“The sun don’t shine forever / but as long as it’s here / we might as well shine together.”
-Victory (1997) by Puff Daddy feat. Notorious BIG and Busta Rhymes
Arguably the greatest rapper of all time1, Biggie, recorded this song, Victory, the day before he was taken from this world (way too soon…just 24 years old). From the beat, to the lyrics, to the background “Rocky-style” music, everything just hits!
And this opening line is profound in its simplicity.2 It’s a principle that more teams, particularly top teams, would benefit from embracing. Why? The duration of “winning time” for most organizations is becoming shorter and shorter (i.e., the sun don’t shine forever) due to heightened turbulence.3 And given that the clock is ticking, the best thing we can do is summon our collective powers to win (i.e., we might as well shine together).
Leadership principle: Teams must be vigilant about the barriers to shared responsibility and swiftly knock them down as old ones resurface and new ones emerge.
In a previous Friday Reflection, I offered a definition of shared responsibility. I’ve refined it a bit here:
Owning individual roles in shared goals (especially when others stand to benefit more than you)
Proactively negotiating interdependencies between teams
Seeking to understand the perspective of teammates with conflicting goals and having the maturity to make tradeoffs that result in the best outcome for the enterprise
In my experience working with teams across a range of organizations, shared responsibility is no longer a ‘nice to have’ for teams, especially top teams. It is a requirement. That’s because the most challenging strategic objectives involve goals that depend on activity that crosses organizational boundaries. Moreover, top teams are 4-D: more “diverse, dispersed, digital and dynamic” than ever before.4
Consider the experience of an upstart biotech company. They had a 1-year lead5 in a race with several other companies in bringing to market a novel treatment for a chronic rare disease. In the final three years of development, they accelerated their process and ended up launching two years before their closest competitor. When asked, the lead scientist confided in me that their secret sauce was the sense of shared responsibility of the cross-functional team, which included a regulatory leader, a manufacturing leader, a medical leader and a commercial leader. If they each had optimized for their individual functional goals, development could have stalled. Instead by staying vigilant about potential conflicts between functions and debating them weekly in a program management meeting, they had an amazing outcome for the company and more importantly, for patients.
While embracing shared responsibility can lead to massive impact as it did for this biotech, it can also feel like juggling flaming torches (ha!). That is because the barriers to shared responsibility are numerous, and when left unaddressed they can burn relationships and turn plans into ashes.
Some of the most common barriers to shared responsibility include:
Unclear roles on cross-enterprise initiatives
Lack of information sharing and communication
Misaligned incentives
Mistrust
Defensive routines6 including “us vs. them” thinking
In other words, shared responsibility can further exacerbate any existing team dysfunctions and worse, it can introduce new dysfunctions.
That said, these barriers tend to stem from the inherent lack of control that is involved in pursuing cross-boundary goals. And when our sense of competence is seemingly at risk (i.e., we sense there’s a chance we’ll fail), this lack of control activates our threat response (fight, flight or freeze). We fall back into our silos and defend our position or we just avoid making decisions on cross-boundary goals, hoping they’ll eventually go away.
Teams in this situation have two paths. 1) Give up on shared responsibility because it it is too hard and the barriers are too difficult to overcome. 2) Foster the conditions to enable shared responsibility to thrive and ultimately achieve more audacious goals.
For teams that take path 2, it won’t be easy, but the good news is that they likely already have all the answers on how to address the barriers. They just need to swiftly agree on how they tackle these barriers and then stay in integrity with the agreements they have made with one another.
Take Action: Practical and Proven Steps
Create the space with your team to identify the barriers to shared responsibility. It can be helpful to use a specific example initiative or project versus talking about the concept in abstract. This is likely to surface conflicts (sometimes very visceral ones), so in addition to the content, be sure to pay attention to the context. Practically what this means is to create the conditions to stay in “presence,” avoiding the blame game and “heroing.”7
Categorize the barriers you identify based on the magnitude of the risk (i.e., how likely is it to de-rail the initiative) and the degree of difficulty involved in removing the barrier (i.e., how entrenched is this barrier). This categorization will help you to prioritize which barriers to tackle first.
Co-create to solutions to remove the barriers to shared responsibility that you can control. For example, if information sharing is the barrier, test out new asynchronous ways of sharing relevant information. Or if role clarity is the biggest barrier, spend time getting really specific about each leader’s accountabilities in delivering the cross-boundary goal. Commit to and set up time monthly to check-in on how effective each solution is working. If it works, great! If it doesn’t, try another experiment.
Reflect: Some Questions to Consider
What are the barriers to shared responsibility (on the teams I lead or am apart of) that are most challenging to address?
How does my need for control get in the way of my trying to address those barriers?
What experiment can I get my teams to run that could remove one of the barriers to shared responsibility?
If this week’s Friday Reflection was practical or enjoyable (or maybe even both!), please share it with your colleagues and friends.
All West Coast readers may threaten to unsubscribe based on this line alone. Notice that I said “arguably” the greatest rapper of all time. That said, it’s hard to fathom how much more Biggie could have given to the world had he lived beyond 24 years old.
Hate on me all you want for calling Puffy profound hahaha. He gifted us with lines like “Can’t nobody take my pride / Can’t nobody hold me down / ohh no / I got to keep on moving.”
Recently a CHRO remarked that there is a massive amount of uncertainty that underpins every interaction in organizational life. And it’s deep! It emanates from many dimensions of life (economy, our jobs, our countries, health, finances, the list goes on). And while every generation seems to think this, it does feel like we are in a moment of heightened turbulence. All the more reason to JUMP at opportunities as they emerge because we don’t know how long the “sun will shine” on them.
This 4-D teams term was coined by Martine Hass and Mark Mortensen and elaborated on here. I’ve come to really appreciate how different teams are on the 4-D dimensions post-COVID. That said, it was a shift that had started well before COVID. Over 8 years ago, the top leadership team I worked with on a multi-billion dollar merger integration had 12 people living in 12 different cities. You can imagine how that went pre-Zoom.
The average time to develop a truly novel drug is 8-10 years, so this was a meaningful advantage.
This term “defensive routines” was coined by Chris Argyris in 1985. For a longish article on the topic, go here.
I’ve written full Friday reflections on these topics here: Subduing Your Inner Villain and Conductors not Heroes.