Is your team healthy or smart? 💪🏽
↩️UNFOLLOW University — May 19, 2023
Happy Friday!
In 2018, Patrón Tequila was acquired for $5.1 billion by Bacardi Limited, one of the largest acquisitions in the spirits industry. I was tasked with continuing to lead the Patrón marketing transformation while exploring opportunities to transfer our playbook to other teams in Bacardi’s broader portfolio of brands.
I spent the next year crisscrossing the globe for meetings with our new co-workers. After 10 years of lagging sales and low morale, our new peers kept asking for a formula they could borrow as a blueprint for their own businesses. Every discussion ended with one question: “So what’s the secret?”
During the London leg of our onboarding tour, four of our Patrón team members sat around a little table scratching our heads. We honestly didn’t know our own secret.
What really made us special? Was it just really good tequila? Why did we take risks and continue to innovate? How did we keep surpassing our own records?
Each of us had worked at other companies - larger, more complex, successful - yet, we all agreed there was something special happening that we were unable to communicate in PowerPoint slides. What was the true source of our competitive advantage?
“It’s this,” one of my team members said. “It’s this,” she repeated, motioning around the table.
“It’s us. We’re sitting here at this table with four people and we just decided what to do, how to win and who owns what. It’s this.”
We nodded. She was right.
We weren’t smarter than our peers. We didn’t spend more money. In fact, we were outspent by competitors by as much as 10X in advertising.
We weren’t the most experienced. Before Patrón I worked on tax software.
We couldn’t out-muscle them - we were one brand competing against global giants. But we won, and we kept winning. Why?
🤯 Radical Truth
Healthy teams beat smart ones.
We were a courageous company. Our founder was an entrepreneur. Our leaders were challengers. Our teams were scrappy. Our debates were healthy. Our failures were fuel for learning.
We earned trust and took accountability. We didn’t get everything right, however, as I’d face a few years later, our lack of diversity was a blinking yellow light.
We were a healthy team. I didn’t put this together at the time but when I discovered Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Advantage, it all made sense.
A healthy organization is consistent and complete when its management, operations and culture are unified, free of politics, empowering and clear.
According to Patrick, the #1 sign of a healthy team is this: star performers never want to leave.
And the surefire sign that something is terribly wrong? The fear of conflict.
It takes intellectual courage to build, lead and protect a healthy culture so this book helped galvanize my determination to prioritize my team’s health.
A few of my favorite takeaways from “The Advantage”:
Being smart in fundamentals - like strategy, marketing, finance and technology - is only half the equation. Yet it occupies almost all the time, energy, and attention of most executives.
An organization that is healthy will inevitably get smarter over time because the people learn from one another, identify critical issues, and recover quickly from mistakes with minimal politics.
Most organizations exploit only a fraction of the knowledge, experience, and intellectual capital that is available to them. But the healthy ones tap into almost all of it.
Conflict is not a bad thing. The fear of conflict is almost always a sign of problems. When there is trust, conflict becomes nothing but the pursuit of truth, an attempt to find the best possible answer. Conflict without trust is politics.
When leadership teams avoid discomfort among themselves, they only transfer it in far greater quantities to larger groups of people throughout the organization they're supposed to be serving.
I was fortunate to help build a healthy team at Patrón for several years while actively rejecting traditional notions of what "smart" teams and people do. Healthy teams optimize for outcomes while smart ones are stuck in a never-ending dance of "decision science.”
I learned to beware of "best practices", "growth drivers" and "expert consultants" who didn’t actually benefit our business. Leaders who lack conviction and teams without direction are easy prey for very expensive, very unnecessary solutions.
Healthy teams solve for the scoreboard, not the playbook.
⚡️Courageous Question
Who do I need to have a hard conversation with? How can I do it with kindness and clarity?
🗣 Wonderful Words
“No matter how good a leadership team feels about itself, if the organization it leads rarely achieves its goals, then by definition, it's simply not a good team.”
- Patrick Lencioni
🙏🏽 Prayer Package
God, remind me of the strength you’ve already provided. When work pressures and tensions seem overwhelming, may I look to the source for answers and not myself. Everything I have is yours, including my job. I will rest in the knowledge of your power and bring that light to everyone I interact with this week. Amen.
🎵 Canvas & Clay - Maverick City Music & DOE 🖼
🛠 Practical Tool
Yesterday, I led a training session with Amazon’s global marketing team and agency where I posed a simple question: What do courageous leaders do differently?
It led to a powerful discussion so I invite you to reflect on the 5 questions I asked their leaders to wrestle with this weekend:
How will I feel 1 year from now if things are the same as they are today?
What do people come to me for that I’m the best at?
Am I the right person for the role I have now? Why?
If someone took my position today, what’s the first thing they would do, change or stop?
What am I afraid to measure?
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Every Friday I’ll send you 5 courageous ideas to help you redesign your work life by making better career decisions:
🤯 Radical Truth - A story from me
⚡️ Courageous Question - A challenge for you
🗣 Wonderful Words - A quote worth remembering
🙏🏽 Prayer Package - A moment of meditation
🛠 Practical Tool - An actionable resource
