Part 1. A Path to Our Greatest Potential. Unlocking Individual, Team, and Organizational Excellence
A multi-part series on the holistic view of a high performing growth enabling culture and organization
Hey, look at me! Look what I can do!
Turns into
I’ve done something like this before, I can probably do it.
Turns into
I’m experienced and able to join a team and get it done.
Turns into
I may not have all the answers, but I trust our team can figure this out.
Turns into
We thrive as a team when we fully commit to the work to be done and make it happen with mutual respect.
Turns into
I’ve seen that any challenge can be solved when we agree to hold ourselves accountable and engage in debate to arrive at the best solution and work together.
Turns into
We have a great team that is accountable, adaptable, committed and trusts each other able to overcome challenges and setbacks as work toward a vision we want to create together.
Turns into
When we replicate these fundamentals to how we work, we can have more teams like us owning hard problems and big opportunities all doing great work aligned to a shared vision broadly.
Turns into
Our organization empowers individuals and teams to identify and own the continuous work of creating and delivering value. This is based on the belief that we can do our best work together with commitment to a shared vision of the future we want to create as an organization.
Nine progressive steps, each with increasingly exponential impact.
The ripple effect of this is massive as more and more individuals come up through this cycle, the more they flow out into other organizations and foster a new cycle of growth and impact.
Modern business, modern leadership, modern workers.
More and more all three groups are trying to align and grow together with varying degrees of success, but all with similar desire to create significance through meaningful and impactful work.
You can see these elements emerging in companies of all types and sizes.
On the surface it may not look like a pattern, but the conditions of workers, leaders, and companies have firmly shifted due to our ‘always on’ lifestyle, unlimited access to information and ever-increasing expectations to move faster. As a result it’s created pressure on all three groups (individuals, leaders, companies) to improve the gearing between each other to improve overall performance.
Even I find myself communicating metrics, emphasis on specific results, and a sense of urgency “or else”.
Some of my own favorite expressions are:
Speed to data
Shrink time to value
Create velocity
Make every day count
All of us are smarter than one of us
No surprise here.
The key is how we accomplish our end game.
One path is painful for everyone, drives turnover and dissatisfaction, another path creates ideal outcomes and elevates everyone.
While we may have our own ways of expressing it, we all want some version of an “up and to the right” growth graph for ourselves, our teams, our company. We all want to get stuff done and do good work.
Professionals and organizations both aspire to create and provide enduring value to customers, employees, and partners.
Entrepreneurship is one route to take for an individual, and even that results in hiring others, creating teams, and needing leaders who can do great work - so in the end it seems we all come back to the individual and their progression into and through leadership in some form or another.
This series seeks to unpack these ideas and fundamentals fully.
Why write the nine step progression this way?
The nine step progression above is intentionally written through the eyes of the individual that becomes a leader because this is the natural progression a person goes through on their personal journey of work. While some stop at various levels, this is an ideal journey of professional maturity.
It’s progression in a nutshell is:
Go from me to we to all of us for all of you.
Additionally, I believe there is a challenge for managers, leaders, and entrepreneurs because there is an overwhelming amount of information pointing at tactics and strategies with limited appreciation for the broader landscape it fits in. This causes confusion and incompatibility where many ideas seem good, but don’t link up.
My hope is to show how pieces from the individual to the team to the leader to the organization interconnect in a cohesive way.
If you have read books like Linchpin or War of Art, you see a great emphasis on what the individual is capable of. Where as books by Jocko Willink or Patrick Lencioni bring intense focus on personal ownership as a leader and the importance of organizational health, high performing teams, and being focused on results.
If books like that have inspired you, like they have me, then no doubt you have considered how to apply it to yourself and your organization. There isn’t a set of IKEA instructions helping with that.
Why this matters?
We need a big bold and clear vision of what could be, what should be and ultimately what must be true in the way we work.
Getting there requires a simple mental model we can all easily understand to act as scaffolding that supports our thinking.
I don’t need to be entirely right, just directionally right inorder to help us all step forward. So, we’ll take some time to walk this out together.
For the purpose of discussion and developing the concept, this is the ideal journey of the GSD way in action across all stages of the individual, team and organization as we seek to fulfill the ultimate objective of making vision reality to create value, get stuff done and make an impact!
#GSD
Appreciate you,
Justin