Many leaders are working incredibly hard to move their teams, organisations and communities forward.
They are navigating competing priorities, responding to change, supporting their people, making decisions with incomplete information, and trying to deliver results in environments that rarely stand still for long.
Within this context, it is understandable that the conversations often turn to what needs to be developed, strengthened or improved. A new framework, a new capability, a new approach that might help address the challenges in front of us.
Yet one of the most important questions can easily be overlooked is...
Where Are We Right Now?
Not where we hoped to be by this point...
Not where another team appears to be...
Not where the latest leadership trend suggests we should be...
Where are we, really?
This question matters because leaders and teams are not all navigating the same reality.
What is needed in one context may be far less useful in another.
Over the years, we have noticed that leaders and teams often find themselves in different seasons.
Different Seasons Call for Different Things
Some teams are finding their feet.
They may be newly formed, experiencing changes in membership, or stepping into a new level of responsibility. At this stage, energy may be best invested in building trust, clarifying expectations, establishing effective ways of working, and creating a shared understanding of priorities, accountability and success.
Other teams are navigating tension.
Different perspectives become more visible, priorities compete, and decisions can feel harder than they once did. The valuable work here could involve strengthening communication, rebuilding alignment, improving decision-making, and learning how to work through differences rather than around them.
Some teams are responding to significant change, growth, uncertainty, or increasing complexity.
Expectations continue to shift while the pressure to deliver remains. In these season, leaders and teams could focus on maintaining alignment, collaborating effectively across boundaries, adapting to changing circumstances, and balancing immediate demands with longer-term priorities.
And some teams are performing strongly and looking beyond their immediate remit.
At this stage, attention may turn to enterprise thinking, developing others, strengthening cross-organisational collaboration, and creating the conditions for sustainable performance and leadership across the broader system.
In reality, leaders and teams often find themselves navigating more than one of these seasons at once. None of these seasons are better than another. Nor do they represent a progression from less effective to more effective leadership. They simply present different realities and call for different things.
Recognising those differences matters because what supports leaders and teams in one season may be far less useful in another.
The Importance of Relevance
When leadership and team development efforts don’t align with what is needed, organisations often invest significant time and resources with limited return.
Often, the support itself is not the problem. It may be thoughtful, well designed, and delivered with the best of intentions. Yet it can still miss the mark if it responds to an assumed need rather than the reality leaders and teams are navigating.
For example it may:
- invest in communication skills when the issue is unclear decision-making,
- focus on resilience when priorities remain unclear,
- encourage action before the team has agreed on the challenge it is trying to solve, or
- develop strategic thinking when trust and alignment need attention.
Perhaps this is where many development efforts lose their impact. We can become focused on solutions before fully understanding the need.
Start With Understanding
In practice, leaders and teams are often navigating several realities at once, making it harder to see what is most needed and where attention is best focused. Which is perhaps why taking the time to understand what is really happening remains such an important place to start.
Our invitation is to start with curiosity and develop a shared understanding of where the team is at.
To support you on that journey, our Ikigai Leading Team Effectiveness Model and Team Effectiveness Card Deck can help guide that understanding.
Our Team Effectiveness Toolkit Is filled with practical tips and tools to support you and your teams on the ongoing journey of building and cultivating your team effectiveness.
Or get in touch with us to learn more about how wer partner with leaders and teams to strengthem their ability to together build and cultivate an effective team.
“Start where you are.” Pema Chödrön
Images by Javier Allegue Barros and A.C on Unsplash
