What makes a robust and effective team? How do you rally everyone around the same vision and goals? How do you ensure that everyone exhibits the company’s values and meets expectations around how to communicate and behave on the team? To answer these questions and more, you need to draft “Team Operating Principles.”

Developing team operating principles is the topic of this week’s episode on Reflect Forward: Advice From a CEO.

I was inspired to draft them after I read the CEO Test: Master the Challenges That Make or Break Leaders by Adam Bryant and Kevin Sharer. The CEO Test is part manual, part experiencing sharing. The authors line out seven tests that examine what makes CEOs excel and what traps they can fall into that cause failure. The tests involve developing a simple strategic plan, creating culture, building teams, leading transformation, developing listening skills, handling a crisis, and managing the conflicting demands placed on and within leaders.

My favorite section of the book was Test #3: Can You Build True Teams. I spend a lot of time developing my executive team, and Kevin’s story of creating leadership operating principles at his company, Amgen, was inspiring. And I read it right when a key employee left the senior management team, and I was focused on hiring the right person for our company culture. So, I worked with my team to create our operating principles, and it was incredibly eye-opening and motivating. Having this clarity is helpful for current team cohesiveness, but just as importantly, it clearly defines expectations for future executive team members.

During the episode, I discuss how we created our operating principles and the benefit we’ve received from having a clearly defined team vision, purpose, mission and articulated behaviors outlining how we work together as a team.

Question of the Week

Someone on LinkedIn asked this week’s question after reading something I posted about meeting my publisher. She asked, “Why did you decide to go with a hybrid publisher? And what does that mean?”

During the episode, I share the difference between self, hybrid and traditional publishing and explain why I chose to go with a hybrid publisher for my upcoming book.

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