We are hearing a common theme amongst our clients recently that they want their teams to dramatically accelerate progress on key initiatives - especially when faced with complex, high stakes tasks.

It’s one thing as a leader to delegate clear cut tasks like asking one of your high performers to chair a risk committee and quite another to delegate responsibility for a complex initiative like developing a data strategy that transforms the organization. How can we improve the odds of your team making great decisions when faced with hard to solve, complex, high stakes tasks?

I was once given several stretch assignments as part of an emerging leaders program early in my career in aerospace at Bombardier. Leveraging my experience, I share four ways to accelerate development and inclusion of diverse talent.

Trust is at the basis of any high performing team. It can be built incrementally, over time, and often by small gestures. Trust is a belief that something vulnerable and important to me is safe with you. That “something” could be my thoughts and ideas, my project, my feelings, my reputation, or anything that makes me uncomfortable when leaving it at risk to your decisions and actions.

Trust building starts with having the right leadership mindset. As leaders, we need to firmly hold the belief that people are capable, trustworthy and have unlimited potential. This is a mindset of generosity – having the most generous interpretation as possible to the intentions of others. This belief provides courage that is sometimes needed to foster an environment where trust amongst our team can grow. When we work with a team, we start the day with a trust building exercise crafted to go beyond the traditional ice breaker. Genuine connection and understanding are the foundation for trusting environments.

Storytelling has a remarkable ability to connect people and inspire them to take action. They provide context and structure that aid in understanding complex ideas. By presenting information within a narrative framework, storytelling helps people visualize concepts more effectively. People remember stories when they include both positive and negative emotions.

The most compelling narratives honor the past, help us understand the need for change, and offer practical ways forward. They are a crucial step to harness your organization’s energy and direct it toward strategic change.

Empowerment is about providing people the power and authority to do something on their own that’s within their ability. People are highly motivated and engaged when they are empowered. Organizations thrive when leaders get this right – we get more capacity with the same resources, more innovation to solve hard problems, and retain better talent. Teams accomplish things that were never before possible. Netflix, Google, and Salesforce are known for fostering a culture of innovation and responsibility for decision-making.

For empowerment to exist people need to be allowed, to want, and to be able to decide and take action.

Leaders often spend significant time discussing accountability and how to hold others accountable. However, it is not as common for leaders to consider the importance of collective accountability. Fostering a high-performance and collaborative leadership culture relies on embracing collective accountability. This happens when each team member accepts 100% ownership for the actions, decisions, behaviors, and outcomes of the team as a whole. Building collective accountability requires both a deliberate choice and a commitment to team development. Collective accountability is only possible when each team member commits to taking this level of ownership.

Leadership development is one of the key ways successful organizations can become more strategic and operate even more effectively. As an executive, I sponsored and was part of a number of really great executive development programs as well as some that were interesting and fun but didn’t yield the long term impact that we hoped for. What I observe as the difference to success was integrating the program into everyday business so that leaders can put ideas and concepts into practice with real activities or experiments to make progress.

When your leaders have the opportunity to work on real topics that matter to the organization and themselves, your leadership program can have lasting impact and reinforce the culture you want.

Here are six principles to consider when building your leadership development program

Inviting your team to present at executive meetings is a unique opportunity to showcase your team and their work (and your leadership). When your team has the opportunity to present to the executive, it is a career opportunity to showcase their expertise, credibility, and impact. As their leader, it is essential that you support your team before, during, and after the meeting to be at their best, have the opportunity to influence, and continue learning to become even better.

Leadership is more than just achieving fast results. It involves building strong relationships, earning trust, and establishing credibility with your team. Acting alone without considering the impact on your direct reports can sabotage their effectiveness and damage relationships, which is bad for your team and the business. This can ultimately result in reduced engagement, productivity, and negatively impact the bottom line. The solution? Slow down, practice empathy and humility. Take the time to build strong relationships, have those tough conversations, and work towards common goals. This approach creates a culture of trust, autonomy, and collaboration that sets your team up for long-term success.

Effective leadership teams and strategy go together and each strengthens the other. It’s hard to be a team working together towards the same future without clarity of purpose, priorities and how we define and measure success. To have your team truly operate as team vs a working group, its essential that the team also has clear vision they are working together to achieve.

We do a lot of executive team coaching with all sizes of teams including some with as many as 16 executives. The larger the team, the likelier the question comes up “Is our team too big”? If you’re asking yourself the question, the answer is often – Yes.

To have your team truly operate as team vs a working group, its essential that the team has clear goals for the team to work together to achieve. Patrick Lencioni describes a team as a small group of people who work together to achieve a goal. He suggests that when your team gets over 8-12 people, it may no longer fit this “small group” definition and become very difficult to stay as a single team.

One paradox we face as leaders is how difficult decisions get made effectively with our teams – we know it’s helpful to gather perspectives to inform better decisions and yet we are also supposed to be bold and act decisively – so which is it? I think the answer is in the choices we make between these two polarities to fit the situation at hand.

Imagine if we could harness all the lost energy by eliminating the times when people in our teams said ‘yes’ but really thought ‘well maybe’ or ‘nope, not doing that’. That is a dirty yes. It’s is an invisible process that drags down the speed of every organization. Not only that, when this happens we lose mental energy, get frustrated with each other and erode trust – all the things opposite to what we want in great leadership.

This is especially relevant right now as many organizations are renewing their business strategy and looking for buy-in to new priorities. Exposing the dirty yes takes some courage – what if I get disagreement? How will I convince everyone? This is a great opportunity to practice ways to eliminate the dirty yes – success of those new initiatives is at stake.

So what does a dirty yes look like?