Why The All-Star Top Team is Not the Answer!

Earlier this month, Fortune magazine contributors Geoff Colvin, Josh Dawsey and Sam Silverman unveiled an all-star, executive team. Similar to fantasy baseball, they put together a dream team of execs who could navigate the currents during these turbulent times. The premise is that in business just as in sports, human capital is the whole game. Better talent, they argue, is what is most important for success.

The CEO selected to lead this group of corporate all stars is CEO Ken Chenault of American Express, The COO is McDonald’s CEO, Jim Skinner. Other players to round out the line up include; Anne Mulcahy of Xerox, Jonathan Ive of Apple, Rob Carter of FedEx, Carlos Brito of Anheuser Busch InBev, Jim Stengel of P&G and Susan Chambers, chief people officer of Wal-Mart.

Put this crew of heavyweights on the field and watch them dominate any industry – like the 1927 NY Yankees.

Really, would that be true?

My suspicion is if you just pulled together this group of high priced talent and threw them on the proverbial business field, it would be a mess of the highest order.

There are plenty of examples where All Star teams faltered when competing against teams that may have had lesser talent individually, but when put together to work
as a team, had greater collective intelligence. Think Team USA in the World
Baseball Classic in 2006 losing to Korea, Canada and Mexico. The USA men’s basketball team of 2004 losing the gold medal to Argentina. And the French World Cup soccer team in 2010 that had so much dysfunction they were called out by President Nikolas Sarkozy and the country’s soccer federation was reorganized.

For a top team – or any business team – to succeed, the leader needs to put in place a number of conditions. Teams need great clarity. They need norms of expected behavior. They need their purpose defined, which issues they’ll address and how they will discuss them, raise and resolve conflict make and make decisions.

Great teams – like athletes – need to work on building their capabilities – both individually and collectively – such as how they give and receive feedback. They need to talk straight and collaborate collegially. They need not only the skill to perform as top athletes and a team; they need the will to do it, too. (Hint: many top individual executives have no will to truly work with others as team members if they can’t be the leader. And if that’s the case, they need to be removed from the team).

And great teams are committed to one another; they develop trust in one another and develop solid working relationships with one another. They have each other’s backs and know they can safely raise any issue.

The most important factor for any top team is the leader. If the leader doesn’t get it, and many don’t, about what’s required to a top team to thrive, the team will have an uphill battle to perform. The sad fact is that most top teams do not work well together and do not deliver the results they need to.

By creating clarity, building capabilities, and increasing commitment, the top team becomes more cohesive and supportive, able to perform at a higher level, sharing similar expectation of high individual and team performance. An extraordinary top team is a catalyst for winning in any market, which can be a very powerful competitive advantage that cannot be duplicated. Even by a group of business all stars.

What’s the Value of Your Executive Brand?

If you are an executive or manager, how’s the value of your personal brand?

Unfortunately, many executives believe because they work for corporations with well-defined brands, they don’t need to define their executive brands. They may think if they support their company’s brand, that’s good enough. While they recognize the need for clear brands at their companies or for their organization’s products or services, they fail to recognize they also need to be a brand. Yet without a unique, authentic, distinctive brand, we’re just commodities. In today’s economy, where globalization, innovation and technology make the world flat and fast, failing to define yourself as a unique brand can have disastrous consequences.

Just like Apple, Nike, Starbucks and McDonalds are brands, executives are also brands. And our brand is either increasing in value or decreasing in value. If we’re not actively managing our brand, it’s not likely that it is increasing in value. And if we’re not actively managing our executive brand, that means we leave it for others to manage our brands – and if that is the case, chances are our audience will perceive our brand differently from what we intend.

The good news is that with some reflection, a framework for creating our brands and work, we can create a unique, powerful brand that differentiates us from the pack. There are seven steps required to defining a unique executive brand and they are as follows:

Join me on September 13 in Minneapolis at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management for my Optimizing Your Unique Executive Brand and you’ll learn what’s required to build an outstanding personal brand. For a preview of what to expect, see this short video:

To register for this 1/2 day course, Optimizing Your Unique Executive Brand click here:

http://www.csom.umn.edu/executive-education/optimizing-executive-brand.html

Hope to see you on the 13th. I look forward to assisting you in becoming your best as an executive, creating greater value for yourself and your company with a well-defined, unique executive brand.