The CEO’s Role In Building A Great Leadership Team

Executives are five times more productive when working as part of a high-performing leadership team than they are when working as part of an average one. So why do so many CEOs fail in putting one together?

Role #2 – Model Team Focused Behaviors

As is quite obvious, the decision to move from a senior staff model to a leadership team model is almost exclusively the decision of the CEO. Once the decision is made, a CEO has to evolve how she views her role and begin to model some important behaviors to facilitate the evolution. Ultimately, these behaviors require a pretty dramatic shift in the CEO’s mindset.

Adult behavior change is hard work and requires CEOs to self-reflect and commit to adopting behaviors required to support their efforts to lead and participate on leadership teams that are resilient, committed to learning from each other, and laser focused on business results. Based on our experience working with leadership teams in organizations across multiple industries we believe there are three behaviors CEOs must model — self-awareness, productive dialogue, and accountability.

Self-Awareness: All CEOs have blind spots that sometimes hold them back from being their best as colleagues, bosses or teammates – they think they are behaving one way while others see them showing up differently. CEOs are often shocked when they get feedback from their leadership team colleagues (often for the first time) – “what do you mean I don’t listen” • “I don’t let my direct reports off the hook” • “I don’t waffle when making decisions; I am actually quite decisive.” To create an environment where team members proactively address their blind spots, CEOs need to commit to addressing their own first.

In her recent Harvard Business Review article, What Self Awareness Is (and How to Cultivate It), Tasha Eurich suggests that there are two types of self-awareness. Internal self-awareness represents how clearly we see our own values, passions, reactions and impact on others while external self-awareness relates to understanding how other people view us. Eurich goes on to say that experience and power can actually hinder self-awareness – ‘seeing ourselves as highly experienced can keep us from doing our homework, seeking disconfirming evidence, and questioning our assumptions.’ Both types of self-awareness are clearly important, but our experience suggests that relationships among leadership team members are strengthened when CEOs take the lead in helping team members strive to understand how others view them, so we are not clouded by inaccurate assumptions and lack of diligence.

Productive dialogue is the ability for teams to challenge, debate and discuss their most important issues in a manner that progresses the issues and leaves minimal relational scars. Unfortunately, productive dialogue is a rare practice on most leadership teams. Shutting down dialogue can happen quickly — for example, when someone’s voice isn’t heard, when teammates get defensive with one another, or when group think sets in and the team begins to shut out dissenting views. When CEOs demonstrate that they are open to feedback, actively listen to different perspectives, and view confrontation as a natural part of the team’s way of operating, leadership teams are much more likely to engage in productive dialogue.

Accountability: Truly great leadership teams evolve into ones where individuals feel accountable to the team, the leader serves more as a coach rather than the primary source of accountability, and the team becomes competent at holding itself accountable. This optimal leadership team accountability construct is extremely difficult to establish and requires nurturing, commitment and patience on the part of the CEO.

They must model the behaviors they expect for the team. This includes receiving feedback well and providing timely, direct and respectful feedback. CEOs also need to clarify that their role does not exist to settle problems or constantly monitor the team; rather it is focused on creating an environment where peers address concerns immediately, directly and respectfully with each other.

Role #3 – Shape Leadership Team Purpose

By default, deciding to move from a senior staff model to a leadership team model requires the creation of a distinct leadership team purpose. To leverage the talents of team members, strengthen innovation, and capture efficiencies leadership teams must have a strong understanding of what work they need to do together. Leadership team purpose should be consequential, challenging, clear and reflect the dynamic and evolving nature of any organization. It should address only those issues that require the team’s collective, cross-boundary expertise, such as key strategic imperatives, cross organizational resource allocation, or how to capture synergies across business units. They should steer clear of anything that can be handled by individual departments.

To shape a leadership team’s purpose, CEOs should work with their teams to identify the most critical areas that must be tackled for the strategy to be successful. Next, the team needs to identify the interdependencies among leadership team members that will drive the strategy. Once the interdependencies are well understood the leadership team needs to narrow them down to the critical few that it is uniquely positioned to address and drive. After actively facilitating this important work it is up to the CEO to make any final decisions to shape a consequential, challenging and clear statement of purpose and work diligently to ensure that the team maintains focus and discipline on execution.

Conclusion

Recent surveys by Team Coaching International, McKinsey, and the Center for Creative Leadership have all revealed that greater than 75% of executives surveyed rated their leadership teams as ineffective. Similar surveys suggest that 95% of executives surveyed believe that building an effective leadership team would yield significant organizational results. Our experience mirrors these staggering statistics – great leadership teams are pivotal to the efficient and healthy long-term success of any organization. It is up to CEOs to step back and make the decision to shift from a senior staff model to a leadership team model, demonstrate the actions and behaviors required to make the shift, and shepherd the creation of clear leadership team purpose.

Read more: When It’s Better When Employees Disagree With You


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