Leadership Keynote Speakers

Hi, I’m John Parker Stewart, founder of a company called Stewart Leadership.

For the last 35 years, my colleagues and I have been fascinated with the impact that people have on organizations, particularly teams.

This afternoon, I wanted to chat with you about team performance and the essential basics that have to occur for a group of individuals to achieve amazingly powerful results. As a team, let me use this illustration that you can relate to.

There are three essential pillars of a team. To be effective, they have to be there. Let me contrast the effective one with the ineffective one First. Here’s what happens. Senior management gives an assignment to group of individuals or to a single team leader. He or she grabs those individuals, pulls ’em into a conference room, goes through what they’ve done a hundred times before with other similar assignments, but never achieving the results that they thought they should have achieved.

But they didn’t know that they were missing some of the essential three pillars of an effective team. So they gather together, here are the instructions, and look what happens. Total chaos, not intentional, but chaos nonetheless.

So now what is the team leader supposed to do? Grabs a couple of the individuals who are working with him or her. Now they go out, they have to collect the team members who are scattered throughout the building. Some are laughing about it, some are discouraged, But they finally come back into the room.

Now, using these nails, we can illustrate the three essential pillars that didn’t occur in the first illustration that occur now, and you’ll see the end result compared to chaos. Move our senior management over to the corner. They gave the assignment. Notice this nail, by the way, is not perfectly straight. I like that because senior management with the best of intentions may not be totally on the level when they give the assignment, they aren’t sure exactly what they’re after either, but they give it nonetheless.

What you want is this bottom nail, which is pillar number one.

Pillar number one is clear purpose. The purpose of why we are all together, what it’s all about, what the assignment really means, what’s at stake, what we can get on board around what we can support. That purpose, the mission, the vision has got to be there. We set that down. Now the rest takes a few moments and many a manager or team leader says,

I don’t have time for that kind of stuff. I don’t have time for a wine and cheese evening or a pizza party or a brown bag lunch to explain what the purpose is all about. But folks, you’ve got to have that second pillar. The second pillar is this next activity called engagement. It’s the purpose or the time to get everybody on board.

So you line them up. Yes, it does take some time and notice these nails are different sizes, different colors, different shapes. That’s intentional, represents the different kinds of people that you want to have on your team. You can have long ones, you’re gonna have short ones, you can have heavy ones or thin ones, different colors, different lengths. But notice it takes time to get people on board. Pillar number one, purpose.

So pillar number two is almost complete the engagement process. Pillar number two. Now watch what happens. You take pillar number one, the bottom nail purpose. You start to lift it up and you can only go so far. Pretty soon the heads of the nails indicate they’re about to fall and they do. People fall off. Even though at one time they were clearly on board the purpose of the team, so you back up a little bit, takes a minute. You quickly put the nails back in the position that they were originally

Re-Explain the purpose, why it’s important, what’s at stake, who the stakeholders are, what each individual’s responsibilities are.

You explain the roles, you explain the results, you explain what’s at stake. Now instead of just lifting up this bottom nail, again, you add the third and final pillar.

This last pillar is communication. Constant ongoing communication. Place it on top of the structure and now it will be complete. Lift up both the bottom nail and the top nail. Let gravity take over. Everyone is on board. The communication pillar on top is in place, and now back to senior management’s original request.

You balance this entire structure and it’s stable. Voila, all three pillars are exhibited here.

The bottom nail purpose, the middle pillar of engagement, everybody’s on board and that top nail of constant ongoing communication. In fact, it’s even so stable. It can withstand budget, change, schedule, pressure, politics, gamesmanship, even a shift in senior management.

It’s stable and watch what can happen. It may look a little bit delicate, but you can even find individuals who may not be performing and you remove them from the apparatus and they’re rift. Or you have somebody who’s won the lottery or maternity leave or some type of sabbatical, and you remove them from the apparatus and the structure remains. If somebody comes along a few days later or weeks later and replaces them, you can put ’em back. As long as those two primary nails, purpose and communication are in place.

Remember this little simple demonstration. Share it with some of your colleagues using 16 penny nails or these larger 11 inch nails, but teach while you’re sharing it, those three essential pillars, and you’re then going to have amazingly powerful results in leading or being a member of your team.

Good luck.