Warrick Is Your Team Solution

“Tilt it down. Down. More.”

“I’ve got it.”

But this time, he didn’t.

The marble bounced once on the carpet and rolled to a stop against somebody’s shoe. Twelve leaders stood there holding their section of the white pipe.

“Whose turn was that?”

Three people pointed.

It was a simple exercise. One marble, a long hotel hallway, and a handful of short PVC pipes. Each leader held a section of pipe, passed the marble to the next person, then walked to the front of the line to do it again. Nobody could carry it alone.

This team was ready for it. Every leader had already been through Leadership Coaching with Warrick and was clearer about how they lead. They were going to need every bit of that to move the marble together. But even with all that...

The marble still hit the carpet.

I’ve learned that a team of strong leaders is rarely a strong team. Ready individually is different from ready together. Harvard’s Richard Hackman studied more than 120 senior leadership teams and found that fewer than one in four (like less than 25%) were effective together. The problem wasn’t a lack of high performers. It was that leaders focused on their own roles more than the work they shared.

Strong at holding their own section of pipe. Still learning to pass the marble to each other.

Every organization has a few marbles, like a new initiative, a strategic plan, or a change everyone has to make. Each one gets passed from leader to leader until an idea becomes an offering.

And the marble always drops in the space between two leaders, in the roll between the roles.

That space is what every leadership team needs to develop, and at Warrick we do it in two steps. I find that leaders often underestimate the first one, but the second can’t work without it.

1: Each leader receives Leadership Coaching.

Most teams want to jump straight to the retreat. It feels faster. But before a team can move something forward together, each person has to get clear on how they lead and how their influence lands on the people around them.

This is where the leader who always talks first learns to listen for other people’s thinking. It’s where the leader who quietly does it their own way learns that their way only works if it connects to the next person.

Leadership Coaching is confidential and focused. After 22 years of coaching conversations, I’m still struck by what leaders are willing to say when it’s just the two of us. It’s often the first place a leader says out loud what they’ve been thinking, and that changes how they walk into the room with their team.

2: The team comes together at a Leadership Retreat.

Coaching makes each leader stronger, but it doesn’t build the handoffs. That can only happen with everyone in the room.

At a Warrick Leadership Retreat, we facilitate the ways of working most teams haven’t built together yet. We get clear on how key decisions actually get made and which priorities matter most for the next six months. We work out how a priority moves from one leader to the next without getting dropped, and what the team does when something stalls in someone’s section of the pipe. Everyone leaves with one shared way of moving the marbles instead of twelve individual versions.

The retreat is where what each leader built in coaching finally connects to everyone else’s work.

I’ll admit, early in my career I believed high performing individuals would figure out how to work together on their own. Researchers studied it for years, I just kept watching the marble hit the floor.

Leadership Coaching develops how each leader influences others.

The Leadership Retreat develops how the team leads together.

Back in that hotel hallway, the question still hung in the air. Whose turn was that?

Everyones.

That answer is the reason we do this work. Somewhere in your organization right now, an important marble is rolling toward the space between two leaders. Warrick helps your team build the leadership needed to see it coming, steady the piece they are holding, and pass it on, so the marble never stops in the space between.

DM us to start developing your team.