An Actionable Understanding

An Actionable Understanding of your colleagues and yourself is the core component to building trust, shared ownership and effective resolution on teams. Whether remote or blended, an actionable understanding of self and each other is critical in this video discussion, we examine the ideal team behaviors in contrast to what many teams tend to 'backslide' into - the bad behaviors and discuss how you get to the ideal and then prevent the back sliding- the latter is the most prevalent issue on most executive teams.

A large portion of problems that cause teams to backslide into poor behaviors are due to issues with self-awareness: accurate and conscious knowledge and understanding of own's own motivations, natural tendencies, behavior under stress, preferences, attitudes etc.. We have found in assessing and then discussing these issues with many executives that at least 95% have at least one significant blind spot and at least 3/4 have major issues including a significant misunderstanding of their own behaviors and triggers which lead to significant negative behaviors that they likely wouldn't do if more self-aware and also less stressed. Peter Drucker, in one of his last works, lamented that most leaders don’t know themselves well and that knowing and managing yourself is the key skill in knowledge organizations. Our experience also corroborates this. In the following video discussion, we look at some of the process issues for addressing these concerns on executive teams.