Beyond individuals’ strengths

INDIVIDUALS — who keep struggling to be persons of integrity due to the consistency between their actions and core values or ideals, such that those actions are ethical, being in line with moral standards or norms---are indeed the ultimate governance assets of any enterprise. They help give sustenance to its governance program.

Individuals as governance assets provide a good base; many breakthroughs and transformative outcomes would be possible and would actually get delivered, if every effort is then made to build on such a great base.

This is where team work comes in. In fact, as the experience of those declared as “Islands of Good Governance” attests, the power of teams within the enterprise can propel it to cover a great distance on the governance pathway. Given the interest on sustaining the governance program, it is necessary for the enterprise to go into the many elements that give teams such great power so as to reinforce and further strengthen them. Those elements include: • The push for every individual to build on their core strengths so as to contribute and add value, using those strengths.

• The intimate and mutual support arrangement between two or three individuals, who commit to become positive anchors for the team, made up of a few more members.

• The flexibility and openness to accommodate differences between all the members of the team, not only respecting those differences, but using them as instruments for the team’s contribution to be much more than the sum of its individual members’ contributions.

These elements enable the varied dynamics within a team, given the different core strengths of its individual members, to provide a more powerful platform on which the team can work towards strategic priorities that are fully in support of at least one priority in the enterprise’s strategy map. This platform would consist of the following: (a) the mutual reinforcement the team members get from each other in the observance of the enterprise’s core values; (b) the personal discipline that members have to observe so as to engage in joint undertakings with others in contributing to a strategic priority; and (c) the new approaches the team can experiment so as to improve and upgrade core processes for which the team may take some responsibility.

From such a platform, the team can then seek to bring small but positive influence on the enterprise’s environment within which it operates. That influence can include: helping to clean the material premises and surroundings of the enterprise; upgrade the cultural environment so that it becomes more conducive to good governance practices; and promote a culture within the enterprise where continuing cultural broadening and professional development would be encouraged and facilitated.

The power of teams, together with the platform on which they work to add value and improve the enterprise’s environment, would fall under the umbrella of solidarity. Like integrity, this too is a core value or an ideal: It bespeaks of unity, which is based on, and produces, “common interests, objectives, and standards” (1). Its source is the commitment of the members of the team to a common strategic priority of the enterprise to which they add value. Its outcome is the positive contribution the team makes to the eventual attainment of that strategic priority for the enterprise.

Teams, like individuals, can also give continuing impetus to the many efforts within the enterprise towards sustaining the governance journey.