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AE Leadership Letter > Volume 12, Issue 1
AE Leadership Letter: Volume 12, Issue 1
Bringing you new ideas for impacting people performance including the latest on company culture, work-life balance, time management, developing next-generation leaders, and new management ideas being implemented in other industries
In This Issue
Culture Club
The Next You
Communications Corner
Culture Club | Thoughts on instilling company culture
Team Charters Offer Blueprints for Success
Real alignment
Need to align a project or management team? A team charter might be the answer. Similar to a strategic plan, the document acts as a compass, directing its members toward a common goal. The charter defines a team’s purpose, roles, success metrics, and guiding principles. By ensuring everyone is on the same page, charters can be particularly helpful for hybrid teams or two merging teams with different operational methods. In the process, team charters build culture by facilitating collaboration, communication, and camaraderie.
Charter contents
A charter details why a team exists and how it will meet its objectives. As with a strategic plan, a team charter starts with big-picture items—a vision, mission statement, and SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound) goals. It delineates individual roles and responsibilities—including the team leader’s—and identifies any staffing gaps. Team charters can get specific in setting guidelines for scheduling and conducting meetings, communicating information, and resolving conflicts. To ensure team members are accountable for their performance, specify deadlines and acceptable response times.
Session suggestions
Some teams find added culture-building benefits by holding charter planning sessions off-site and paired with team-building activities. The team leader or another facilitator should direct the session by asking questions and guiding discussions. It’s critical for culture-building that all team members actively participate in the charter’s creation and have the space to voice opinions, concerns, and ideas so that they feel valued and heard. To ensure accountability, put the team charter on paper and have all team members sign it.
Post office
Post the charter in a shared physical workspace or online so that all team members can readily access it for future reference. Continually reference the document to make sure the team is meeting its agreed-upon objectives. The team charter is a living document, so revisit it at regular intervals or if the team needs reinvigoration.
The Next You | The latest on developing next-generation leaders
Find Tomorrow’s Leaders Among Today’s Followers
Follower, the leader
Aristotle may have been lacking an MBA, but the ancient Greek philosopher supposedly offered this kernel of leadership wisdom: “He who cannot be a good follower cannot be a good leader.” Indeed, your firm’s most faithful followers are ideal prospects for future leadership positions. Management professor Robert Kelley, author of The Power of Followership, wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “People who are effective in the follower role have the vision to see both the forest and the trees, the social capacity to work well with others, the strength of character to flourish without heroic status, the moral and psychological balance to pursue personal and corporate goals at no cost to either, and, above all, the desire to participate in a team effort for the accomplishment of some greater common purpose.” Sound familiar? It’s no coincidence that those qualities match the traits of effective leaders.
Type casting
Kelley designed a model that identified five types of followers based on their levels of engagement and independent critical thinking. Scoring low in both engagement and critical thinking, passive followers lack initiative and follow leaders like sheep. Although engaged, conformist followers are “aggressively deferential, even servile” sycophants devoid of critical thinking. Alienated followers think critically but are passive and often cynical. Pragmatic followers wait to see which way the wind blows before acting. Most desirable are exemplary followers—highly engaged, assertive, independent thinkers. “Paradoxically, the key to being an effective follower is the ability to think for oneself,” Kelley writes.
Exemplary behavior
Exemplary followers are risk-takers and self-starters who are highly rated by peers and superiors. They don’t see themselves as subservient and are more likely to stand up for their beliefs and challenge leaders when they disagree. Dedicated to an organization’s collective purpose and goals rather than a singular leader, they are enthusiastic, selfless team players who admit mistakes, value colleagues’ input, and share successes.
Cultural cultivation
Although critical, followership is not cultivated in most organizations due to a mistaken assumption that—unlike leadership—everyone knows how to follow. Kelley recommends followership training that fosters critical thinking, self-management, and an alignment of personal and organizational goals along with performance evaluations that rate employees on the traits of exemplary followership.
Communications Corner | Ideas on connecting with your workforce
By the Numbers
Flood warning
Numbers may be the stock and trade of many AE professionals, but flooding your presentations and communications with data can inundate audiences and drown out your broader message. Turns out none of us are truly “number people.” According to Chip Heath and Karla Starr, authors of Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers, the human brain is wired to only understand a handful of numbers—literally. “Through much of history, most languages had no words for numbers greater than five,” they write. If numbers are a foreign language, communicators must translate them into a vocabulary their audiences understand.
The first rule of number club
The authors’ first piece of advice about communicating with numbers might be surprising—avoid them because “math is no one’s native tongue.” If you do use numbers, Heath and Starr say to make them user-friendly by rounding off and employing whole numbers whenever possible (e.g., “one out of three” instead of “33%”). Making the abstract personal also drives home a point. Which packs a bigger punch: a law school dean telling students on their first day that the dropout rate is 33% or instructing them to “Look to your left, look to your right, because one of you won’t be here by the end of the year”?
A new perspective
Developers of Microsoft’s AI-driven Perspectives Engine, which generates relatable references for giant numbers, found that adding a single comparative sentence to massive figures doubled how accurately people recalled them. Placing large numbers into familiar contexts makes them easier to understand and retain, such as describing the size of Pakistan as two Californias instead of 340,000 square miles. Heath and Starr also recommend translating numbers using everyday objects. For example, the impact of eliminating $210 million in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts from the federal budget could be easier to fathom when presented as the equivalent of editing fewer than 4 words from a 90,000-word novel.
Numb and number
The larger the number, the harder it is to grasp, leading to a phenomenon known as psychological numbing. So instead of using an aggregate number with a litany of zeroes, break it down into a single unit that connects with an audience. While it’s tough to comprehend the size of the $36 trillion U.S. national debt, it’s much easier when knowing that it equates to over $106,000 per citizen.
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