How To Create One Team With One Dream
On today’s episode, I talk to Suneera Madhani, the founder and CEO of Stax by Fattmerchant. I met Suneera when she was going through Starter Studio, a tech accelerator in Orlando, FL, and when her team was preparing for incredible growth, she asked for my help to align her team. My purpose in life is to help teams increase their cohesion and effectiveness, ultimately driving organizational performance, and a lot of that involves growing individual self-awareness to create more self-accountable team members who then communicate and collaborate more effectively. AND, there is also the critical element of aligning your team on the core elements of your organization. Why do you exist, what do you do (and what do you NOT do), what is your vision of the future, how do we align decisions to maximize the likelihood we get there (AKA strategy), and how do we treat each other along the way (AKA culture). I use the framework from Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything to create a playbook for executive teams. In my interview with Suneera, we discuss everything from self-awareness to recover from defensiveness to finding your true purpose as an organization to how a viral article in Fast Company broke Fattmerchant, but ultimately prepared them to align strategically in preparation for scalability and 10x growth. If you are an entrepreneur who wants to grow a company, or a leader who wants to create a kick ass culture, you don’t want to miss this conversation.
SHOW NOTES
- Fattmerchant is the company that Suneera founded
- The Fast Company article that broke Fattmerchant, and reminded them to prepare for massive scale!
- We talked about vulnerability-based trust as described by Patrick Lencioni as a critical piece of our team-building process.
- Learn more about defensiveness in this blog written by Dr. Stephanie Lopez.
- Learn more about defensiveness in this podcast episode featuring Dr. Stephanie Lopez.