The Unique Challenge for Senior Leadership Teams
Imagine: The CFO of a company is fed up with the time tracking system her organization uses. It makes the analysis work for her department a major pain. She repeatedly mentions this at the leadership team (LT) meetings, stating that the customer management software they use really needs replacing. However, every time she mentions this, the head of sales shuts it down immediately, feeling that there is no way his team could handle a system change this year with the extra ambitious goals they'd been given. When this pattern arises, none of the other team members says a peep because it isn’t as relevant to their functional domains, and the CEO inevitably deflects in the name of "moving on".
Leadership teams are collections of individual leaders brought together to make team decisions to lead their organization. Senior leadership teams comprised of of VP and C-level leaders have unique challenges compared to other teams in the organization.
Integrating function and enterprise
On the one hand, functional leaders sit on the senior team to represent and advocate for their particular role within the organization. This is important to ensure that every function is adequately considered in decision making.
Keeping an enterprise view
On the other hand, functional leaders represent their function, as part of a governance team steering a larger ship — the enterprise. Therefore, these leaders need to keep one foot in the senior leadership team camp. As Patrick Lencioni describes in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, this is their 'first team'.
Emotional maturity requirements
Having the ability to use integrative thinking to operate with the big-picture win in mind takes a decent amount of emotional maturity. There will be times when a decision may feel, in the short term, like a setback for a certain leader's team.
What happens if a senior leader lacks the maturity to stay connected and consider different perspectives to find a win-win solution?
Egos will come into play and metaphorical tables will be thrown
The CEO may get in the unfortunate position of mediating, choosing sides, or breaking up conflicts
The team becomes siloed and comes together as a lower-order information sharing or coordination team, missing the opportunity to make creative, win-win decisions together.
How can senior leadership teams build the chops to get to creative-decision-making status?
Come together more deliberately.
Reflect together on itself as a team.
Name the patterns the team has and its visions for becoming better together.
That's really it. Simple, although not necessarily easy. If you're leading a senior team, consider setting up a team "pulse check" meeting or even setting aside time for a team retreat. If you only have the time and budget to do a 2-hour online team retreat, it's a start, and you have to start somewhere at leading the team towards more cohesion and higher performance through intentional development.
