By Kristin Cobble
Darius was exhausted and frustrated. As the CEO of a rapidly growing company, he felt like Atlas, the Greek Titan, bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders. When I first started working with him as a consultant and executive coach, he shared how disappointed he was in his leadership team’s lack of initiative and big-picture thinking.
Darius believed he had a team of mostly B players. He didn’t trust their judgment; as a result, he had unintentionally become a bottleneck for every decision. He knew there had to be a better way, but he had no idea what it was or how to go about it.
Little did he know that his team was struggling with his leadership and criticizing him behind closed doors for constantly micromanaging and changing priorities. In order to cope with his management style, they kept their heads down and concentrated on their function, hoping to avoid his critical eye. At team meetings, they’d say as little as possible, while Darius drove and dominated the conversation.
In the 20-plus years I’ve been coaching and consulting with leaders and their teams, I consistently run into a harmful misconception – that the leadership team is leading the entire company together. In reality, most of them don’t.
A real C-level leadership team, not just in name only, is a group of functional leaders working together to lead the company as a whole. It sounds reasonable enough. However, the inconvenient reality is that most “leadership teams” are merely a collection of individuals leading their individual functions, not a team leading the company as a whole. Darius couldn’t yet see it, but this was the struggle he and the leadership team faced: they were a pseudo team.
Unless the CEO focuses on creating a true, high-performing leadership team, the team members will default to leading their own functions first and foremost. When the CEO is the primary driver of leadership decisions, the team can only be as good as the CEO.
The Benefit of
Transforming Your Team
When the CEO is the only one with enough knowledge of all the functions to think coherently about the organization as a whole, the team is limited to one dominant way of seeing, thinking, and making decisions. Team members do not experience one of the most essential resources of a true team – collective intelligence.
A good leader harnesses the individual power of each of the team members, while a great leader harnesses their collective power. Only then is the group smarter than the sum of the parts. Only then do you get the magic of 1 + 1 + 1 = 10.
When a leadership team thinks together about the business as a whole, it perceives emerging opportunities and challenges and can respond nimbly to change. When CEOs can remove themselves from the middle of every decision and truly unleash their teams, they’re liberated from a preoccupation with short-term execution and operational challenges and are free to focus on the more strategic aspects of their role.
Darius hired me and Groupaya, our San Francisco-based consultancy, to help him transform his pseudo leadership team into an exceptional one. With a mixture of hope and fear, the team agreed to give it a shot.
Ten weeks later, after a series of conversations and experiments, the team that had previously felt stuck and miserable described a new sense of empowerment and commitment. Their comments included:
- I feel like everyone is leading more.
- The exec team is coming together. I feel a genuine sense of optimism coming into this new year.
- There is a cohesiveness that is developing and a lot more synergy. Through that, more ideation is happening.
- We’re addressing difficult decisions more quickly and head on.
- We’re bringing much greater focus on process, but not at the expense of our entrepreneurial spirit.
Darius was thrilled. “I feel a sea change. The team is stepping up and leading. It feels great from where I sit.” These changes made it possible for Darius to focus on the strategic aspects of his role and for the team to develop its ability to collaborate more effectively.
As a result, the company went after a key strategic partnership that they wouldn’t have previously considered. To their surprise, they beat out much more established competitors and opened up a new vertical market for their product, which in turn doubled the size of their business.
Working more collaboratively, the leadership team continued winning customer and partnership deals faster and with greater ease. Darius moved from micromanaging his team to unleashing their inherent leadership, and the team shifted from being avoidant to being proactive. They became an exceptional leadership team.
The Path to Becoming a True, High-performing Leadership Team
The developmental process that reliably transforms a pseudo leadership team into an exceptional one consists of three interwoven key elements:
- candid conversations to surface and explore tensions
- experiments to develop new behaviors
- tools to support generative team dynamics
Below are examples of three conversations we facilitated with Darius’ team that integrated the key elements:
Conversation #1
In one particularly courageous conversation, Darius and the team explored what they could learn from a strategic investment that hadn’t panned out. We facilitated an After Action Review, a process which allowed for structured, yet candid, conversation and enabled them to experience how much deep learning a debrief can yield.
Until this point, team members had withheld feedback, believing that Darius would resist it. Finally, when given the opportunity to share their perspectives, the team released an immense amount of stifled energy and gained a more complete picture of what had actually happened. The conversation also revealed assumptions they had made about each other – some of which were just plain wrong. They saw how openly voicing their perspectives and checking their assumptions earlier would have saved them time, money, and aggravation. To everyone’s amazement, alignment around another strategic initiative spontaneously emerged.
In order to create a true leadership team, not just one in name only, Darius had to take the first courageous step. He had to recognize and acknowledge the ways he had contributed to the team’s breakdowns. His candor and vulnerability paved the way for others to share with the same honesty.
Conversation #2
In another conversation, we led a process in which leaders stepped into each other’s shoes and imagined the needs, goals, and challenges of one another’s functions and then made agreements based on their new understanding. Almost every leader was surprised to discover how little they actually knew about the rest of the company. Developing more understanding of each other’s functions, plus seeing more clearly how they impacted one another, increased trust and provided crucial insights about how to work together better. It was so effective that some leaders chose to bring the same process to their own functional leadership teams.
Conversation #3
In a third conversation, the team developed behavioral experiments and processes, focusing on one of their biggest chronic challenges: clarifying the annual goals and recalibrating their priorities throughout the year. The process enabled them to be more thoughtful about which new opportunities to pursue and when to stay true to their existing priorities. This discernment created closer partnership between Darius and his leadership team and freed up an enormous amount of energy previously wasted on adopting and dropping initiatives somewhat capriciously. As a result, they were more focused and productive; morale across the whole organization skyrocketed.
Assessing Your Team
While Darius’ case reflects many universal patterns, every team’s journey is unique. To assess where a group is on the pseudo to exceptional leadership team spectrum, my colleagues and I developed a survey that identifies specific behavioral distinctions related to high performance. The survey illuminates how impactful and vibrant leadership teams can potentially be. The results provide teams with insights that serve as springboards for their development.
We based the survey on our Groupaya Team Outcomes Model, derived from conversations, held at regular intervals, with dozens of teams about their on-the-ground experience and the changes they experienced since working with us.
Six themes emerged:
- Deepened Relationships
- Better Collaboration
- Generative Mindsets
- Impactful Innovation
- Strategic Focus
- Sustained Results
The resulting survey focuses on these six domains. We invite all our clients to take the assessment to help identify leverage points around which we design our work with them. We combine the results of the survey with information from individual interviews to get a holistic picture of the system and the processes that would most support it. The survey results also serve as a baseline for measuring the team’s improvement.
You can get a glimpse of where your team is located on the pseudo to exceptional leadership team spectrum by reflecting on a sample of distinctions from the Team Outcome Survey on the following page or by taking a 36 question version of the survey (5 to 10 minutes to take it) here at groupaya.net.
The table below contains two distinctions per domain. Choose a number from 1 to 6 that best captures how the left or right statement describes your team.
