Leadership Team Alignment

A leadership team that is committed to achieving the greatest good for the organization is one of the most valuable assets you can have. A leadership team whose members behave as though they were competing for the last remaining crab puff at the buffet is one of the biggest drains an organization can have. Which do you have?

Simply put, a leader cannot do it all by him/herself. She or he needs to build a clearly defined team with mutual trust and respect across the board. Beyond that, leaders need a team where individual commitment to working for the good of the whole exceeds personal agendas or institutional and historical turf boundaries.

The best leadership teams have a macro level understanding of the organization and a broad leadership perspective that is concerned with more than their own division’s work and resources. Members of these teams work across boundaries, outside their own “silos,” and with others across the organization without regard to structural impediments.

These teams are committed to healthy conflict. Team members are able to both support and challenge each other in healthy ways, to disagree with each other but ultimately to support the team decision. Their group norms support engagement in healthy, positive, constructive engagement over differences, rather than passive acquiescence or aggressive attacking. And, ultimately, they are able to challenge the leader for the good of the organization.

This service might be for you if...

This service might be right for you if:

• You’re not sure if you even have a leadership team, or if it has the right members, or if others in your organization can identify them.
• More frequently than you would like, your leadership team works at cross-purposes.
• You spend a good deal of your time adjudicating disputes between leadership team members.
• The team was inherited, not selected by you.
• It is not clear that the members of your team know what your vision is or they do not align with it, or they would not prioritize the organization’s goals in the same way.
• Team members do not hold each other accountable, do not challenge the leader, do not ask each other for support, and are protective of their own areas.
• The team is much more frequently focused on day-to-day logistics than on strategic level questions.
• Your team members would not be open to giving up resources to assist other members of the team in meeting strategic organizational goals.