Several years ago I was sitting in a meeting of successful CEO’s where the discussion was focused on hiring a leader for a non-profit we were collectively assisting.
The conversation took a turn when the co-President of a very large and successful clothing retailer made the statement, “The best person for this job is a team.”
This friend and highly regarded business leaders had served on a four-person co-president team that had led his company through a public offering and had grown the business from sales of $9 million to well over $4 billion dollars during his co-tenure at the helm of their northwest-based national company.
Through his real-world experience, he had learned that the give-and-take, gifting-based task allocation, approach, and unified collaboration of a committed team, had far out-distanced their competitors - and that properly formatted teamwork was the key to their stand-out achievements.
Teamwork: “cooperative or coordinated effort on the part of a group of persons acting together as a team or in the interests of a common cause” (source: www.dictionary.com).
Over the next few weeks we will examine a number of the attributes of successful teamwork and debunk the myth that leadership is only possible under the exercise of single-person headship.
Maybe the advice from my friend Jack remains correct: The best person for the job is a team.
