While much attention is placed on individual CEOs, it is the collective leadership of the executive team that truly transforms organisations. Our research, “The Unspoken Life of Executive Teams,” gets beneath the surface of the team experience to understand how they can be supported to have a meaningful impact.
Key Findings
- The Triple Challenge: Executive teams are currently facing a “triple challenge”: delivering immediate performance, leading transformation, and answering existential questions about their organisation’s role in society (such as the climate emergency and social justice).
- The Burden of Responsibility: The weight of expectations from all directions often exceeds a team’s capacity to cope. This can lead to exhaustion, “crisis mode” thinking, and a narrowing of attention that prevents strategic leadership.
- Fragmentation Under Pressure: Contextual pressures can cause teams to “separate along fault lines,” retreating into functional silos or functional identities rather than acting as a collective.
- Surfacing the Unspoken: Teams often avoid difficult choices by maintaining a “polite” surface. Success depends on the team’s ability to work through their ambivalences and speak to what is implicit but unsaid.
Methodology
This inquiry took a systemic “outside-in” and “inside-out” position. We conducted interviews with CEOs and executives, observed teams in action during consulting projects, and held a roundtable inquiry with 30 senior leaders and practitioners.
Recommendations
- Create punctuation points for the team. Given the myriad of forces that are pulling teams apart, we observed how important it is for teams to create protected spaces for themselves. These provide opportunities for them to reflect on events, stand back from the immediate pressures and review how they are working together.
- Clarify the role and desired impact. Executive teams benefit from clarifying the challenges they need to confront and taking time to agree on how they will add value over the longer term. One framework for doing this is the Three Horizons Model.
- Be mindful around where the team’s attention is directed. It is important for teams to be mindful of where time and attention it is focused. The real test for a team is to maintain the ability to move attention across different time horizons when they are under pressure.
- Ask the difficult questions around purpose and impact. If executive teams are going to make a difference, they need to be asking themselves difficult questions around purpose and impact.
- Invest in relationships and building support. Given the tendency for people to hold unrealistic expectations of leaders, it helps leadership teams to make specific and explicit agreements with different stakeholder groups. These need to be revisited on a regular basis given the rate and degree of change.
- Support risk-taking in speaking openly and directly. Our research highlights that teams are more effective when their members take risks to express themselves and their points of view. In our experience, leaders create trust by speaking clearly and directly with their teams and supporting individuals who take a risk to say something difficult.
- Work through ambivalences and doubts. Leadership teams need to take time to explore their emotional life whilst they are working together. Pausing to notice their doubts, fears or hopes helps them to recognise how their emotions influence their dynamics, decisions, and acts of leadership.
Interested in Metalogue’s approach to executive team development? Find out more here.
