When the leadership team is the problem

A new CEO inherits a leadership team. In most cases, what they actually inherit is a group of functional heads who have learned to operate independently, escalate decisions upward, and protect their own territory. That is not a leadership team. That is a collection of individuals who happen to report to the same person.

Getting that group to operate as the team that runs the business is one of the most consequential things a new CEO can do. It is also one of the hardest, because the people involved are senior, experienced, and often convinced they are already doing it.

This is where I come in.

What the work involves

Being the Leadership Team is a workshop that addresses how the team operates together. Research shows that a group of people working together will always arrive at a better solution than the smartest person in the room working alone.* Most leadership teams never fully leverage this. When a problem arises in one function, the functional head tries to solve it alone. This workshop changes that. The team agrees how to work together, what group and individual behavioural change is required, and builds the charter that makes the shift from a group of functional heads to the team that runs the business.

Leading my Function addresses a practical reality: every member of the leadership team is already fully occupied. Nobody has spare capacity. In order to spend more time operating as a leadership team, each member has to free up time from leading their function. That means developing their direct reports and building the capability at the level below them, so that work can be migrated down the organisation.

Leadership Team Coaching is a proprietary process I developed over 25 years of working with leadership teams. A structured one-hour, four-phase group coaching session in which the team coaches itself around a real business challenge brought by one member. Fast, efficient, and genuinely useful; it combines coaching, mentoring and peer insight in a forum that most organisations do not have. I lead sessions over a six to nine month period and simultaneously teach the team to facilitate the process themselves, so they can continue independently long after the engagement ends. This is a capability build, not a dependency.

* Laughlin et al., 2006. Summarised in Robert Cialdini, Yes!