Leading your leadership team

Objective

Your leadership team is critical.

• You depend on each team member to represent core values, and explain core actions to his or her own team.
• You depend on each team member honestly to raise issues of importance which you need to be aware of.
• The senior leadership team is an important support mechanism for you in maintaining credibility with key constituencies – for example, partners, suppliers and especially your own boss!
• Who you choose to have in your team, and how you are seen to manage them, sends important signals to the organisation as a whole about your motivation, commitment, demeanour and values.
• The cohesiveness of the senior leadership team, seen through the consistency of its messages, plays a key role in underpinning the credibility of an organisation’s vision and strategy.
• The modus operandi of the team – how it meets, interacts, displays itself – sets a tone and standards which the organisation will tend to follow, even if unknowingly.
• You need to be aware that, in some respects, each member of your senior leadership team is a personal ambassador and that their actions will therefore reflect on you.

Your team is therefore a critical extension of yourself. How you manage what is a cohort of ambassadors becomes a critical aspect of delivering overall performance.

Your goal in leading your team is to create a group which wholly represents a united, shared view of objectives, strategy and values.

Context

Teams function most effectively when each team member is seen to be an authority in their own area. In part this determines your approach – you must have the humility to say, and to believe, that each of your direct reports should be more expert in their given area than you are. You should understand that your role is not to be the overall expert – a king or queen of all trades – but to enable each of your team members to be a star. This approach is likely to be credible when:

• you are seen to defer to the specific knowledge of individuals, challenging not their expertise but their reasoning;
• you say in public that your role is not to be an expert.

The use of extensive delegation as the approach to issue-solving assists in this process. An effective leader always assists in problem-solving, but where you are seen as the problem-solver of first resort, then the dependency culture created undermines the specialisms of the team members, and with it the effectiveness of the team as a whole. By delegating responsibility in the first instance to your team members, and by indicating that you expect your involvement to be problem-solving of the last resort, you enable your team members to gain internal self-esteem and external ‘face’. Sometimes this means that you must allow decisions you disagree with – the assumption of responsibility gained by the team member outweighing the downside of the decision.

Challenge

The greatest challenge in a team is managing conflict. Open and constructive disagreement is healthy and should be encouraged. What should be discouraged are stand-offs – significantly different views which become more, not less, entrenched through debate, increasingly personalised, and where the act of opposition becomes more the issue than the real issue itself! In such a circumstance you must cut to the quick, distil the real points of difference and challenge the disputants to resolve the issue based on your distillation of the facts. The ideal outcome is an agreed resolution, though you will not shirk – and your team will know this – from imposing a resolution if needs be. In this, as in all aspects of team management, effective leaders know how to move, and when.

Success

For a team to be effective, it has to be a team in practice, not simply in name. There are a number of techniques you can adopt to ensure your team operates effectively.

• Regular meetings – your team should meet on a regular basis, preferably weekly, on a day and at a time which fits the organisation’s cycle. Such a meeting should be issues-based, and strictly time-limited. When you start such a cycle of meetings, the ground rules should be established clearly. A key rule is that no member of the team should be discouraged from expressing a view on any subject or function.
• Issue meetings – team meetings should be separated from deeper discussions on key issues (which might also involve other staff), and you have to sense when these should be chaired by yourself, or by a function head, and indeed when you should abstain from attendance altogether. Functional heads must be seen by their own teams as leaders in their own right, and this can be impaired if you dominate proceedings.
• 121s – group meetings should be supplemented by regular meetings between you and each of your direct reports. Obviously this serves the purpose of monitoring progress regularly on key objectives, but it also allows for a wider-ranging discussion of the business and its performance. Paradoxically, as this is a one-to-one, it will contribute to overall team performance because it will help to secure a series of individual relationships on which the team is based.
• Awaydays – teams can also be strengthened by the careful use of off-site opportunities for longer periods of undisturbed analysis and reflection. Leaving aside their precise nature and construction, they will deepen team bonds and performance by enabling outside-the-box thinking and by forging stronger personal relationships.

Pitfalls

Above all else treat your team as a team. If the team breaks down into a collection of individuals, working in different directions or competing with each other, then the necessary focus on performance delivery will be lost. Team effectiveness will most likely be imperilled if you:

• are seen to treat individuals differently;
• are seen to make decisions in apparently random sub-teams;
• fail to hold regular team meetings and other team-developing events;
• consistently ignore the advice of colleagues and apply a wholly autocratic decision-making style.

Team development is hard. Leaders will almost inevitably experience some element of the forming–storming–norming–performing cycle in the development of their leadership team. Avoiding the most obvious pitfalls demands tireless attention to the detail of team management.

Leaders’ checklist

• See your team as a group of ambassadors.
• Encourage each team member to believe and understand that in very different ways they champion customer needs.
• Set clear expectations for team behaviour, both in regular meetings and in personal relationships.
• Go out of your way to emphasise your own dependence on the specialist skills of your team.
• Encourage healthy debate, but discourage silo mentalities and partisanship.
• Remember that successful businesses are always greater than the sum of their parts, and that this depends on constructive collaboration.
• Organise periodic social events that bring team members together in a non-formal setting. Even if the talk is still about work, such gatherings help to cement relationships by removing some of the veneer of workplace personae.
• Do not allow unresolved issues between team members to fester – this will undermine the effectiveness and credibility of the team.