The organisational peak is a perilous environment. It is more complex and challenging than anything that has gone before. And consequently, both executive tenure and corporate longevity are decreasing. To survive and thrive at the perilous peak, executive leaders need to balance their functional leadership, a focus on execution with enterprise leadership, that is ensuring the organisation adapts in our new world. That is what we will be exploring in the Advanced Executive Leadership podcast. Welcome. I’m your host Jacqueline Conway. I’m the Founder and Managing Director of Walden Croft, a consulting practice dedicated to helping Executives and Executive teams anticipate, navigate and lead at the perilous peak.
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Whether you’re a CEO leading an executive team or a Chief People Officer with responsibility for the development and functioning of your exec or a member of an exco, keen to learn what the best executives are focused on, then you’ve come to the right place. The podcast is a combination of interviews with exceptional CEOs leading their executive teams through disruption and turbulence and Chief People Officers who are commissioning the type of work to really develop executive teams towards enterprise leadership.
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What you get from this podcast is really cutting edge ideas and tactics about how your executive team can improve its collective performance for the good of the enterprise. I’m going to show you how the best executive leaders and teams are doing executive leadership differently from the vast majority, there was an old way of doing executive leadership that has really been surpassed in recent years, and yet most executive teams haven’t yet caught up with that.
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Now our stance on executive leadership is that most executive leaders, and by extension the entire team, remain overly focused on their functional responsibilities. By that we mean looking in and down into the organisation in the here and now so they’re focused on functional day-to-day execution types of issues.
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Of course, this is a completely necessary and important part of an executive role, but when it’s all the executive is doing, they are missing the area where they can add greatest value to the organisation and that is really their enterprise responsibilities.
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Their enterprise responsibility is, in contrast, looking up and out. It moves away from the day-to-day towards a much broader and longer time horizon, it’s looking at the there and then and it’s asking who do we need to be? What is the legacy of this organisation? and how do we respond to the disruption? And how in fact do we get ahead of that disruption? Enterprise leadership is really looking at things like nonlinear risk, ethical decision making, how do we really want to make decisions for the good of the organisation under intense scrutiny by stakeholders who have a greater line of sight to our decision making than ever before.
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looking at things like strategic foresight, are we really looking at what’s coming down the line? Not just in this quarter or this year, but really in the next 3, 5, 10, 20 years time for the organisation.
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And it’s really a place for the executive team to focus on organisation culture. Who do we want to be? What do we stand for? rather than doing that as a sort of accidental by-product it becomes a central role for an executive team focused on their enterprise responsibilities. Over the course of the podcast, therefore I’ll take you through the specific processes that exceptional leaders and exceptional executive teams are working on, and we’ll break them down into tactics and strategies.
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And so why me? I am the founder and managing director of Waldencroft and we are absolutely dedicated to transforming the impact and effectiveness of executive teams. I have a PhD in executive leadership which I gained over a number of years in observation with some very high profile and interesting executive teams. During that time, and since in my day-to-day work with CEOs and their executive teams, I have created a methodology that really condenses down the conditions that are best placed to improve the effectiveness of executive teams. It’s called the Integrative Framework of Team Effectiveness and I’ll be sharing some of the specifics of that framework over the next few episodes.
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I’m also the creator of Waldencrofts Zenith Programme, which is really a distillation of the very best processes and methods for developing executive teams in their collective enterprise leadership. And again, I’ll be sharing some of the content of Zenith so that you can put that to use practically in your own team. So welcome to the podcast. I hope you get a lot of benefit from it.
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I’m really looking forward over the coming weeks and months of sharing some of these really interesting conversations with chief executives who are grappling with fairly intense disruption in their industries, and the ways that they and their executive teams are tackling them. And in the solo episodes that I’ll be bringing they are much more tactically focused on the things that you can be doing now to improve the impact of your executive team.
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Thank you for joining me. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if there’s anything you would like me to cover off.
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