Getting the most from your Senior Leadership Community

Most of the time on this podcast, I’m talking about the Executive Leadership Community and their need for collective enterprise leadership to help their organisation adapt in a disruptive world.

There’s often a necessary condition of an executive team releasing themselves from day-to-day functional tasks. Because if strategy execution and operational excellence is delegated, who is it delegated to? Well, it’s those functional heads and business unit leads who report in the C-suite. I’ll call them here the Senior Leadership Community and I’ll explain why in a bit.

So, we know that it’s vitally important that this cohort of leaders exercise their full leadership responsibilities both individually and collectively. But how to optimise the performance of this group seems to be a perennial issue in many organisations that has proven very difficult to solve.

How can you make your senior leadership cohort more than the sum of its parts?

And how do you maximise the potential of this group for the benefit of the entire organisation? Making it more dynamic, resilient and focused on ensuring the successful implementation of your strategy?

Success looks different in different organisations. Context matters, and no one size fits all.

In this episdoe we explore the conundrum of the Senior Leadership Community and outline some of the ways to resolve it

The challenge as I see it, sits two separate by very much connected, areas.

How do you strucutre your SLC in such a way that the people within it work interdepdently to make a greater contribution to the business?

Are these leaders expected to contribute beyond their functional / business unit responsibility?

And how do you make what is sometimes an amorphous group of people a well functioning team?

This is the structural challenge.

Then…

How do you unlock of the potential of the people in your SLC to meet the unique challenges of the level of leadership they are operating at?

How can this group step fully into their senior leadership role so that they free up executive leaders from the functional and operational?

What capacities do you need in this group of leaders? How are these capacities cultivated, recognised, promoted, and rewarded in your organisation?

This is the development challenge.

So, there’s a structural challenge and the development challenge in getting the very best from your senior leadership community.

In Waldencroft, we believe that structural issue and the development issue are thoroughly intertwined.

And we often envisage them in the shape of a double helix like the structure of DNA, consisting of two intertwined strands that resemble a twisted ladder. Each is essential to the other.

In biology, the double helix isn’t just a structural novelty; it plays a vital role in ensuring the accurate transmission of genetic information from one generation to the next. And likewise, the double helix in your senior leadership community where one strand is represented by how that cohort of leader is structured and what they exist for  and the other is how you develop them, are both essential for the transmission and execution of the organisational capacities that you need from these leaders.

However, if this double helix is predicated on both the structure and the development being unique to your organisational and strategic context, then it stands to reason that one size doesn’t fit all. You can’t just look at see what another organisation that you respect tis doing and say, ‘let’s do that’. And I see this very often. But it usually ends in quite unsatisfactory outcomes because it doesn’t quite fit.

Let me explain this with a story of a client of ours on the structural side of the challenge.

A technology firm that operated across the UK and Norther Europe experienced the challenges that results from a poorly functioning senior leadership team.

The Executive Team had agreed on the need for them to get out of day-to-day execution and focus on helping the organisation adapt in a rapdily chaging world. As you know, what we call Collective Enterprise Leadership.

And they were making good progress in this. But there was a problem.

Every time they tried to fully step up into their enterprise responsiblities, they seemed to get pulled back to operational matters because the senior leadership team wasn’t taking the reigns on executing the strategy and delivering operational excellence. So the executive team found themselves sending too much time in their functional areas and not enough time on their enterprise responsibilities.

In this instance, the senior leadership community was made up of well meaning and competent leaders…

Just an aside, sometime we see a reticence in the executive team to take up their enterprise role because they say the senior leadership community isn’t ready or able … and sometimes that simply not the case.

But in this instance, the executive team wanted them to step up and these senior leaders said they wanted to step up. But when the rubber hit the road, there was some block in them taking this on. The sypmtoms were they weren’t aligned to the strategy. They didn’t quite know what it meant in making the tough decisions that are involved in shifting direction and saying a definitive no to some things and a definiitve yes to others. Added to this was a lack of clarity about what their areas of collective responsibility or accountability were. So they kept directing things upwards to the executive team.

Because they weren’t a unified team, they often worked at cross purposes, and there were poor team dynamics, with back-bitting and in-groups and out-groups. Important business information wasn’t shared with each other in a timely way that would enable them to tackle pan-organisational problems.

The team was made up of 28 people – much too large for standard around-the-table meetings. Yet the theatre style meetings that the company had adopted resulted in a lack of participation from the senior leaders. Innovation was being stiffled and the team didn’t see themselves are part of a team.

Putting a group of leaders together under one title doesn’t make them a team.

What are the conditions that need to be in place for your senior leadership community to become a senior leadership team?

From our research and experience, there are four things that are absolutely necessary.

Clarity of team purpose

The most basic challenge to the effectiveness of a senior leadership community is a lack of a compelling and consequential purpose of what the SLC actually is.

Leaders at this level are usually very clear on their indivdidual accountabilities and those of the teams they lead. But without collective outcomes and collective tasks for the SLC, these leaders are more likely to focus on their own area and miss the opporunity for strategic alignment and cross functional collaboration.

When the SLC’s purpose is weak, such as a communication forum, a learning community or a place for occassional collaboration, organisations miss the upsides of a pro-active problem solving, interdependent decision making and timely risk mitigation.

When the SLC’s purpose is strong, this community of leaders appropriately manage the day-to-day operational functioning of the business, involving executive team members at the right time and enabling them to focus on organisational renewal and adaptation.

Requiste levels of accountability

There is often misalignment between the C-suite and the SLC where senior leaders either do not receive enough support from the C-suite, or alternatively are micromanaged by them. When this is the case, leadership responsibility continues to sit within the wrong strata in the organisation.

As the size of the leadership team grows, the complexity of leadership roles also increases and so its necessary that all strata in the organsation is clear and has the capability for the decision-making authoirty that they hold.

This starts with the C-suite in stepping into their collective enterprise leadership. But they are constrained in doing this by the capability, capacity and willingness of the SLC to step fully into leading the functional and operational responsiblities of the business.

In larger groups, there can be ambiguity around decision-making authority, especially if the lines between individual responsiblities and collective decision making are blurred.

Well-managed team dynamics

When roles, responsibilities, incentives and rewards are all focused towards individual contribution, your senior leadership community have few reasons to step into collaborative and interdependent ways of working.

This results in poor team dynamics where sernior leaders fail to resolve challenges effectiveley resulting in ineffective problem solving. Unaddressed interpersonal dynamics that get in the way of meeting wider corporate goals.

Social loafing and diffusion of responsibility is a phenomenom often seen in large leadership groups where some leaders put in less effort because they can – it goes relatively unnoticed. Add to this that the discussion can become unwieldy and it can be challenging for everyone to contribute meaningfully.

Trust and cohesion are citical elements for successful collabortion in leadership teams, but these are harder to establish in large groups. Building trust requires meaningful interpersonal interactions, which become less freqent as group size increases. Without strong trust, it is challenging for the group to develop a share purpose beyond functional responsibilities.

Appropriate working forums

SLC forums fail to achieve what they set out to, especially when they’re structured in exactly the same way as other organisational meetings.

In smaller groups, people tend to seek connection and in creating a trusting enviornment. Large groups, in contrast, often trigger a fight-or-flight response, driving survival-driven actions. It’s therefore crucial to design the SLC gatherings in a way that’s appropriate for the size, make up and critically, the purpose, of the group.

If you’ve got more about about 12 people it’s no longer possible to have a meeting, you’re having an event!

Poor design leads to a lack of collaborative agility where there are no mechanisms to collectively spot and effectively deal with failures to leverage the diversity of perspectives needed to respond to new challenges and capitalise on new opportunities.  Groupthink and homogeneity can also be a factor in larger groups despite their more diverse memebers. Large group dynamics make it harder to challenge dominant viewpoints or having subtle, meaningful conversations about where change can be effectived.

What your organisation needs from your senior leadership community will be unique to you. Your organisation’s size, whether you are a geographically dispersed or a co-located team, the role and purpose of your Executive Team, the context your business operates in and the nature of the strategic challenges that you face, will all play a role in determining the best design for you.

And it may be that this cohort of leaders isn’t a team at all … and that there shouldn’t be any requirement to make them.

If you work with project boards, operational review boards or some other mechanims to get things done, you may feel that trying to make your senior leadership community and senior leadership team is just not a priority for you. And that’s okay too.

Just be up front about that. It’ll save you a lot of time!

That’s because one of the things we see time and again, is how issues of status and in-group and out-group dynamics are at play at this level. Many organisations say they have a senior leadership team – and then there’s a lot of background noise and energy about how is on it and off it – even though IT doesn’t actually DO anything.

This is such an energy drain in an organisation.

This may be an accepable price to pay if you truly want your SLC to be an SLT.

But if they don’t do anything collective by way of leadership anyway, what’s the point of calling it something that it isn’t? Why give yourself all that grief?

Survely it’s better to say, this is a senior leadership community, don’t be too specific about who or what they are, and get the work of senior leadership done through whatever structural mechanisms are in place to operationalise the strategy in your business. Be it sub committees, pillar boards, project boards or whatever you call it.

But if you do need more from this cohort of leaders – if you need them to champion the strategy, and to cohere the organisational culture by role modeling acceptable norms and behaviours then you may decide a team is what you need.

Once you’ve created this team, then its essential that the people on it are developed in a way that matches what’s expected of them.

If you expect the leaders in your senior leadership community to be able to collectively make sense of a rapidly changing stakeholder enviornment, then you must development the leadership fluency in dialogue and sensemaking to tune in to what they’re experiencing.

If you want these leaders to make decisions which don’t just pay lip service to your values, but fully embody them, even when it means making tough decisions about profit or growth, then they need a leadership fluency around ethics.

Our research on Developing Leadership Fluency at this levels demonstrates that it’s often on the basis of a leaders’ worldview, values, and where they experience themselves as competent that fluency is required.

By the time your senior leaders reach this level, the last thing they usually need is more technical training.

We’ve just been developing a White Paper on the double helix of senior leadership communities, called “Helix:– Balancing Structure and Development for Organisational Success“.

If you’d like to receive a copy of this White Paper and the chance to talk about it with us, follow the link in the shownotes.