“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
Albert Einstein
In my years of working in organisational development, coaching senior leaders and teams it’s become increasing clear to me that the challenges leaders and senior teams face have become exponentially faster paced, more complex, not always completely clear and very often stressful.
This is not my unique insight, there’s plenty of research on the subject. It’s also become clear that for senior teams to be able to address all these challenges – as in society generally – there needs to be greater cross-disciplinary and boundary partnerships, more collaboration, more cohesion and less local self-interest than many senior teams have been able to achieve previously.
The nature and the quality of the thinking when senior teams are together is different to when the members of the team are leading their individual areas of remit. In working together senior teams need to generate new ways of thinking as Einstein pointed out.
So why is higher performance as a team – or should we call it higher value creation as a team – so difficult for many senior teams? If only they could coalesce more successfully. If only they could drive strategic speed in achieving their ambitions? If only they could harness the collective brainpower and wisdom in the team more effectively. Could they amplify their incremental performance impact as a team and role model to the rest of the organisation what high performing teamwork really looks like?
All my observed experience (and of course empirical evidence) points to the answer: Yes. But why is high performance teamwork so tricky at the top of an organisation?
Senior teams have to run AND transform their business at the same time, but they have to be able to operate in three horizons simultaneously:
- The immediate, business needs as usual
- Future innovation today
- Strategic foresight to identify opportunities and challenge requiring significant change
The problem is that while we can intellectually agree about these needs and abilities, there are several assumptions that exist in senior teams that have the effect of slowing down the team’s ability to coalesce into a high performing one.
- The teams purpose is identical to the organisations purpose.
Seeing the teams purpose as synonymous as the company’s purpose is inaccurate. Achieving the organisations mission and vision is of course what they are their to do, but it doesn’t accurately describe why they exist as a team. While senior teams might, quite reasonably, be measured by how they do against some economic criteria, this purpose doesn’t really measure what they do jointly as a team against specific team performance or higher aspirational goals. Senior teams have to define why they exist beyond making the business successful.
- Membership of the team is automatic
Organisational structures cluster people into teams in their design, but membership doesn’t really describe contribution. In senior teams it is logical to have the heads of function around the top table representing and advocating for their individual areas of accountability. This, however, doesn’t guarantee common commitments, mutual accountability and full utilisation of complementary skills. In addition ego, personal ambitions and sense of hierarchy or seniority can make it difficult for senior teams to corral their collective contributions.
Check if your team is high performing by completing our survey. It takes 2 minutes and you get a personalised report. Take the survey here
- The role and contribution of team members are defined by their hierarchical and functional position
This is partially true, but the problem with this unconscious assumption is that is can easily lead to silo mentalities. The marketing director worries and represents the marketing function. The finance director, finance and the operations director, operations. This is compounded because these biases towards individual accountability is deeply ingrained. They have the effect of reinforcing patterns of behaviour in the senior team that run counter to the needs of the team – and the organisation – as a whole. In all teams mutual trust and interdependence is key, but this is an even greater requirement at the top. The role of individual senior team members is to be accountable for the overall success of the organisation, not just the contribution of their functional responsibility. This is why I say the nature and quality of the thinking at the top is different when the senior team is together than when the individuals are with their own teams.
- Team time is not good use of time
Senior people are busy people, aren’t they? So when they come together, its about efficiency and task completion. Did we get through our meeting agenda? Did we make the decisions needed? Are we all updated?
But (as I have said many times before) senior high performing teams attain strategic speed because they are able to establish clarity, unity and agility. The first two of these elements are key at the top. As I have said above, some of the challenges faced by senior teams are the very essence of the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world we live in and the issues may require ‘kicking around’ in discussions more fully.
Engaging in productive conflict is one feature of high performing teams which illustrates my point about the nature and the quality of the conversations and ultimately the collective decision-making required of senior teams.
So, apart from the social aspect of getting to know each other and their personal styles deeply in order to enhance mutual understanding and perspectives, senior teams also need to explore and interrogate subjects deeply enough to enable members to feel heard and able to commit to the collective decision.
- Open communication is the key determinant of team effectiveness
It is certainly true that the nature of communication within senior teams can be a huge enhancer or barrier to team performance. But this assumption overly burdens this feature for the success of the team.
As many other studies – the most widely cited being the Google Aristotle project, undertaken to understand what make teams successful – have shown, other behavioural traits play a significant role. Of these, Google found that an environment of psychological safety was the most important determinant of team success. Team members feeling that they could rely on each other to get things done as well as having clear roles, plans and goals was also significant. (The Aristotle project also found that meaningful work and having an impact were also in the top five features of highly successful teams. There is also another aspect which is typically underestimated and hugely overlooked: How people feel at work; how they feel about being a member of this team. A question I often like to ask that generates super conversations is: What emotions does the success of this team depend on?
For me, the issue about these assumptions and the challenges faced by senior teams is that high performance at the top of an organisation is not a given, despite the years of career experience senior team members might have.
Leaders and senior teams as a collective can benefit from thought provocation. Their answers to todays problems can’t be based on yesterday’s thinking or mental models. Senior teams can benefit substantially from developing cohesion and ‘teamness’, sometimes they benefit from facilitation and, dare I say it, from transformational leadership team coaching and systemic coaching.
The point is that being referred to as the ‘senior leadership team’ doesn’t, in itself guarantee high performance. It’s difficult. It needs conscious and intentional effort. And sometimes they need help.
Delivering strategic speed, reducing time to value and increasing value over time, is one of the distinguishing features of high performing senior teams. I coach senior leaders and teams to become more cohesion and operate more effectively, thereby accelerating the execution of their strategy through their people.
If you would like to discover if your team is operating at its optimum take our survey and contribute to our on-going research. It takes less than two minutes to complete and you will receive a personalised report.
