The WOW! Buzz

Two weeks ago, the entire leadership team of WOW! gathered for our annual conference.  It’s a 2-day offsite event, that keeps the world at bay and our attention focused inward.  This is a time to review our progress against this year’s goals, discuss key business strategies for the future, build on our relationships with each other, and work on our own development as people and as effective leaders.

Some might scoff at the time and expense we invest in these annual gatherings.  I beg to differ – not because I attend and feel a need to justify it to outsiders – au contraire!  This gathering has a significant impact on keeping the leadership team connected to each other and connected to our short term and long term goals.  It also serves, via the development segment, to keep us challenged in our roles and focused on ‘sharpening the saw’ as Steven R. Covey put it in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  While it would not be appropriate for me to talk about business strategies (sorry!), here’s a little summary of what we did for our development work this year: 

In April and May, the leadership team went through a 360 feedback process.  This is a tool for gathering feedback from direct-report employees, peers, internal customers and ‘the boss.’ It provides results on how they perceive your effectiveness in 29 areas of leadership behavior.  Results can be encouraging, disappointing, and even downright frightening if you aren’t prepared to use it the way it is meant to be used… as a tool for your development.  In reality, there’s no such thing as bad results on a 360 chart.  The only bad thing that can come of it is if you don’t use the feedback to work on getting better.

In May we all received our individual results along with some professional coaching.   In June, in the morning of our development day, we shared our charts and our coaching results with the six or seven other managers who sat at our tables.  This is almost unheard of in other organizations.  360 feedback is generally confidential.  But how can we be accountable for our results if we don’t acknowledge them?  In fact, it was difficult to own our shortcomings and toot our horns at our own strengths, but we did it.  As it turns out, it was good practice for the afternoon.  In the afternoon we sat with our regional or functional leadership teams: Ohio people sat together, Indiana people sat together, I.T. people sat together and so on.  This time we shared our results with people who work with us everyday, almost all of whom contributed to the feedback reflected on our 360 charts.  It was emotionally difficult, but well worth the effort.  After all, we were on the same playing field (humility and vulnerability are great equalizers), and as a localized team, we are in the best positions to support each other through change.

Finally, each group looked at a 360 chart that showed the combined results of their regional or functional team.  Talk about enlightening!  It was very interesting to see the overall patterns and ‘personality’ of our team as perceived by others.  This picture gave us the opportunity to see where we should focus as a leadership group – to minimize our weaknesses and improve our strengths.  At the group level, our take-away from this exercise is to identify 3 or 4 changes that will most improve our team leadership and then outline what we will do to make these changes happen.  We were all worn out by the end of the day, but at our casual dinner that evening everyone talked about what a powerful and meaningful experience it was.

WOW!’s annual Leadership Conference is always more work than fun, but the end result is a more capable, cohesive leadership team.