It’s not uncommon for an organization’s senior executives to call themselves the "Leadership Team." Yet frequently divisional self-interests drive their actions more so than teamwork—a lower-performing model for people at all levels of the enterprise. In contrast, members of high performing leadership teams watch out for each other, share resources and knowledge, trust each other, are brutally honest, embrace healthy conflict, and are committed to / accountable for results, individually and collectively. If this seems too good to be true, you probably have some work to do with your senior executive group. Assess the situation, identify changes that need to be made, and don’t settle for less. Doing so will increase the likelihood that your executives will achieve sustainable results, and set a most engaging example for everyone in the organization.
Self-coaching:
- Taking a hard look at your leadership "team"—and considering the elements described above, to what extent is your group operating as a high-performing team?
- If the self-interests of your executives tend to override the greater good of the leadership team as a whole, what factors are contributing to that pattern?
- Determine what help you may need to assess more thoroughly the leverage-able strengths, and tackle the key development areas of your leaders. Measure progress, and build mutual accountability into the process.
David Peck
Executive Coach and President
Leadership Unleashed
Twitter: recoveringleadr
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Based on client experiences / lessons learned, our weekly LeaderTips have been offering self-coaching themes and topics of interest to leaders since 2004. They are often published in BusinessWeek Online, sent weekly to our clients, and hundreds of other corporate leaders worldwide. I invite you to forward them to others, who are also welcome to subscribe using the link below. Note that over 100 of these tips appear in my book, Beyond Effective: Practices in Self-aware Leadership. Click here to subscribe to LeaderTips via email.
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