Do you and your team avoid accountability? If you're like most small businesses, the answer is probably yes. And it was something new to me for a while, too. But in today's episode, I'm going to share a team exercise that I just did with my staff that helped us take our accountability to the next level.
Hey, everyone. Jack Jostes here, and welcome to The Landscaper's Guide to Modern Sales and Marketing Podcast, where we talk about sales, marketing, and in today's episode, leadership. I run Ramblin Jackson, a green industry digital marketing and branding agency with just over 11 employees. And before we get started, I'd like to thank today's hat sponsor, Sesuit Landscapes, our client out in Cape Cod. Thank you all for trusting us with your branding. It's cool to wear this logo having helped you create it.
And we've got some snow here in Colorado, and it's a beautiful day. Look at this. One of the keys to our leadership style is a book, well, several books by one of my favorite authors, Patrick Lencioni. And in particular, he wrote the book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. And he wrote a Field Guide that has all these business team exercises that you can go through.
The Team Effectiveness Exercise
And recently at Ramblin Jackson during our weekly communication coaching call, we did an exercise called The Team Effectiveness Exercise. So the five dysfunctions of the team are a lack of trust, a fear of conflict, a lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. Now we've done different exercises from this field book that I've talked about in previous episodes. And this one, we were focusing on the avoidance of accountability. So for this exercise, everyone shared what everyone's greatest strength was, and then also the behavior that was the biggest detractor to the team. Now this was overwhelmingly positive. I think hearing some praise was good, and then also hearing some feedback about some areas to improve was really great. And in particular, for me as a leader, I don't often always hear this from my Ramblers, but it is something that we encourage.
One of our core values is to Raise The Stakes, and we encourage what we call Rumbling. And this wasn't quite Rumbling, but it was definitely Raising The Stakes with each other. And it was overall a really positive outcome. And one of the things was that it led to a lot of great one-on-one conversations for me with some of my team. So if your team is avoiding accountability, right? Then are people owning what they said they were going to do? And do they know and can they tell each other in a constructive way, how that's going and how that's impacting the team? So I wanted to share this with you. It's a short tip, but check out the book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team, and in particular, the Field Guide. It was really good. And shout out to Ramblin Jackson's senior project manager, Rebecca, for leading this workshop. You did a great job.
Balancing Being Receptive While Still Being Decisive In Leadership
And that was one of your big contributions to the team is taking these leadership exercises and just going with them and trying them and doing them. And I think that's so much of what leadership is about, is you have to make decisions. Right? You have to go and try things and there's risk involved. And you have to balance being receptive to hearing from your team, but not leading by consensus. That's at least how I choose to lead is to try and be as receptive and listen to people as much as possible, but not get bogged down by consensus because the cost of consensus is time and opportunity. And a lot of times in business, you just have to decide and move forward. Do you agree? Or do you lead by consensus? Let me know in the comments. And I hope you enjoyed today's episode. See more at landscapersguide.com/podcast.
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