High-Performing Leadership Teams
Think of a regular team as a football squad with a shared goal. Leadership teams are different. Senior leaders, each responsible for a function or region, have distinct goals, even when striving for overall company success. This leads to conflict, as their perspectives, shaped by responsibilities ranging from sales to finance and HR, clash.
Furthermore, each team member brings unique cultural influences and individual dynamics, behaviors, and skills to the table.
So, how do we manage this? Where do we begin?"
“CULTURE EATS STRATEGY FOR BREAKFAST”
As the head of the leadership team, CEOs have the important task of modeling the desired behaviors and creating the right culture.
They set the culture, defining the “rules of the game”, and prevent behaviors such as passive-aggressiveness and arrogance, and ego that can hinder the leadership team from delivering effectively.
The critical elements of a healthy culture: regular feedback, openness, trust, and healthy relationships among team members.
How can leaders create a safe and healthy environment where team members can speak up? Listening is an important skill to build relationships and trust. For new CEOs especially, it is important to be curious rather than judgmental. Through listening, one can gain insights and perspectives that put them in a better position to navigate the relationships and reorient the team towards a culture of trust, safety, and perspective-taking.
You can use the support of your Chief Of Staff or an Internal Organisational Consultant to help you with this task. However, you will gain much more from doing it yourself on a regular basis, building trust with your team and really knowing what’s going on in your organisation.
The Leadership Team
The first step is determining who's in the team. In a study of 120 organizations, when asked who sits on their leadership teams, only 9% of the respondents were able to give a clear answer. Sometimes, it’s by design. Lack of a clear organizational structure ensures there is no accountability.
Leadership team is an alignment mechanism.
Vertical alignment is necessary for strategy implementation to ensure a united front, while horizontal alignment is needed for better integration, such that units meet their objectives in ways that complement other units’ efforts to achieve their objectives.
By balancing individual, functional, and cross-functional objectives, the leadership team achieves both vertical and horizontal alignment. This creates a united front for strategy implementation (vertical alignment) and ensures that different units work together effectively to achieve shared goals (horizontal alignment). Ultimately, this leads to a more effective leadership team and a successful organization.
Leaders must make their expectations clear and match accountability and expectations with rewards and recognition. Appropriate recognition and reward mechanisms foster a performance culture and sets the bar for the leadership team and wider organization. When different parts of an organization have goals that clash, it leads to wasted effort, poor teamwork and conflicts. Accountability of the leadership team – both individually and collectively. This is key for both vertical (top-down, throughout the organization) and horizontal alignment (within the leadership team itself).
Collective accountability and decision processes will take the leadership team from conflict to collaboration. Essentially, everyone in the leadership team must have clear and measurable individual and group objectives.
Source: INSEAD Knowledge