Too often, 1+1 < 2
Bringing together accomplished individuals doesn’t easily translate into superior team performance. Collective leadership requires different skills than individual leadership. Moreover, these differences are often unclear and unrewarded. It’s perhaps not surprising that many senior team members default to what’s expedient in the short term, assume that their team is “pretty good,” and proceed as though good is good enough.
When “good enough” isn’t acceptable
Senior teams frequently come to accept some dysfunction as normal. The symptoms are recognizable: power struggles, slow decision-making, conflict avoidance, limited collaboration, spotty execution and mixed messages. But organizations need every advantage within reach, especially the value that a highly effective top team provides. The degree of unity and effectiveness of the top team is visible to stakeholders and cascades throughout the enterprise.
Beyond conventional solutions
Unfortunately, the typical approaches that organizations use, such as team-building offsites, don’t work very well or for very long. Too often, they occur apart from the team’s real work. Benefits usually dissipate within weeks.
Our Collective Performance work takes a different approach. We apply techniques that are routine in many domains of elite team performance but are still uncommon in business. Our approach:
- Integrates the latest rigorous evidence, such as leading research on collective intelligence
- Provides real-time, in-the-moment coaching while the senior team works together on one or more “Big Rock” priorities
- Takes place within existing meeting structures and operating rhythms, absolutely minimizing new demands on leaders’ time
- Focuses on the collective, both “at the table” and outside of the room
- Provides the option to enhance team coaching with independent learning, using our proprietary leadership development education modules
Outcomes include:
- Role clarity and priority on top team collective performance
- Genuinely shared purpose and goals
- Deliberate performance as a winning team — engaged, productive, decisive, effective
- Politics and positioning replaced by open problem solving
- Active collaboration “outside the room.”
