When Two is One: Add Horsepower to Your Senior Team

Add Horsepower to Your Senior Team When Two is One:

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. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hear more from Dr. Randy Harrington at the 2017 Convention!

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

“ ” “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. ” − 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

experience can be exasperating. It will mean lots of meetings, often wondering, “Do I really need to be here for this?” At the senior level, teamwork seems like a good idea, but it often bogs down processes. Just like Ahlberg said, simple, but not easy. In my presentation, When Two is One: Essential Points of Collaboration for your Senior Team, I argue that the digital world demands key points of interdependence among senior team members. Don’t think as much about a “senior team” per se, instead think about “senior swim buddies.” I call them “High Performance Dyads.” (It’s academic I know, but that’s how I roll.) Social media, risk management, growth, mergers, and customer experience are all strategic issues well served with select pairs of executives. The tricky part is in the way these efforts are commissioned and evaluated. In my presentation, we will discuss how to increase decision speed and quality—while avoiding pitfalls. The cool thing about high performance dyads is that they give you the advantages of teamwork while allowing your executives to cover a lot more strategic ground more quickly. And, as you go along, you will naturally be establishing a powerful team culture that can permeate your entire organizational culture. The bottom line is that banking is more complex than ever and the tempo is getting faster all the time. The net effect of the digital world is that speed is king for every phase of banking; market knowledge, response time, decision cycles, data review, service delivery, and on and on. The SEALs say, “The only easy day was yesterday.” Maybe bankers need to be saying that too. The old days of annual

planning cycles and quarterly reviews are gone. Now it is an hour by hour effort, and your office follows you wherever you go with your smart-device. You need help, but you don’t need a committee. That is what this presentation is all about. Oh, and check out our new book Slammed: Succeeding in a World of Too Busy, it just might help.