One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams

One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams

Chris Fussell 

Eric M. Anderson, Ed.D. M.Ed. | Associate Designated Institutional Official and Director of Graduate Medical Education Atrium Health Carolinas Medical Center 

About Me

You can often catch me on the weekends in Lincolnton, North Carolina sitting out on my front porch or wandering down to the local coffee house with book in hand. It’s a small town located in the Piedmont of North Carolina and has been home for the past 10 years. Downtown you’ll find our local bookstore, North State Books, where every book you could ever want to read can be found. My home library is full of books from varying genres. Fun fact I own every book written by Stephen King, yes including his most recent.  This past May I completed my doctorate degree in Higher Education Leadership. Leadership is something that I find rewarding but also particularly challenging at times. 

About the Book – One Mission

Several years ago, one of our leaders shared the book One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams by Chris Fussell. Change is inevitable in complex institutions, such as healthcare organizations. Developing a mission that all members of the organization can get behind and connect to their purpose is essential to the success of the organization. 

ONE MISSION’S FOUR OVERARCHING CONCEPTS ARE:

1. Creating an Aligning Narrative. The key to preserving top-down alignment while simultaneously allowing individuals and teams to make coordinated, independent decisions is an aligning narrative (a single mission emphasis). 

2. Establishing Safe Space for Decision Making at each level of the organization. This concept clearly articulates a lane of decision authority controlled by essential executives and teams inside the organization. 

3. Identifying and Creating a Special Role for Individuals – the Liaison. Each organization creates a role for trusted members of their organization who task is to "promote trust, cooperation, and understanding among different groups - they are the culture carriers and well versed in the aligning narrative and strategically positioned and empowered to facilitate the interconnection(s)" with key stakeholders and critical partners outside the organization. Identifying and developing a special role for individuals (referred to as Liaisons) - a role for trusted members of the organization who "promote trust, cooperation, and understanding among different groups - they are the culture carriers and well versed in the aligning narrative and strategically positioned and empowered to facilitate the interconnection(s)" with key stakeholders and critical partners outside the organization. 

4. Fostering a Humble Style of Leadership. Fostering a modest leadership style fit for making this hybrid model work. This leadership style must be one that empowers, and links teams, draws many views and viewpoints into the dialogue, and recognizes that "no single person is a stand-alone and sole decision maker. 

There is one line in the book that I believe summarizes the importance of this read to our organizations “the challenge is to create an enterprise that is comfortable constantly adapting to the complexity around it, while avoiding constant disruption to the parts of the organization that should remain stable.” 

As someone who likes to study history and especially war history One Mission resonates with me in how military leadership has shifted requiring the ability to quickly adapt to change. The lessons of this book helped me improve my leadership skills and develop some strategies to address the challenges of leading different generations during extreme times of change and growth. One Mission resonated with me because it really allows each of us to accept that failure is a lesson to learn from and pivot quickly to addressing the problem with a team that you have developed to pivot quickly as well. 

Brief Bio: Dr. Anderson is the Associate Designated Institutional Official and Director of Graduate Medical Education at Atrium Health Carolinas Medical Center located in Charlotte, North Carolina. Previously he served as the Director of Graduate Medical Education at the University of South Florida and H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center both located in Tampa, Florida. Dr. Anderson earned his EdD in Higher Education Leadership from Liberty University and his MEd in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of South Florida.