filling space searching for fear-based circumventions. They experience the living systems around them as one big, multidimensional venn diagram, each system feeding and being fed by the living systems around it.
Evolving Capacity leadership teams, as Harvard Professor Robert Kegan might say, create fertile spaces where human beings can do what they’re designed to do: develop. And they recognize that development is bidirectional. In other words, developing your people develops your teams, your divisions, and your organization.
Rather than asking, “What should we do?” Evolving Capacity leaders ask, “How are we making meaning?” Instead of always breaking things down and analyzing them, they take time to think holistically. Rather than spending all their energy circumventing problems, they create space to allow potential to unfold.
Accepting the Many Facets of Leadership in Teams
There is no one correct way to see leadership, as evidenced by the complex dance between leadership paradigms. Value extraction and disorder suppression are cornerstones of any functioning business, but transformational leadership teams must be able to stretch beyond them.
At Fern EPC, we equip physicians, healthcare executives, and their teams to overcome fear-based thinking, reignite passion, and recapture the vitality that drives the transformative progress.
Adapted from Bryan Ungard’s lecture on Carol Sandford.
