Creating the Highly Effective Senior Team By Peter Strupp It is surprising given the resources invested, the talent

involved, the opportunity costs at stake how many senior executive teams either have low overall effectiveness or are completely dysfunctional. It does not have to be this way. There are many different pieces to the puzzle, but if the Chief Executive Officer is ready to invest in the right processes with the right people, a highly effective senior executive team can result. The first question for the leader of the organization is whether or not a senior team is actually needed to carry out strategy. A critical approach by the top executive officer should be to see whether a senior team working together can bring out interdependencies between major internal groups to create greater customer, employee and shareholder value. A scan of the of the top operating priorities that will create greater enterprise value will show whether or not the senior team can create real value as an entity. If internal groups headed by senior team members are highly independent of each other than another coordination structure may be more appropriate than a senior team making company level decisions. Another major point to recognize is that a senior leadership team is, in several important ways, very different from traditional organizational teams. Senior leadership teams are composed of leaders who have direct operating responsibilities that require their day to day effort. Team participants are often high achievers who do not recognize the additional leadership competencies they need to work on an enterprise wide level rather than in a silo. Often there may be internal political issues such as succession which needs to be addressed. Also, often in multinationals, there are both country and parent company cultural conflicts that need to be dealt with clearly. In their book Senior Leadership Teams: What it takes to Make them Great by Ruth Wagman et al, explores several major areas that are fundamental to successful executive teams. First a real team needs to be created. This requires clear boundaries on who actually is a member. Often senior team membership is ambiguous to the wider organization. Stability within the team is also helpful in order to facilitate working effectively with each other. This can be difficult when expatriates parachute in and out of a company every two years or when local managers are headhunted at a fast rate. Some stability is required for team trust to be established and effectiveness to increase.

In addition it is the responsibility of the CEO to provide the senior team with a meaningful purpose that members can embrace. Both individual self motivational factors and a perception that participants have a high influence on organizational development is a key factor to team success. Also, senior team participants need to have decision making authority in order to know they can make a real impact. Otherwise the team is really a talk shop and participants will only revert to their profit center or functional role. Clarity of the purpose for the team is essential. What organizational areas will the team focus? What are the enterprise wide issues that need to be handled? What are the company-wide measurements that will decide success for the team? It is also important that the team have the time to debate and argue over these important issues. Time needs to be spent in a give and take environment recognizing diverse viewpoints. Picking team members who have the competencies to work on a company level is also a critical piece to success. Key competencies include having members with strategic insight, as well as the ability to supervise project managers in order to ensure strategic operating priorities are properly resourced and completed. Strategy does not work unless strategy implementation competencies exist among senior leaders. There is also the need for participants to display empathy skills in order to clearly understand other peoples perspectives and to possess integrity in putting the organizational interests first, above their own parochial concerns. One of the biggest mistakes a CEO makes is letting stay on a destructive senior team member who is actively seeking to undermine the team and the CEOs authority. These members must be removed sooner rather than later. It is important to distinguish between a team member who is oppositional, but supports the team efforts, and one who is actively undermining the authority of the team and the leader of the organization. Most CEOs regret that they did not move faster to remove a destructive team member. Senior teams require the need to have effective meeting skills with a focus on tackling high value added subjects. The credibility of senior teams is often undermined when precious time is spent discussing low level issues. The CEO can facilitate this by ensuring that the most important issues are handled first within the meeting time. Team members need to understand explicitly what their decision rights are on each issue discussed (these decision rights may vary depending on the issue). CEOs help coach the team in providing better decision making methods, rather than simply using intuition or being overly influenced by one team member without a systematic decision approach in place.

Like all effective teams, senior teams have explicit norms which are enforced by the CEO. Breaking those norms and not confronting the wrong behavior implicitly states to everyone else that it is alright to break the rules of the team. High performing senior teams are well resourced. There is an understanding of the time that needs to be invested, Information is well organized and read before meetings. The CEO cares to invest in education of the team and also recognizes his/her own need for learning. Normally team coaching is also highly recommended for a regular checkup on team health. Well run senior teams are an incredible resource for the organization. They provide direction and a mechanism for company-wide resources and results to come together. They deter against one person rule, which is a major source of company decline. The stakes of organizational success or failure normally reside in how this team is created and lead.