This is another article to continue my case study on leadership and team development in a small business of about 50 employees.

After the initial workshops on leadership and team development, I met with the business owner to continue the process towards creating an organization that is scalable to meet the business opportunities in the marketplace.

This next phase of the mandate is about implementing a win-win agreement process that commits each manager to achieving certain organizational outcomes by applying good leadership behaviors of participative management that they learned in the leadership workshops.The first meeting I held with the business owner was to establish a win-win agreement between him and I for the mandate itself. This is to assure that we stay on track towards agreed upon objectives and to hold each other accountable through a clearly written document and evaluation process.

It also was to help the business owner fully understand the win-win agreement process so he would know how what is required from him and his managers in terms of time and resources.

The first meeting was so that I could interview him about his concerns and to have him articulate what he wanted out of the mandate and win-win agreement process.

After the interview I drafted an agreement using our template form for this purpose. Since it is a two-way agreement I also drafted the support commitment form for us to discuss and complete at the second meeting. The support commitments from me are what he feels he requires as support for him to achieve his objectives.

Each form includes the key goal that each person is working on related to the negative tendency of his type. This tendency is really what holds us back from fully using our qualities in what we do and in interacting with others.

We always keep the key goal of one’s type as part of the agreement because we never fully overcome our tendencies and they can always surface to make us ineffective. It also forces us to keep working on ourselves and develop the habit of continuous personal improvement of our behavior related to leadership and teamwork.

We had a second meeting where we reviewed the first document of his objectives for the mandate and the performance commitments required by him to achieve what he envisioned. Though some discussion we came to agreement on the leadership behaviors required by him to meet his objectives.

We then discussed the support commitments he would need from me to reach his objectives. These were comprised mainly of holding him accountable through confronting him when he was off track or neglecting certain commitments etc.

I was quite pleased with the commitment of this business owner to this process and to wanting to put forth the effort to modify his own behavior to achieve his objectives. He is confident and willing to be transparent with his team, to commit the time to coach them and to be held accountable.

As part of the agreement we worked out how to track our progress towards the objectives and even discussed rewards and penalties.

The next meeting will be to finalize the support commitment document and discuss how to begin implementing the same agreements with his direct reports. This will enable us to figure out the time required by me to coach him and his managers and thus formulate a budget that makes sense to him.

I will post an update after the next meeting.

Stephen Goldberg