What’s the latest news about teamwork?

This fall, The Good Leadership Breakfast directly addresses the idea, Good Leadership is a Team Sport. Guests in September will get a copy of my latest book, pictured here. But there’s a bigger story behind the book.

The pandemic accelerated a profound shift that was already underway – the shift from the traditional, hierarchical organizational style to a collaborative teams of teams style. We call that a goodness culture. In every decade since the internet became a thing, professional workers have been enjoying more and more freedoms about how they work, where they work, and when they work. We all know the more freedoms we experience, the less we want to be forced to conform.

How do you think about accountability?

Traditional cultures are based on a hierarchical chain of command model where power is consolidated into the hands of a few leaders, and accountability is rules-based. We see this in very large organizations, and many founder-led companies. A goodness culture is a collaboration-based, teams of teams model, where power is distributed into the hands of many, and accountability comes from interpersonal relationships and shared commitments. Once professional workers discover the benefits of a goodness culture, they don’t want to go back.

However, there’s one simple problem: when every team leader leads their teams differently, people suffer whiplash from contrasting team-leadership styles. The book Good Leadership Is a Team Sport presents a model for team effectiveness that creates consistency and dependability within teams. The central concept called “Epoxy Theory” brings to life the strategy for equally blending together relational capital with structural integrity for the highest possible team performance. No more whiplash.

Learn from a rich variety of team leadership perspectives.

The fall breakfast series speakers include leaders from three distinctly different industries, and differing operating models:

September 15: Michele Havens, President of Northern Trust Western Region, will share her perspective on creating consistency with client-facing teams in financial services

October 20: Mai Anh Tran, Associate Vice President of Philanthropic Services Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation, will share how she creates teamwork around a shared vision for the community

November 17: Archie Black, CEO of SPS Commerce, and a MN Business Hall of Famer, will share how SPS creates customer-focused teams in ways that have produced 89 quarters of sales growth in a row

Get your tickets here to improve your team leadership.