Paul Plotczyk, WSA
The Executive Leadership Team, the Team at the Top, the Senior Management Team, today we nearly always refer to the group of individuals leading an organization as a TEAM.
The term conjures up images of bright, energetic, ego-less, professionals working selflessly to ensure the success of the organization and produce benefits for its stakeholders. As we all know, the day-to-day reality in the boardroom can be quite different - personal agendas often prevail, trust among top team members can be minimal and leadership/team skills are frequently less than stellar.
The lack of teamness at the top can, and often does, produce a huge obstacle to an organization's success.
In this – the first in a series of articles on Executive Teams - we take a look at some basic truths about Teams at the Top and what you can do to improve the performance of your Executive Team.
10 Truths about Executive Teams
- The fish rots from the head: Executive teams hold the success of the organization in their hands. Dysfunction at the top will quickly filter through the organization and spread.
- The Great Myth: By the time an individual reaches the executive level they have developed the teambuilding and leadership skills necessary to create a high-performance team. Too often this is not true.
- The Harsh Reality: In over 25 years of consulting in organizations around the globe, rarely have we found executive teams functioning as high-performance teams.
- Executive groups often consist of fiercely independent individuals who enjoy competing with everyone, including each other. That's how they got to the top.
- Gangs or Committees: Executive Teams can become more like gangs or committees where power struggles are common and fiercely protected fiefdoms abound.
- Rivalry among senior team members is often used (sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously) by the CEO as a viable tool to stir the competitive pot and get the best results from each person. But at a great price.
- Tight command-and-control management by the CEO can turn Executive Team meetings into “Executive Briefings” where more attention is given to reporting out information and avoiding any discourse that could lead to necessary albeit uncomfortable conflict.
- Top managers must guide a complex and interdependent system rather than control their own piece of the action. For an organization, this requires a well-oiled machine called the Executive Team
- This is Not Your Father's Chevrolet: Yesterday's executives lived in a different business environment. Diversity, remote workers, off-shore sourcing and competition are only some of the ingredients in today's global business environment. No single person has enough knowledge or experience to understand the challenges in a complex and sophisticated organization. That's why you need an executive TEAM.
- All for One and One for All! As the spirit of teamwork grows among top managers, they are seen as role models for getting results through cooperation. An amazing thing begins to happen - teamwork starts to develop at all levels of the organization. Employees working together become the norm and barriers to moving in the same direction begin to fracture and fall away.
What to do with the Truth?
The truth about Executive Teams is that there is no other place within an organization that having an effective team is as important or can have a bigger impact than at the top. And, ironically, it is at the top that we often find the most highly dysfunctional teams.
There are 3 key steps to building high performance teams:
- Building: The process we call “Chartering” lays the foundation for superior team performance.
- Developing: Devoting time to honing the individual skills necessary to implement the work of the team as a whole.
- Sustaining: Developing the skills to self-evaluate team performance, make adjustments, get results and monitor adherence to the team charter.
For more information about these steps see 3 Steps to Building High Performance Teams or contact me at 781-343-4008.
Next month: See how your top teams rate against the key characteristics of effective teams.
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