from our Guest Blogger David Zeilinger

This is the first blog post of a series of thoughts from David Zeilinger on New Leadership. Stay tuned for more…

For the first time ever I am witnessing the dynamics of a fully integrated and engaged team, and it is breathtaking. My personality is geared towards managing people, not structures and processes, I needed to always constrain myself to adhere to rules and limitations in order to reflect on the necessities of the coporation, which exhausted me ans was not my sweet spot.

Just recently I experience a significantly different way of working: My team is managing itself, they reach conclusions and decisions superior to mine and established a solution oriented mentality, which makes my ability to take decisions almost obsolete, they organize and take care of the right results themselves. I can focus on developing our strategic direction and coach my team members, which in turn reinforces the self management of my team.

How come? We created a team credo of what we call “radical truth & unconditional pride“. In several workshops where we focused mainly on the contribution of each team member to the overall result we identified that all we basically need to succeed is “to put everything on the table” and “delivering only work of which we are pride to put our names below“.

We committed ourselves to honor this simple credo at all times, no excuses, no exceptions. Well, this is not a blue print for each and every organizational format or business challenge you might face, however there are several methodologies supporting such a team development.