Collective Leadership for Executive Teams
Executive teams usually comprise smart people, but they often don’t work together in ways that leverage their potential shared brainpower.
How well does your executive team utilise the combined intelligence that it’s members potentially bring? In my experience, a likely answer “is not too well”. Executive teams usually comprise smart people, but they often don’t work together in ways that leverage their potential shared brainpower.
This is a risk because achieving outcomes in areas such as customer responsiveness, innovation, quality, empowerment and ensuring psychological safety requires high calibre collective leadership at the top.
I can help your executive team jointly practise leadership – as well as management – to better clarify and achieve core goals for your organisation.
I meet with your team – either virtually or face to face – in a series of meetings over several months. We practice different ways of opening-up and making sense of critical challenges, especially strategic challenges, for your group.
The sessions include some workshop-style activities and input but primarily they are working sessions. The focus is on the executive group practising leadership-oriented action in engaging on crucial challenges.
Program Outcomes
- Suitably balance attention to strategic/emerging issues and more routine, current matters
- Focus on leadership-oriented responses to challenges, without over-reliance on technical solutions
- Be able to utilise differences of perspective and conflict as a resource, rather than them being an impediment to action and change
- Practice inquiry to explore different perspectives and test interpretations
- Have group members expressing themselves confidently but in a manner that invites inquiry – e.g. being willing to share data that underpins their views while minimising their own defensiveness
- Emphasise the conduct of trials and experiments, and reflecting on outcomes to inform further action
- Collaborate with others outside the executive to build shared understandings and foster action
- Promote collective leadership at other levels of the organisation.
To find out more about developing your executive team’s collective leadership effectiveness, contact me for an obligation-free chat.