Circling Back re: The hidden force driving your teams success

It took me 7 months living out of my suit case to learn this lesson

A system is more than the sum of its parts.

I often joke that my job at one point was to be a fixer. I would travel across North America to fix teams and operations and (of course) make the company more money. The caveat? I didn't get to come home until I turned things around. 

I remember my first project, flying across the country with my suite case, rental car details, and a lot of ego, thinking, "I'll be back home in 2 months tops! I'm that good!"

The comedy of it all was that I was gone for a total of 6.5 months.

So what went wrong? Why did "turning things around" take so much longer than my arrogant 20-something self thought it would?

I invested in the wrong part of the system.

A business is a system

Although that is a relatively obvious thing to point out, let's explore what makes up a system on a fundamental level. Systems are all around us in nature, at work, and in our world, in general, yet we never pause to think about the different parts of the system and how they influence different outcomes.

At a base level, a system is made up of three things 

• Elements 

  • These are all of the different pieces of a system.

• Interconnections

  • This is the relationship between the elements.

• Purpose

  • This is why the system exists

Although I love abstract concepts, I like clarity even more, so let's apply this to a business. 

• Elements

  • This is everything from your people to products or services, equipment, offices, and so much more.

• Interconnections

  • The relationships between everyone in the system. How does your team relate to each other? How does your team relate to another group in the organization?

• Purpose

  • Yes, this can be the "why" of the business, but because your team is a system in and of itself, you and your team could collectively define this through your values. 

It feels like the perfect moment to pause and ask you, if so many businesses have similar elements, what sets them apart? 

If you said interconnections, DING DING DING! You're right!

We often invest more time, energy, and money in the elements that make up a business rather than its interconnections. And it shouldn't be that way.

The least obvious part of the system is often the most crucial

When I landed across the country and hopped into my rental car, I came in with a lot of assumptions that the "fixing" that needed to happen involved their product, their marketing, their training, their systems, and their people.

So I did just that. 

I went systematically (no pun intended) through each aspect of the business and cleaned things up. Sure, there were small wins as I adjusted different elements, but truthfully none were remarkable improvements. It wasn't until I focused almost entirely on repairing relationships within their teams and their relationship with our head office that I started to see massive shifts in how each business performed.

You aren't the hero

Although I may not have known it then, my approach to work was centered on the belief that, as a fixer, I was there to be the hero. Culturally this is the narrative we often hear in regard to management and leadership. We’re told a leader's ability to clarify a purpose or find the perfect elements is what creates a superior system. While there is some truth to that, my experience has taught me something entirely different.

Interconnections have the ability to make or break an entire system. 

I'll be back on Thursday to show you how you can assess the health of your teams' interconnections. Until then, good luck not looking at everything as a system (or maybe that's just a me thing.)

Keep making good trouble,