An agile business is a successful business with leadership teams that are at the top of their game. But how do you ensure your leaders are ready to respond to today’s challenges?
Unsurprisingly, winning teams respond with agility when they regularly reflect and learn. But if you couple this with a broad and systemic business approach focused on purpose, strategy, organisational alignment and team dynamics, the outcome is a leadership team that remains relevant and thriving in our changing world.
Over 20 years’ experience has gone into developing our Team Success Model, taking countless leadership groups successfully through our holistic, business focused development programme, tailored to each business’ needs. We’re happy to share an overview with you because we believe that helping senior teams become great takes more than just raft building!
REMIT:
The starting point is to be clear on the team’s remit – what are key stakeholders asking the team to deliver? What do the shareholders, board, equity holders, employees, society, etc want to see achieved?
Then consider how the CEO/MD pulls together the right team to help them deliver this. With the right team in place the following steps should lead to success.
VISION & ALIGNMENT:
Once the remit is clear, the leadership team creates its road map to success. This is about how the team comes together to turn the vision into practice:
- Clarity on purpose
- Agreeing the critical values for the team, and the business, to achieve success
- Defining the strategy; where to play and how to win, considering the wide range of stakeholder needs and reflecting on the business planning process
- Ensuring organisational alignment; assessing the organisation’s ability to deliver across roles, capability, policies, procedures and reward mechanisms
HIGH PERFORMING TEAM WORK
In clarifying the plan for delivery, teams then consider how to improve the dynamics within employee groups and with other stakeholders. Considering the company culture, team/individual profiles, how to develop trust and encourage debate and continually develop together are all helpful.
For many organisations, the risk is to focus on one area more than others. For example, teams can get focused on developing the right strategic approach and road map, but not consider behavioural dynamics. This might get the boat pointing in the right direction, but the crew will be rowing in different directions.
Similarly, some teams focus on doing great team building work, reviewing different styles and approaches and working out how to get on better, but if they lose their strategic business focus then it’s a bit like straightening the chairs on the titanic!
““I am reminded of an executive team I once encountered, who spent huge amounts of money creating a strategic approach to meet their main stakeholders requests; changing the organisational design, operating model, restructuring roles, there were work-streams and Gantt charts coming out of your ears in a well-engineered and planned approach.
However, the organisation failed and folded because the leadership team relied too narrowly on business plans and did not review and develop how they behaved and worked together.
As a consequence, there was little agreement to the overall vision and purpose, they had little understanding of each other and trust was low. Compounded with a lack of listening and respect for differing views, and an avoidance of tackling conflict, it’s no surprise they didn’t succeed.””
From our years of experience, we know that there is no such thing as a typical leadership team, which is why we don't offer an off the shelf solution. We always seek to understand the specific organisational context and unique challenges and build an approach aligned to that.
If you’d like to hear more about how we help leadership and senior teams to add real value and perform at their best, we’d love to hear from you.
Contact us:
Call: +44 (0)7881 915657
Email: claire@downtoearth-development.co.uk
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