Designing Your Senior Leadership Team
Does your business have the leadership it needs to deliver the vision you’ve created?
Does your business have the leadership it needs to deliver the vision you’ve created?
With the pace of change today, the requirements of leadership roles and executive teams are changing, fast.
Operating in a turbulent, high-tech, hybrid-remote world means finding the sweet spot between stability and responsiveness. It means having fresh diverse perspectives on your Board, and the latest skills that can adapt to your changing business strategy.
And just like the other areas of your business that require regular strategic review, leadership is no exception.
A solid executive leadership strategy isn’t simply about roles, structure, and who does what.
The leadership that you have in place sets the tone for your entire business; internally and externally. The way you work together, the values and principles that you uphold, and the image you collectively create are critical.
Far too often, however, executive team design stops at the point the team is in place and responsibilities are assigned.
Ask yourself; when was the last time your executive team deep-dived into how you work together, the values you agree to uphold, and how you want to be perceived?
And would you all share the same language and understanding if you checked in today?
The challenge is that creating a strong, resilient, and flexible executive team doesn’t happen by chance.
Whilst you might, over time, find a way to naturally work together, intentionally designing what your business needs will accelerate the process and build a significant strategic advantage.
During the course of my career, I’ve learned there are eight vital areas to consider when reviewing and designing your business’s leadership needs; and these now underpin my work helping leaders create and hone their executive teams.
Executive Leadership Strategy Model
To review your leadership strategy, a useful approach is to explore each of these areas through three different timeframes;
Looking back and learning from your past position and experiences
Assessing where you are now
Identifying what’s needed in the future
To help you do that, you can find a set of three thought provoking prompts below.
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1. Past
The last three years have been some of the most eventful and pressured in recent decades; rich in challenge and rich in learning.
Some of the things you did as a collective leadership team will have worked well for your business. Perhaps you were able to take quick decisions and put them into play quickly. Or perhaps the principles that you agreed to share proved paramount to your success.
But maybe some things didn’t go as you’d envisaged. Maybe your communications were misinterpreted or perhaps in hindsight, you didn’t communicate enough. Some things that you planned didn’t work, and other things that you didn’t plan, unexpectedly proved successful.
Each of your executive team has different perspectives and experiences so pool your insights and learnings; the Success and Expectations Grid below is a useful tool to help you.
Ask yourself:
Which areas of the eight areas of your leadership model gave you what the business needed?
What specifically worked well and why?
What didn’t and what were the factors that led to that?
2. Present
Take a moment to review where you currently are against each of the eight areas in the Executive Leadership Strategy Model.
Capture where you are now, as well as what’s working well today and what’s not.
But don’t rely on your own perspectives. Check-in with those you lead, stakeholders, and trusted external peers and ask for their feedback, not just individually but on the performance of your leadership team.
How is your leadership team or Board perceived by those around you?
What do people hope to get from you and what do they avoid bringing to you? Why?
What blind spots do they see that you don’t? What strengths do they see in you that you can capitalise on further?
3. Future
Look to your business strategy to give you direction for the values, behaviours, and culture that you’ll need in your leadership against each of the eight elements.
No leadership team will look exactly the same and your leadership will need to be aligned with the future you want to create.
For example, your business’s executive team may not need a CMO or a CDO. But what you may need, if you’re expanding globally and remotely, is significantly increased cultural sensitivity amongst leaders, as well as highly adaptable communication skills/practices.
Setting out clearly what your business needs from your leadership to deliver your future strategy will give you the foundations to start scoping a plan to get there.
But don’t wait before putting your team in place; get the leadership team that you’ll need in the future, ready now.
They will be the ones who help you get there.
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