Teamwork Theater

Gary Burnison is CEO of Korn Ferry and the author of Love, Hope & Leadership: A Special Edition.

Thirty minutes… five streaming options. Rotten Tomatoes reviews referenced readily and even AI at our fingertips. It was a Friday night, and my family still could not come to a consensus on which movie to watch.

Everyone had a voice and a vote, and consensus was required.

Romcom? “Nah, too predictable.” Drama? “Not interested.” Action? “Too intense.” Biopic? “Kind of long.” Something in the top ten? “Really? These are the top 10 everybody is watching right now?”

The evening was waning fast—and so was everyone’s patience. In the end, after multiple options were offered, we all agreed to compromise. We found a show that was acceptable to everyone, but the first choice of no one. A movie that was pleasantly … mediocre.

In trying to please everybody, nobody was really happy. We just kind of settled.

It’s an all-too-familiar storyline, in both life and leadership. As counterintuitive as it seems, too often teams can actually become overly participative. The dynamic—more people, more meetings, more names added to that email string, more group thinking—masquerades as individual accountability and ownership of an outcome.

So, everyone… and no one… is responsible. It’s a process that leads to a product that fails to perform.

Make no mistake, teams are how we get things done. And yes, that takes shared purpose, overarching goals, and collective genius. But between the lines, teams can lose context and lack clarity.

So, how can we as leaders bring people together in teams that are more efficient and effective? Here are a few thoughts.

Explicit, not implicit. As our firm’s research shows, many teams falter because decision-making is implicit rather than explicit. When roles and responsibilities aren’t clear, consensus can become a cover for ambiguity.

Time is the most precious commodity for all of us. That’s why the most successful leaders take the B.L.U.F. (bottom line up-front) approach. It explicitly focuses on what needs to be done, who is going to do it and by when.

Accountability vs. Responsibility. Responsibility is only in the present. Accountability, by contrast, is longer lasting—it spans results of the past to outcomes in the future. When the stakes are high, it’s especially difficult to make the tough calls and accept the consequences. But that’s what accountability is all about—the ability to say, “Whatever the outcome, I own it.”

I can still remember that day—the crack of the bat when one of my friends pulverized the baseball, then the reverberating crash of a window being shattered. Some scattered, not wanting to get caught. Others were just too scared to move. When the adults asked us what happened, that’s when shoulders started to shrug. Wasn’t me….

“Let’s have a meeting!” Even with the best of intentions, the default is often to have yet another meeting—and bring in everyone and anyone. But more is sometimes less—not just diminishing returns, but actually detrimental to the outcome.

Whenever a meeting is called, the first question should be why. Is it informational, decision-making, discovery, or brainstorming? Or is it just to connect with others? Not all meetings are the same! Brainstorms are all blue skies with no bad ideas—and more participants means more opportunities to bounce off ideas. Decision-making, on the other hand, is all about figuring out what actions everyone needs to take—and that’s better in small groups.

When the why is understood, the who naturally follows. 

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