Setting a leadership team up to succeed
Determining The Challenge
I was approached by a CEO who was new the organisation and wanted to prepare the senior team to tackle some difficult decisions over the coming months. She told me that she wanted to bring the team together right at the start and make sure that they were all “on the same page”.
The CEO knew that the team were going to have to lead the organisation through a tough time and wanted to ensure they were able to support each other and their own teams through the upcoming changes.
Deciding What Was Needed
I worked with a couple of members of the team to design a programme that would create some time for the team to reflect on what they wanted to achieve, and how could best work together through the challenges ahead.
We wanted to develop a process that could be replicated with the different teams across the organisation, and yet met the specific needs of each team.
Delivering the Action Plan
The team development programme was delivered to senior team over 4 months.
It included four half-day sessions with the full team to agree their shared purpose, their priorities as a leadership team and how they needed to work together and behave with each other going forward.
Team members were also offered individual coaching to help them think about how they could prepare and support their own teams through the changes ahead.
The feedback from the programme was overwhelmingly positive. I still coach leaders within the organisation and they tell me that the work we did in those early days formed a really solid basis for them to have robust conversations with each other, hold one another to account and understand how they can support each other.
“Putting in the work in those early days means that we’re all really clear what we’re aiming for, and can challenging each other helpfully when someone is veering off course”