4 Strategic Responsibilities Of Successful Leadership Teams
Tony Gambill
Leadership Development | Executive Coach | Speaker | FORBES Contributor | Author
Leadership teams have a unique role because, in addition to each team member having responsibility for their respective team's success, they have a more strategic set of shared responsibilities to ensure the organization's success. An effective leadership team is critical because they are the only ones who have the authority to make implement strategic goals, allocate resources, build synergies across functions, and create collective accountability to enable the organization to grow, adapt, and evolve to better serve its vision and mission.
Too often, leadership teams spend most of their time together sharing general updates, addressing day-to-day issues, and creating space for employees and projects to get leadership exposure. These activities are valuable and necessary, just not at the expense of accomplishing their most strategic tasks. The best leadership teams continually prioritize their time and energy to ensure they deliver on these?4 Key Responsibilities Of Great Leadership Teams.
1) Providing Strategic Direction
?A common purpose, values, goals, and priorities give the organization its identity and direction. These commonalities unite the organization's daily efforts to advance its shared goals. The leadership team has responsibility for providing clarity of "who we are, "what we do," and "how we do it." This foundational clarity enables an environment where employees can collectively focus on pursuing the organization's most important goals. Research shows that highly effective organizations share a common vision, are clear on their purpose, live their values, and link strategy and actions to serving this vision and mission.
An organization's strategic goals should be broad and future oriented. These goals focus on scalability, creating culture, building strategic partnerships, innovation, developing new capacities, solving big emerging problems, and creating opportunities for future growth.
??)?Aligning Strategic Resources?
The leadership team is responsible for ensuring everyone has a clear picture of who is accountable for what, the extent of each group's authority, and how the organization must work together at the highest levels to accomplish common goals. In addition, they are responsible for ensuring the organization has the functional structures and talent in place to deliver on their strategic priorities.
If done correctly, this sets up managers and teams to create a direct alignment with the vision, mission, organizational values, and strategic goals. Aligned resources and clear expectations help instill focus and accountability, so everyone executes on the vision daily. Leadership teams must ensure that their organization's ongoing efforts and resources align with your overall strategy, or they will not achieve their long-term goals.
Great leadership teams continually focus on the following alignment practices.
3) Problem-Solving Key Issues
The best leadership teams are great at problem-solving. Resolving critical issues that get in the way of accomplishing strategic goals should be the central component of a leadership team's recurring meeting focus. Below are best practices for teams that excel with inclusive problem-solving to ensure strategic goals stay on track.
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4) Living the Values
One of the biggest mistakes leadership teams can make is thinking that shared values are nice to have rather than an all-important necessity. The truth is that shared values are vital to helping employees find purpose at work and improving employee well-being, motivation, retention, and performance. Organizations that connect with employees and build community through a defined set of shared values create a culture where employees feel valued, heard, and capable of doing their best work.
The leadership team is responsible for ensuring the organization is diligent in selecting, promoting, rewarding, and holding accountable their leaders to live the values in their day-to-day actions and decision-making. There is nothing more disparaging for employees than having a leader that demonstrates behaviors that do not align with their values, and no one seems to care.
Conclusion
The best leadership teams understand that their highest calling is to build a culture that enables employees to feel heard, valued, and capable of doing their best work in pursuit of the organization's vision and mission. Successfully fulfilling these 4 Key Responsibilities allow leadership teams to evolve, scale, and grow their organizations during good and challenging times.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:?Tony Gambill is the President of ClearView Leadership, an innovative leadership and talent development consulting firm helping organizations, executives, and managers bring their best leadership selves to their most challenging situations. He is the author of,?Getting It Right When It Matters Most: Self-Leadership For Work & Life . You can also follow Tony on?Forbes?Leadership Strategy ?to read his articles on Self-Leadership and Leading Others.
Divisional Manager at Linked VA
1 年A nurturing and supportive culture will bring the best out of everyone!
Attorney At Law at CIVIL COURT CASES
1 年Love this
Master & Advanced Levels Certified Developmemt Project Manager (CDPM-III?)
1 年Dear Tony, Many thanks for sharing very helpful and contemporary article on Strategic Responsibilities of Successful Leadership Teams.Its pretty sure that the leadership teams need to have and exercise the DAC model on their day to day responsibilites for success.Giving the direction ( inculcating organization's or projects's vision) among teams,engaging in aligning the resources and responsibilities of teams towards vision and ensuring every team members to be committed ...are responsibilities of successful leadership.
TEDx Speaker | Co-National Director with Potential Project cultivating a more human world of work | Organisational Transformation | Leadership Effectiveness | Business Strategy | Cultural Change | Keynote Speaker
1 年Great article. Thanks for sharing!