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For Love of Team™ is THE podcast where Leaders Simplify Teamwork, helping you: SURROUND yourself with others doing work they LOVE. Business mentor and strategist, Winston Faircloth believes that it is your love of TEAM, and not just your love of products and customers that sets you apart in the marketplace.
And as we grow leaders within our organization, many team members see only a part of the organization. These are pretty well siloed in most organizations in terms of deep understanding. I'm Winston Faircloth and this is for Love Team, the podcast dedicated to helping you grow a team you love, multiplying your impact, income, and freedom in business. Unlocking the what and why so essential to attracting and keeping A plus team members. Today, let's talk about a familiar expression that founders and leaders of teams often face.
Winston Faircloth:Have you heard this term before? It's lonely at the top. Well, I decided to Google and do a research on this and I found that there were 1,900,000 results that used the term it's lonely at the top. Even Merriam Webster weighs in by defining lonely at the top as an expression used to say that the powerful and successful people have few friends. I found an article about Tim Cook.
Winston Faircloth:This was about five years into his role as CEO, and he famously said that running Apple is sort of a lonely job. The quote was, It's sort of a lonely job. The adage that it's lonely, that the CEO job is lonely, is accurate in a lot of ways. Now, I'm not looking for any sympathy. You just have to recognize that you have blind spots.
Winston Faircloth:We all do. And it's in these blind spots where the feeling of loneliness can be most apparent. I feel like this is especially true for founders or CEOs with early stage leadership teams. Thinking back over my United Way career, the first time I became CEO was at age 30. I'd just been named chief of the organization that's across the bay from where I grew up and close to where I went to college.
Winston Faircloth:This was a huge jump for me, moving from being responsible for a division to now being the face of the organization, a team of 20, and a budget approaching $6,000,000 a year. And I was following a retiring CEO who'd held the responsibility for over twenty years. He had a very formal leadership style. And as someone decades his junior, I was not going to follow in those footsteps. I'm by nature a pretty casual and informal person, so the internal dynamics were vastly different from my predecessor.
Winston Faircloth:And externally, most of my connections in the community were leaders of other companies and organizations. None of them were similarly situated with the kinds of challenges we were facing just a few months into the role. I didn't feel like there was anyone locally to talk to about my work. They were so different from what we were doing, and didn't feel comfortable talking with either internal team members or trusted advisors in our town. Later, as the founding CEO of a technology social enterprise, I experienced many of the same feelings.
Winston Faircloth:Even though I was more seasoned, had more leadership and management experience, there was a disconnect. This time we had a unique set of challenges because we were plowing completely new ground. There were just not any other models that we could compare ourselves at the time. You know, and when you're creating something new, something that doesn't yet exist in the marketplace, there are often very few reference points. And this is why, you know, there's this debate between first mover and second mover advantage.
Winston Faircloth:In a lot of ways, I think it's more advantageous to be the second mover because you can learn from the mistakes and the ground that the other player has paved, and you don't have to educate the marketplace about something that's pretty revolutionary. Well, going back to you as the founder and leader, there is this inherent power imbalance that creates distance between you and your team. And I still was pretty junior in terms of my overall career. And by this point, I had three different CEO roles under my belt. And yet I felt an internal self imposed pressure to know the answers and to protect my team from uncertainty as much as I possibly could.
Winston Faircloth:That meant I came to them only infrequently to ask questions, seek answers, offer solutions, which ended up only further isolating me. And it became a self fulfilling prophecy of being lonely at the top. Now, even leaders and founders who have more self assurance and confidence than I did at the time struggle with this gap between themselves and their leadership teams. And I would submit that even with this self understanding and training and self awareness, there is a gap that comes primarily from the knowledge of the founder about the business and the context, and the rest of the team. Let's just take this apart for a minute and see why this is so.
Winston Faircloth:Founders often begin their journey alone or with a very small inner circle of confidence. Multiple plans are made, partially implemented, and many pivots happen along the way. It's hard on even those in the inner circle because it seems like the sands are always shifting beneath their feet with tweaks, changes, and wholesale pivots. Finally, imperceptibly, at first, traction begins to take hold and more clarity begins to emerge about the path forward. There is this almost like infant like solution that must be protected and nurtured.
Winston Faircloth:And then as more and more people begin to purchase this help, we begin to think about the client experience. And it becomes has form and shape over time. And as we have solution that's getting traction and a client experience that needs to be nurtured and maintained, at some point, the business begins to grow and the founder can no longer keep up wearing all the hats in the business, and a team becomes imperative. And yet, even after bringing on team members, in many businesses from the founder's journey, there are still several more significant changes or pivots ahead. And at the center of all of this change, all of these pivots, all of these tweaks, there's only one person who has all the twists and turns, ups and downs, fits and starts in their mind on the team.
Winston Faircloth:And even surrounded with the most seasoned, capable leadership team members, there's only one person who has all of this. You as the founder. In many organizations, the founder CEO is the only person with deep historic understanding of all the key performance indicators, KPIs, over time. And as we grow leaders within our organization, many team members only know they're part of the elephant. They may know it backwards and forwards, but they see only a part of the organization.
Winston Faircloth:And whether they are sales numbers, customer churn, marketing metrics, client satisfaction, profit loss, defects, errors, whatever the KPI, these are pretty well siloed in most organizations in terms of deep understanding not only deep understanding about the numbers but what they mean downstream. And none of these leaders see the entire picture in the same way that you do, blending an overall mastery of the individual trends with the context and history of the road that brings you to this moment in your business. This knowledge gap between the founder and even the most capable leadership team members are vast and it grows week by week. No wonder you feel like the bottleneck when it comes to consequential decisions about the future of your business. And when you spot opportunities, especially ones that involve more than one team member, you face the daunting task of not only spotting those trends but now having to sell that change to others in your organization that only you see as necessary.
Winston Faircloth:There is a way not to be lonely at the top and we call it unlock innovation. Imagine for a moment, what if you could level the playing field of knowledge of the key trends and metrics over time within your business, avoiding the painful discovery and reports written by consultants destined to sit up on your shelf, never to be implemented. Instead, building understanding and ownership of needed changes based upon facts, insights, instead of opinion and hunches, providing a framework for the context, the history that only you can share as the founder and leader. Unlock Innovation starts by rounding up the data points which tell a story about your business over the last three to five years. And then, in an intensive two day workshop, we unpack those metrics, discovering trends, and more importantly, coming up with a shared understanding about which ones are most important to the future of the business.
Winston Faircloth:Use the leader, sit to the side, allowing your team to discover this information. And watching your team debate on the needed actions over the next twelve months, becoming more nimble in spotting emerging opportunities. And you leave the two days with a focus, ownership and commitment based upon a shared understanding and shared experience. And we end up being with you every step of the way over the next twelve months with coaching and quarterly business reviews. We've done this model dozens and dozens of times before in professional services organizations, large complex nonprofit organizations.
Winston Faircloth:It's just magic when you level the playing field of information and how much innovation bubbles up from the team going from this point forward. It's a proven model to break down barriers, helping you multiply your impact and income as a founder. And this is just one part of our For Love of Team Services. Contact us today with the information in the show notes to learn more about unlock innovation and how it can serve you. You no longer have to be lonely at the top when you level the playing field of information and unlock innovation within your team.
Winston Faircloth:A business you love, supported by a team that you love. What could be better than that? For love of team is a leading indicator of your future successes, multiplying your impact, income, and freedom in business. Be blessed, I'll catch you on the next episode.