When Two is One: Add Horsepower to Your Senior Team
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Randy Harrington, PhD is CEO, owner of Extreme Arts & Sciences, and co-founder and owner of Strategic Arts & Sciences and Best Practices Media. He is on the University of Mississippi MBA School of Business Administration Alumni Board, and is a popular instructor and advisor for the annual Ole Miss Speaker’s Edge event, which coaches students on high-impact public speaking and the fact that communication is a vital part of the business world. With a natural gift for quickly assessing complex problems, Harrington consults with clients to find practical, high-impact solutions.
Hear more from Dr. Randy Harrington at the 2017 Convention!
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Navy SEALs are amazing. They are diverse, intelligent, ferocious, and surprisingly compassionate men who represent the point of the spear in our elite Special Warfare units. For the past 20 years, I have had the pleasure of working with several retired SEALs. Nothing adventurous mind you. Outside of drinking shots of tequila with SEALs at McP’s Irish Pub in Coronado, California—none of the work has been the least bit dangerous. I like working with SEALs because they bring a very refined perspective to usually fuzzy issues like “leadership” and “teamwork.” A case in point. In researching our first book, Evolutionaries: The Missing Link in your Organizational Chart, former SEAL Commodore Steve Ahlberg described the recipe for developing a corporate teamwork culture in three sentences. “In The Teams, you always work in pairs, you always have a swim buddy, and if you can’t work with one other person there is no way you will
The The Arkansas Arkansas Banker Banker || February February 2017 2017
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“In The Teams, you always work in pairs, you always have a swim buddy, and if you can’t work with one other person there is no way you will ever be a team member and you will never be a SEAL. ”
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−former SEAL
Commodore Steve Ahlberg
ever be a team member and you will never be a SEAL. Then we put pairs together to make boat crews, and then we put boat crews together. Building team culture is simple, (and then he added) but it’s not easy.” Ahlberg’s comment is captured in the SEAL maxim, “Two is one and one is none.” This refers to redundancy in gear (two parachutes, two radios etc.) and it refers to the essential element of any high performing team—two people working together. In the last few years the term “Leadership Team” has become a popular way to describe a bank’s “Chiefs” or SVP’s. Never mind that these groups rarely act as a real team. And if you do push the idea of actually working as a team—the
