Team Ambition and Its Enemies

What you and your team WANT to do depends on your team’s theory of change. Your theory of change depends on your mission. Your mission depends on your vision. Your vision depends on your mandate or business model. All those dependencies depend on measurement and criteria for decision making. Having a presentation-ready story is not enough. Having a nice roadmap on a placemat is not enough. Knowing what to want is not enough. You still have to figure out how you want it.

What you and your team NEED to do depends on your team’s survival mechanism. Your team’s survival mechanism depends on the nature of your team’s existence. If your team’s survival depends on functional legitimacy, then establishing your team’s function is what you need to do. If it depends on proving your value periodically, then securing executive support is what you need to do.

What you and your team END UP doing depends on organizational emergencies and executive whims. Regardless of whether it contributes to your team’s survival or growth, what you end up doing are influenced by whimsy things largely out of your control, such as executive whims or putting out operational fires you didn’t start. To manage those whimsy risks, you have to play politics, build relationships, earn allies, and connect frenemies. Everyone in the team needs the leadership skills that help.

What you and your team are NOT doing depends on your leadership. Doing things for the sake of doing it – as a common political maneuveur – may be necessary at times, while that also means what you’re doing is not a good indicator of your team’s success. To assess your team’s long-term health, you need to compare the actions ordained by your theory of change with what you’re not doing and measure the overlap. What you’re not doing is more important than what you are because the abundant former gives a better picture of the criteria you use for making decisions than the much fewer latter.

What do you and your team WANT to do?

What do you NEED to do?

What do you end up doing?

What are you NOT doing?

Why?

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