How To Measure Leadership Team Effectiveness

Measuring Purpose

Great leadership teams have purpose beyond their stewardship role; one that leverages the collective experience and talents of each team member. While mission and strategy should certainly strongly inform a leadership team’s purpose, they do not provide adequate guidance for how the team should behave and operate as a unit. For example, without clarity a team that assumes its purpose is to execute the firm’s strategy to reduce customer concentration risk will likely deploy multiple and potentially competing approaches. Team members will often naturally focus on the parts of the strategy that relate to their areas of responsibility. Gaining clarity of leadership team purpose drives consistency of approach and establishes a foundation for how the team will operate and behave as a unit.

The criteria for establishing a leadership team purpose provide a good foundation for measurement of this important team role. A leadership team purpose must be consequential and have impact on the lives and work of others and on the viability of the organization it serves. It should also be challenging and require members to exchange strategic information, coordinate organization wide initiatives, and make vital decisions on behalf of the organization. A leadership team purpose must also be clear and help the team maintain focus on its critical priorities. Finally, as the organization’s environment evolves (new competitors, economic challenges, changing customer requirements) the purpose of the leadership team must evolve. Similar to a leadership team’s stewardship role, execution of a common purpose requires leadership teams to maintain a sometimes-challenging balance of focus on business results and productive behaviors that will influence results. The table below provides a framework for measuring a leadership teams role in executing a common purpose.

Measuring Cultural Impact

Culture is a fancy way of describing “how things are done around here” – it is the accumulation of the beliefs, norms and values shared by employees up, down and across and organization. Culture is reflected in the behaviors and processes that are created to realize an organization’s strategic direction. Leadership teams are responsible for defining and refining the type of culture that will best serve their organizations and they play a pivotal role in shaping and maintaining desired culture.

Employees take their cues from how well their leadership teams interact and how effective they are at holding each other accountable. For culture to become more than platitudes and become part of the fiber of how employees operate, leadership teams must collectively and individually model the values, beliefs, norms and behaviors reflected in the culture. Most importantly, leadership team members need to hold each other accountable for living the culture as a team and help each other cascade this way of operating throughout their organizations.

Great leadership teams recognize that a good culture is not just the soft stuff but rather a critical element in achieving desired results. They view culture as a potential competitive weapon as they compete for employee and management talent, strategic partnerships, and customer loyalty. The table below provides a framework for measuring a leadership teams role in maintain a strong culture.

Measuring the Foundational Elements of Great Teams

Great leadership teams have a strong pulse on the basic blocking and tackling factors that enable them to focus on and achieve tangible business results. In the paragraphs below we will describe a framework that helps teams build, continually assess, and refine their structural and relational dynamics. This predictive framework provides leadership teams with a level of confidence that they are working on the right issues to strengthen team performance.

The interplay between a leadership team’s structural dynamics such as defined roles, metrics, and meeting rhythm and its relational dynamics which are those factors that influence how team members interact is an incredibly important dynamic that is often overlooked. When leadership teams are struggling, leaders will often take action to correct one or the other set of elements rather than look at the cause and effect relationship between them. Specifically, there is no doubt that insufficient structure can exacerbate relationships among team members. For example, misaligned incentive structures can inadvertently create competition that naturally puts pressure on relationships. On the other hand, bad relationships among team members can expose poor structural design as exemplified by a team that avoids debate about critical issues despite having well-planned meetings with great agendas.

Team Coaching International’s Team Diagnostic: A leadership team isn’t just a collection of individuals; it is a living, dynamic entity with its own personality, spoken and unspoken rules, vision, blind spots, even moods. It is because of this important context that we use Team Coaching International’s (TCI’s) Team Diagnostic which focuses on the team as a dynamic system where the team is more than the sum of its parts. With the Team Diagnostic a leadership team’s needs are explored independent of the needs of any single member. This shifts the attention and the work of the team to the team itself.

Using common everyday language, the Team Diagnostic assesses team performance from two perspectives: (1) What results is the team achieving? (Structure/Productivity) and (2) How is the team achieving these results? (Relationships/Positivity). The Team Diagnostic uses 7 productivity factors and 7 positivity factors and through increasingly detailed layers of analysis a comprehensive baseline is provided for taking specific action on a few important areas of improvement. From this baseline, performance can be assessed periodically from the perspective of the team itself, the Board, team members’ direct reports, among other stakeholder groups. The graphic below illustrates the specific dimensions assessed using the Team Diagnostic.

Conclusion

Leadership teams can be a force multiplier for their organizations and, as the Google study suggests, those teams that effectively balance a focus on business results with building a healthy and productive culture increase their organization’s likelihood for sustained success. Great leadership teams bring this balance into all of the work they do including serving as the steward for the organization’s strategic direction, leveraging team member talent and experience to integrate on important priorities, and embedding a desired culture throughout an organization. Deploying a leadership team measurement framework that reinforces the results / culture balance across these important roles will build a foundation for continual refinement and sustained success.

Read more: The Differences Between Leadership Teams In The U.S. And Asia