Seth Dobbs (he/him): Have you worked in a team or organization where it felt like everyone had their own goals and agenda? How do you keep a diverse team focused when they’re faced with adversity? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs, and this is the Principle Driven Leadership podcast where I share principles of leadership along with examples of how to apply them,

to help make you be the best leader you can be. These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader, in building organizations and teams, and in coaching others to become leaders themselves. And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential for helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact. And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results.

And leadership is a journey. The step we’re taking today involves looking outside of the business world for inspiration. In fact, so far out, we’re going to talk about some of the animal kingdom today and then compare our teams to them.

Now leadership is about people. The role of a leader more than anything is about getting groups of people to accomplish something or more specifically, influencing them to effectively create durable results.

You as a leader, need to understand and work with groups of people, systems of people, and of course, individuals. In fact, every person you work with is an individual affiliated with at least one group and working in a broader system.

I was once asked in an interview if I had examples of where I’ve had to adapt my approach to leadership to a specific individual. And my response was that to me, effective leadership by definition requires adapting to different individuals, groups, and systems. If you come at leadership with one mode of interaction for all, you’ll find yourself frustrated.

And in fact, when I build a leadership or really any kind of team, I don’t look for everyone to be like me or to be like each other. Of course, depending on each role, there’s going to be capabilities and skillsets required. But by design, I like to build teams that are diverse. And this is where the challenge can come in for a leader. While you should by design, be working with a diverse team, you need to get them to move together holistically towards ultimately achieving a common collective outcome. Even though they’ll all have their own career goals and own organizational priorities. So, how do you create and coach leaders to be independent and autonomous, yet still make sure they’re working as a unit, and moving your goals forward all without micromanaging? And even more challenging,

how do you ensure that they’ll keep collectively making forward motion when faced with the unexpected? And what does success and failure of this really look like? So what better way to think about how to interact with people, groups, and systems of people, than by looking in the animal kingdom?

So I’ll start with a fairly common work scenario. A, team, even a leadership team, where everyone seems to just want to go their own way and do their own thing. Does that sound familiar? It’s pretty common and whether they have different or similar backgrounds and responsibilities, people, typically, even with a little bit of autonomy granted, often want to pursue their own path. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Unless they aren’t working towards a greater common goal. So to see how this kind of team plays out, I’m going to talk about crabs. There’s many species and breeds of crabs.

Some are loners. Some are highly social that live in colonies of dozens, if not hundreds. But either way, they go along living their crab lives, eating their crab food and so forth. And if nothing comes along to disrupt them all is good. Now what happens when they’re faced with unexpected adversity? Let’s say you come along and scoop a bunch of them up in a bucket.

What happens then? While I don’t want to assume a crab’s motivation, I’m nonetheless, pretty sure that what happens is they don’t want to be in a bucket and indeed their behavior indicates this. They try to escape. As each one realizes its plight it tries to climb out on its own. Often as some start making it up the side,

those that are further down in the bottom with a bucket grab onto the ones that are higher and pull them back down. Now my understanding is that’s not spiteful behavior, but rather, each crab working for itself and trying to do whatever it takes to get itself out of the mess it found itself in. Meaning, even if they were the more social coexisting species of crab, they become individuals within the bucket when faced with adversity.

So bringing it back to our world, the human, the leadership world.

What’s the problem here? It’s that they are not aligned on the same outcome. They’re each focused on their own outcome, getting themselves out, and have no coordinated activity, leading to chaos and more importantly, not leading themselves out of this unexpected problem. Same thing goes for unaligned teams and organizations when facing unexpected adversity. Each leader, each team member in the absence of clear alignment will follow their own path, their own decisions, often conflicting paths, or at least at a minimum paths that aren’t mutually supportive. And similar to the crabs,

I don’t think it’s typically out of meanness with groups of people. It’s the natural outcome of a group of leaders that are unaligned. They work towards their own goal. You inadvertently have a negative impact doing that on other individual goals and others trying to achieve their goals, have that impact on you,

and no one gets anywhere.

When the crabs exhibit this behavior, they don’t get out of the bucket. When your organization behaves this way, you don’t get forward motion and sometimes much worse. And again, left to their own devices outside of the bucket, crabs are mostly peaceful and some are even social and collaborative. But the moment they face adversity, their true colors come out and you see that they’re just focused on their own

self-interest. This is what happens when you have a bucket full of leaders that are unaligned as well. When your bucket full of leaders face adversity, without alignment, everyone retreats to their own individual interests and ideas. It might even be a few team members that want to rally a concerted effort. But even here, sometimes they’re motivated by self-interest wanting to be the hero and save the day.

But regardless of motivation, in the absence of alignment of a well understood set of desired outcomes to provide guidance, a measure of what’s a successful holistic effort looks like, you get a bucket full of competing solutions, not a cohesive effort that rallies and unites the team, and the results are typically bad. They’re exhausted.

They can cause burnout. This is chaos. This is autonomy without alignment.

So let’s look at a different animal now. The fire ants of the Amazon rain forest. Fire ants and more particularly their homes, are highly susceptible to damage and destruction from water. Which given that they live in a rain forest is actually a constant challenge. The fire ants

don’t always have a lot of time to live their fire ant lives, eat their fire ant food, build their fire ant colony, before a torrential rainfall hits, disrupting everything. Now, the interesting thing is that when their home and surrounding land gets flooded, gets destroyed, they don’t behave like the crabs, each swimming off on their own for higher ground. Instead, when they realize that the problem is occurring, they stop performing each of their individual jobs and functions and they start linking together, literally using hooks on their limbs to connect and form a ball or raft or some other shape that allows them to collectively float on the water. Worker ants have wax on their body, actually that helps keep the interior of the ant raft dry so that the eggs, the larva, and other members of the colony that are unable to handle that adversity by themselves are protected. The ants will even periodically rotate. Rotating submerged ants to above the water line to try and prevent any drowning. And no single ant is really directing all this.

This is the behavior of an incredibly effective organization. An organization that’s effective because they all have a collective understanding of their vision: protect the colony. This might mean making severe changes since they’re floating away from the homes they’d built after the previous rain. And it’s a move

that’s not without risk. But there’s little question on what they’re trying to achieve together. In some ways, this models an ideal organization. This is a group that when faced with potential destruction, uses clarity to rally together, to support each other, to drive towards a cohesive solution that takes all of them to achieve. Some of the ants even make sacrifices, submerging themselves while others remain dry and able to breathe. In our world, the corollary is a team sub-optimizing their own needs in order to optimize for the whole.

So rather than trying to be the hero and fix everything, rather than just trying to make sure your department looks good, it’s about working collectively and doing what’s necessary to realize the collective vision. That’s real leadership going deep into the organization. It’s a group of leaders in action driving to collective outcomes. This is why alignment and clarity of vision is so important. On easy days, alignment of vision ensures forward motion. But on the worst days, it enables your team to quickly rally in the face of adversity. And ideally, this helps reduce the amount of bad days because of the resiliency that’s inherent in this approach. By having a clear vision, by being able to face reality, you might just be able to prevent the worst of reality from happening.

You don’t want your team to be like the crabs. You want your organization and team to rally in the face of change and adversity. When adversity hits, you need to be ready to adapt together. Like the fire ants. And you can’t adapt if all your leaders are just doing their own thing. It’s hard to retroactively gain alignment on outcomes when adversity hits, if you haven’t been leading that way already.

This concept applies regardless of the scale of your influence. Whether you’re leading a company, a division, a department, a program, or just a small project with a few people. If you don’t have a uniting force, a vision, bringing them together, you only have independent agents doing the task in front of them and breaking apart as soon as problems strike.

You and the people you lead will always face some form of adversity. Sometimes it can be predictable, but it’s really the unpredictable, the external threats, the new competition, the tough economic situations, simple mishaps, delays by other teams or clients or partners that we might not foresee that requires you to really have more leaders in the organization. Creating true leaders helps create a nimble organization

that’s watching for signs and working together. And when they see them to overcome whatever challenges hit. Together. This is what leadership is for.

So does your organization behave like crabs or like fire ants or something in between? What do you think is preventing them from rallying together, especially in adversity? And what can you do starting today to ensure that they’re aligned so that they’re ready to lock arms and face the next unforeseen challenge? Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe and share with a friend

if you liked it. Send thoughts and questions to contact@pdlpodcast.com and we’ll address a few in a couple of episodes. Join me next time, where I’m going to talk about dealing with uncertainty and the unknown.