Dean Miles, Founder and President, Bridgepoint Coaching & Strategy Group
Dean Miles is the founder and president of Bridgepoint Coaching and Strategy Group. Dean is also a member of Forbes’ Council for Executive Coaches and is a member of The Center for Creative Leadership.
Podcast
Overview
Businesses today deal with providing problem-solving goods and services. It is always the team efforts that lead to collaborative problem solutions than working alone. In order to accomplish the goals in the competitive business environment today, team leadership is key. The leaders ought to motivate their followers and lead them to follow the path to accomplish the common goals.
They ought to not just instruct their followers, but rather include them and understand them. With each old member leaving and a new member joining, the team dynamics alter. How does a leader manage that? We have your questions answered by a leading executive coach, Dean Miles.
About Dean Miles
Dean Miles is the founder and president of Bridgepoint Coaching and Strategy Group. Dean is also a member of Forbes’ Council for Executive Coaches and is a member of The Center for Creative Leadership. Today, he discusses what constitutes a perfect team, how to lead a team, and measure the team’s efforts.
DISCUSSION
Dean shares his journey to becoming a coach by understanding an important lesson to be a good leader. It is the difference between trusting instincts vs obeying instincts.
He recalls a quote by Samuel Johnson that finally motivated him to become a coach, “We need to be reminded more than we are to be instructed.”
At Bridgepoint, they join individuals and teams and end up reminding them of these principles.
What are a team and team effectiveness?
Dean defines, “Team is where the best things happened and where the worst things happen. It means we are doing something that is difficult and is necessary.”
He explains the VUCA philosophy of leadership for effective team performance.
V: Volatility
U: Uncertainty
C: Complexity
A: Ambiguity
Dean explains that the team members are now expected to perform under these pressures while giving the same expected results and without wasting time, materials, and energy.
Perfect Team
In order for team effectiveness, a commonly asked question is what constitutes a perfect team? To this, Dean borrows the findings of Google’s Project Aristotle.
He lists the two key requirements for constituting a perfect team:
- Equal participation
- Psychological Safety: the ability of the leader to read the emotions of the team and the individual team members and be correct.
Measuring Team Dynamics
As the team members join and leave, the dynamics keep on changing. It is the leader’s onus to pay constant attention to the changing momentum. He needs to train his first follower so well that others end up emulating the leader indirectly.
He explains, “When someone new comes to the team, what tends to happen is that the new follower doesn’t emulate the leader but the leader’s first follower.”
Food for Thought
Dean shares his views on the impact of the pandemic, which revealed the strengths and weaknesses of the teams and their managers.
Talking about the impact of culture on teams, Dean again resorts to the Project Aristotle findings of Google’s high-performing teams. He explains that it was their ability to resort to the following Cs:
- To clarify
- To confirm
- To communicate
- To connect
- Impact on consequences
Dean further lays down a new word, BANI, as an attempt to explain chaos:
B: Brittle
A: Anxiety
N: Non-liner
I: Incomprehensible
At last, Dean shares his views on “Great Resignation” which he calls catastrophic. He explains how people leaving the teams have told what they don’t want, but haven’t made it clear what is it that they want.
Profile
Dean is the founder and president of Bridgepoint Coaching & Strategy Group, a global executive coaching firm. He has spent his career coaching executives how to better lead themselves and their organizations.
Dean was invited by Marshall Goldsmith to join 100 Coaches (#MG100), an invitation-only community of the world’s leading executive coaches.
