Your senior team can be the key driver of innovation and business growth… if they truly operate as a team.
When a senior team is aligned on a future vision and ensures that the work of their teams and departments is joined-up and connected across the company, it improves efficiency, provides space for more value creation and ensures they are well-prepared to respond quickly to emerging challenges.
All major factors in sustaining and achieving ongoing success.
But it can be challenging to make this happen in practice. Many organisations miss critical opportunities to get their senior team working as a well-oiled machine. Instead siloes emerge, bottlenecks and confusion occur, and at worst, this leads to conflict and unhealthy competition that slows progress.
Here are five key areas to focus on to develop a high-performing senior team that drives measurable results.
Building alignment
The foundation of any strong senior team culture is alignment, ensuring every team member has a common understanding of the company’s strategy, and contributes to its future direction by sharing their own, and their teams’, insights, knowledge and expertise.
This alignment is achieved through structured and focused discussions to establish clarity, set goals and create agreement around practical actions.
CASE STUDY: Here’s how we achieved a 46% increase in alignment for this senior team.
Strengthening cohesion
A high-performing senior team develops a strong trust, good relationships and open communication. There is a clear team identity and understanding of how it enables company growth. Each person understands and respects the expertise of every other senior team member and the work they oversee.
This requires both self-awareness of individual contributions and curiosity about others’, and open discussions to identify commonalities, differences and how the team can utilise them.
Establishing good communication
With a clear understanding of their collective responsibility, a senior team can then identify what information they need from each other to be effective. They can outline the frequency and type of discussions – both operational and strategic – that support effective decision-making and maintain momentum. This clarity enables them to identify opportunities for collaboration and to create value within and across their teams.
Creating systems by design
Smart senior teams consider what they need to put in place to operate at their best. They are deliberately proactive about designing systems and processes that support alignment and decision-making, provide visibility of key information, track progress and keep them collectively accountable.
Responding to change
With open communication and trust, high-performing senior teams can be agile and responsive in an uncertain and changing environment. They can mobilise quickly to solve problems, identify resources across their teams and take rapid action. They trust each other to experiment and take small risks to stay relevant. As a result, they continue to learn together and strengthen their effectiveness as a team.
Developing your senior team as a true collaborative unit with a strong identity has an impact throughout the entire organisation. It trickles down to the teams and departments they lead, creates a more consistent experience for employees, and ensures more alignment, trust, clarity and shared purpose across the business.
It’s a valuable investment that results in a more resilient and responsive business.
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