It is said that ships don’t sink be­cause of the wa­ter around them, they sink be­cause of the wa­ter that gets in them. The same prin­ci­ple can be seen in ac­tion when we look at lead­er­ship teams that dri­ve the per­for­mance of a busi­ness. A busi­ness does not sink when there’s uni­ty of pur­pose or when its lead­er­ship is unit­ed in com­mand, it sinks when the uni­ty be­comes porous.

Uni­ty of pur­pose is sim­ply be­ing uni­fied around a shared pur­pose of why the busi­ness ex­ists. It equates to a shared vi­sion of the essence and no­ble in­ten­tion of the busi­ness. So, one busi­ness may have the in­ten­tion to trans­form how peo­ple source their en­ter­tain­ment (stream­ing), whilst an­oth­er may be an­gling to trans­form how cars are dri­ven (au­tonomous­ly). It is part of the con­nec­tive tis­sue that un­der­girds the scaf­fold­ing of the busi­ness and should be one of the “liv­ing or lived” val­ues.

Uni­ty of com­mand oc­curs when the mul­ti­ple chains of com­mand across a busi­ness are unit­ed around a sin­gle, com­mon and shared mis­sion. This uni­fi­ca­tion equates to the syn­chro­nised mis­sion and method­ol­o­gy of get­ting the job done and fo­cus­es on ef­fec­tive­ly guid­ing the busi­ness, to achieve its strate­gic in­ten­tions, goals and ob­jec­tives.

I be­lieve that busi­ness­es should make the pur­suit of a unit­ed com­mand at the top, an ob­ses­sive pri­or­i­ty. Count­less sto­ries make the case for the vic­to­ries that fol­low a lead­er­ship team that utilis­es unit­ed com­mand as the up­wind for achiev­ing per­for­mance ex­cel­lence and over­all com­mer­cial growth.

Over­whelm­ing­ly though, my ex­pe­ri­ence has been that au­then­tic uni­ty of com­mand at the top is un­com­mon. It’s un­com­mon for many rea­sons, one of which is the lack of uni­ty of pur­pose as a dri­ving lever of the busi­ness.

The re­lent­less pur­suit of uni­ty of pur­pose should prop­a­gate a unit­ed com­mand at the top. Can you imag­ine how pow­er­ful­ly the co­her­ence be­tween the uni­ty of pur­pose and a unit­ed com­mand amongst the lead­er­ship team can im­pact ser­vice ex­cel­lence re­sults and busi­ness growth?

There are some very sim­ple op­tions avail­able to a busi­ness that wish­es to build uni­fied com­mand at the top. The strat­e­gy that ac­com­pa­nies these op­tions is built around the con­cept of “col­lec­tive and syn­chro­nised” ef­fort, cas­cad­ed from the high­est lev­el of the busi­ness to the low­est lev­el.

A use­ful start is to cre­ate two char­ters that build col­lec­tive ef­fort and re­pel si­lo-type op­er­a­tions. A lead­er­ship char­ter and a man­age­r­i­al char­ter. The lead­er­ship char­ter locks in the way in which the busi­ness strate­gists will ex­e­cute their roles and will re­quire all mem­bers to be com­pli­ant. A man­age­r­i­al char­ter will fol­low the same pat­tern, at the man­age­r­i­al chain of com­mand lev­el, so that all de­part­ments are man­aged sim­i­lar­ly. No more “man­ag­ing by per­son­al­i­ty”.

Both of these char­ters will need to be con­gru­ent with the pur­pose and the val­ues of the busi­ness. Need­less to say, a con­di­tion for suc­cess would be test­ing for man­age­r­i­al con­gru­ence across the busi­ness, to de­ter­mine how well the coali­tion is per­form­ing.

An­oth­er con­trib­u­tor to the uni­fi­ca­tion would be to have all chain-of-com­mand per­son­nel de­fine what suc­cess would look like when all the re­sults of their man­age­r­i­al goals are com­bined at the strate­gic lev­el. The ef­fi­ca­cy of this sys­tem rests on all goals be­ing achieved and places team in­ter­de­pen­dence at the heart of endgame suc­cess.

In any con­struc­tion ef­fort, there will be ob­sta­cles to be over­come. In the case of build­ing uni­ty of com­mand, one such ob­sta­cle will be the hu­man ten­den­cy to want to out­shine the “per­ceived” com­pe­ti­tion and the fact that in­ter­nal col­leagues who should be re­gard­ed as al­lies are cast as com­peti­tors. The com­pet­i­tive spir­it in small dos­es is tol­er­a­ble, can be­come counter-pro­duc­tive if it re­mains unchecked and if ig­nored in­def­i­nite­ly, the per­pe­tra­tors may even be­come un­govern­able.

I have en­coun­tered many busi­ness lead­ers who are well-in­ten­tioned in their at­tempts to build uni­ty of com­mand but strug­gle to gain mo­men­tum be­cause their ef­forts are at odds with the ex­ist­ing (ad­verse) cul­ture or the val­ues at the top. They may be in­ter­fer­ing with the sta­tus quo, a for­mi­da­ble ad­ver­sary when one is at­tempt­ing to en­er­gise change.

Fi­nal­ly, let me say that the rise and fall of ser­vice ex­cel­lence is trig­gered by many mov­ing parts. The state of uni­ty of com­mand at the top of a busi­ness is one such el­e­ment that can help or hin­der its cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence brand.

Why? Be­cause uni­ty at the top means cus­tomers ben­e­fit from con­sis­tent ser­vice de­liv­ery. Dis­uni­ty, on the oth­er hand, spells trou­ble.