Building Leadership Team Effectiveness

Is your leadership team effective? An effective team abandons silos and advances from a culture of “me” to a culture of “we.” They get things decided, are highly respected, and have the confidence of the organization, especially in difficult times.

Making a Leadership Team Effective

Here’s a quick questionnaire for evaluating your own leadership team’s effectiveness:

• How well does your senior team run meetings?
• How well do members of your leadership team listen to one another?
• How well do they make decisions?
• Do they have team agreements on:
  • How they will work together (code of conduct)?
  • How they will run their meetings?
  • How they will make decisions?
  • How they will build trust among themselves, both in meetings and outside?
• And do they truly live those team agreements?

Optimizing Your Team’s Effectiveness

There is a bottom-line difference between a leadership team that is just functioning adequately and one that is truly effective. CLG’s Leadership Team Effectiveness solution helps you to optimize their effectiveness.

We use a corporate-tested structured approach that we customize to your company. We tailor it in a simple, practical, beneficial way: we work with you to select a real, current issue or initiative in your organization, and then work it through your team during one to three meetings. This way, your leaders learn to improve their team effectiveness while applying their advancing skills to a real challenge you must meet.

It’s a powerful win-win, getting valuable work done as your leadership team actually “lives” the reenergizing experience of working together to optimize their team performance.

How CLG Builds Your Leadership Team’s Cohesiveness and Effectiveness

Despite similarities, each leadership team has unique needs, styles, and circumstances, so we typically customize our solution to fit your culture and situation.

Clients tell us what they highly value about our approach:

• To save time, we bring checklists, a model agenda, and model agreements, and tailor them to your situation so the team can reach agreement quickly and move forward.
• We wrap the experience around a real task, doing meaningful work together, guiding your team in making decisions that they had previously found difficult. We have found that building in at least one agenda item that addresses a key decision or resolves a key issue increases engagement and affords the immediate opportunity to practice team agreements. This builds remarkable team cohesiveness.
• We clarify the concrete behavior that will achieve desired impact, and we get sustained team effectiveness—the leadership teams we work with continue to perform better because we explicitly build in ongoing sustainability plans.

It’s a book-ended approach: we get your team to talk about what they need to work on, get them to adopt agreements, and then they practice on real work in real time, with our facilitator, so they make decisions as they learn to optimize their effectiveness.

Then we conduct a lookback: where did we adhere to agreements and make progress? Where did we not? How do we sustain this—build it into your team’s fabric?

Depending on your situation, we may do this at one of your sites, or we might agree to visit a novel offsite. For one company, we did a memorable—and effective—“scavenger hunt” at Disney World to stimulate alignment on a “breakout” customer strategy. For another, we traveled to the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg, PA for a “staff ride,” revisiting the pivotal battlefield lessons on strategy, execution, and leadership as a framework for current decision-making.

A Typical Agenda

Here is the basic structure that helps us build leadership team effectiveness:

• Set the stage - Why this session, why now? What are your priorities?
• Verify/strengthen alignment - Roles and important interdependencies
• Team effectiveness agreements - Ground rules, managing our interdependencies, building and sustaining trust
• Accomplishing meaningful work together - Select and work a high-priority decision-making or issue-resolution item
• Team-building activity - Strengthening our rapport and cohesion
• Debrief - How well have we put our agreements into practice here?
• What will we do after the meeting? - Clarify action items and accountabilities. What we will communicate to others? How will we monitor our progress?

Our success with leadership teams in the Fortune 100 derives from our customized meetings and focus on accomplishing real work together.

Learn more in our case study, Coaching Initiative Helps Chemicals Company Achieve and Injury-Free Work Environment.