A note from me

I just enjoyed a really busy week in Edinburgh. I was there for professional reasons but that coincided with the Festival so I spent a few exciting days in the city with Mary. 

We enjoyed a number of different types of performances. The military tattoo is a huge spectacle, with hundreds of well-drilled and energetic performers from around the world. Music, movement and dance with, of course, a huge contribution from pipers!

We also visited a new play by David Ireland performed by the National Theatre of Scotland, a hilarious show from ventriloquist Nina Conti and Monkey, and smaller-scale experiences “House of Life” and “You’re so F**king Croydon”. This last piece was a wonderful one-woman show from Katie Hurley which I hope you may be able to catch at some point. It combined humour, music, dance, introspection, audience interaction and genuinely touching emotional exposure and vulnerability.  

There was a lot of positive creative and emotional energy apparent in Edinburgh, which is one of the characteristics of high-performance teams I’ve been emphasising so, in the Newsletter, I’m going to dive a little deeper into one factor in this – the quality of relationships.

I’m also now preparing for the next experiment with the Dodo Club webinar which will be hosted for the second time on LinkedIn on Friday, September 6^th at 15:00 UK time (16:00 CET). There was good participation last time and we’ve learned from a couple of technical hitches (e.g. connection link issues), so this should be even smoother. It’s an opportunity for you to pose questions or comment on recent, or any, Newsletter content or issues related to leadership, strategy, scenarios or energy transitions.  

I hope you enjoy it!

My Bi-Weekly Guide

Positive Emotional Energy for High-Performance Teams (and Art)

Being back in France at the moment, my mind has tended to turn towards French artists when thinking about the  Newsletter and which images to share.  In the last Newsletter, I connected some thoughts to Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa” and also “Liberty Leading the People” by Delacroix. In this edition, I have chosen to highlight Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party”, painted in 1881.  

Clearly, this painting captures a great sense of warmth and conviviality in a complex moment of close, longing, and also unrequited relationships. Perhaps more significantly, Renoir and his friends, Monet and Bazille, were part of the “Batignolles group” centred around Édouard Manet which met between 1869 and 1875 and nurtured many of the artists who later became known for the Impressionism movement. There was clearly a significant positive creative energy and presumably positive emotional energy, inherent in this group.

Positive emotional and creative energy can be driven by many factors, but I’d like to focus particularly on the quality of relationships. In this, I am not just thinking of individual relationships within the team but also the relationships with other stakeholders beyond the team.

Also, while this is often the case, I’ve found that not all relationships in high-performance teams are always comfortable. When I joined one of the teams I was privileged to lead, I was challenged by the intensity of some of the debates among leadership team members. What I needed to learn, however, was the deep respect, even friendships, that had developed in the team, which enabled them to bring their different functional expertise to challenge each other without risking the psychological safety of anybody. You see this dynamic, for example in podcasts like “The Rest is Politics” where presenters from different areas of the political spectrum can disagree while together promoting the importance of informed and respectful political dialogue.

The Relationships Foundation has usefully identified 5 factors to consider in assessing the quality of relationships between organisations or individuals.  I’ll introduce these below, and for deeper exploration, you can visit https://relationshipsfoundation.org/. In developing and maintaining a high-performance team, you can consider each of these factors and how they can be enhanced.

1. Intensity:
   The level of engagement you may have with a medical professional after a heart attack will generally be much more intense than you have with the check-out assistant at a supermarket! There is a different depth and significance to the relationship.
   

2. Continuity:
   The time dimension is very important.  This may come through the duration of the relationship and the regularity of the interactions. When living very far away from my ageing parents, we made a point of phoning them for a chat at the same time every Sunday, which continued to cement our closeness.
   

3. Multi-dimensionality:
   Some relationships are one-dimensional and transactional, but deeper relationships develop when several different types of activity are involved. In the work-related sphere, this may, for example, mean working together on several different projects, socialising together, and playing on the same football team in your leisure time (I was part of the “Lady Di” football team for several years, but that’s another story!)
   

4. Parity:
   Power relationships are really significant. This is often why huge multinational enterprises or government departments have difficulty when dealing with individual customers or local communities. In high-quality engagements, there needs to be a sense that all the individual parties have similar power in the relationship. Powerful organisations need to foster relationships that mirror the perceived power of counter-parties. In dealing with individuals, the CEO needs to show that she is just as human and vulnerable as other people.
   

5. Alignment:
   Clearly, in a high-quality relationship, there needs to be a sense that all parties are facing in generally the same direction. While there may be disagreements, as there were in the team example mentioned above, these need to be seen in the context of a higher-level commonality in objectives and interests.

Question of The Fortnight

Every fortnight I’ll be asking a thought-provoking question in hopes of sparking interesting and enlightening discussion.

I’d love to hear your response! You can do so by simply responding to this email.

Today’s question is:

In the teams you are involved with, could considering these 5 dimensions of relationship quality be helpful and how would you customise them for your specific use?

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