In times of crisis that touch the soul of a nation, people expect more than leadership, they expect unity. They expect political agendas, personal ambition and ego to be set aside in favor of collaboration across the aisles—not group consensus, but the greatest talents coming together to confront the greatest challenge of the day. Before the devastating attacks by Hamas terrorists on October 7, Israeli politics had seen five elections in four years and different governments fall and new ones form. After the attack, an emergency unity government assembled within five days, including key opposition politicians like the former Defence Minister Benny Gantz. Not all joined the government, but even those like former Prime Minister Yair Lapid, the leader of the largest opposition party in parliament, pledged to support the war against Hamas.
Times of crisis shine a light on the dysfunctions of leadership. When the world looks to the United States, a vital piece of our Constitutional governance looks uncertain and contested. Who will be the Speaker of the House? How will resolutions and time-sensitive military budgets be passed with urgency and clarity of action? The process is broken. In Israel, the United States has no Ambassador on the ground because the process to appoint one has been held up in Congress. Again, the process is broken. Leadership has not provided answers.
Over-indexing on leadership
What’s needed today—also in frightening economic times for business—is more than leadership, it is teamship. Through our work and research with the world’s best companies over the last 20 years, we know that the world’s best teams don’t win because of their leadership alone. They win largely because of their teamship. As a culture, everyone expects everything of the leader and gives too little credit to value drawn from the interdependency of talent in a team. Too little credit is given to the value that emerges when people with a common goal effectively collaborate.
Teamship takes hard, purposeful work. Too often in the private sector, and we know in government, teams just don’t work. Only 20% of executives believe their teams are reaching their full potential. Our research shows an overwhelming majority of executives, 72%, don’t think their peers engage collaboratively in the most important problems.
Big shifts in team behavior
Being committed to the mission and our own performance is not enough. We need to be committed to the mission and each other’s performance to achieve the extraordinary and reach for innovative results and transformative solutions. We call this Co-elevation: a new standard of behavior that deviates from the traditional hierarchies and silos most companies and certainly government and politics are mired in.
To become a Co-elevating team big shifts in behavior are required:
- Team members need to speak boldly and with candor. They need to abandon the old social contract of not wanting to throw each other under the bus and shift to a courageous culture of healthy challenge.
- Team members need to shift from serendipitous relationships to purposeful bond-building with each other; to care about each other’s success, energy, and well-being.
- Team members need to be deeply collaborative to ignite innovation and the boldest answers. They must shift to a more inclusive approach to collaboration that leads to a greater diversity of thinking and even bolder ideas from a broader network of stakeholders—inside and outside the organization.
- Team members must shift from thinking in departmental silos to alignment as a team and with organization’s North Star goals.
Co-elevating teams are bolder and work faster than conventional teams. They generate innovative ideas by drawing on broader inputs from multiple sources by combining diverse points of view, all the stronger when the ideas are opposing. There’s no room for cowardly back-channel chatter. They speak straight. Candor is critical, even when it is risky. Teamship is about embracing the fear of conflict, engaging and seeing it as the path to achieving brilliance. Here’s a better agreement for a team than the norm of avoiding conflict: Be willing to respectfully challenge one another openly if it’s in service of the mission and each person is performing to their highest capacity.
Echoes of a different era
In a different era, Ronald Reagan, a Republican president, and Tip O’Neill, a Democratic house speaker, were two adversaries who respected each other as appointed public servants. They did not agree but found a way forward, and put aside their clashes on policy for the sake of national unity. Their work together forged a united front that enabled the U.S. to accelerate the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Today is not the time for a failure of leadership. Today is the moment for leaders to rise to the challenge of the times and become their nation’s first team. It is the time for teamship, not just leadership.
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