How well is your leadership team performing?

Welcome to the Strategic Leader newsletter! In each edition, I give you a perspective, resource (e.g. a tool, framework), and a recommendation (for a book, article, talk, service, or person).

If we haven’t met yet, thank you for joining me! You can learn a little more about me?here?and by watching this short?video.

Perspective

“I don’t have the right people in my leadership team” say many of the C-suite executives I work with.

“They’re not [decisive/creative/entrepreneurial/

representative] enough.”

It might be a first impression, as they start a new role. Or a conclusion from their performance during a critical moment – launching or buying a new business, negotiating a strategic partnership, dealing with an investigation, or responding to aggressive competitor activity.

The team lurches from crisis to crisis and struggles to generate the profitable growth expected of it. Hardly a top team others aspire to join.

The causes are obvious, especially to those outside the team:

• Tenure or political clout trumps capability: as a result, people aren’t fit for the job required of them.
• Little diversity: there isn’t representation and inclusion of people by gender and race, let alone other factors (e.g., cognitive ability, style)
• Lack of psychological safety: people don’t say what they think. It means ideas and risks stay under the surface.
• Strategic drag: the leadership capability doesn’t reflect the needs of the strategy – for example, the strategy may require more emerging markets experience and technology expertise. As a result, the “old” teams struggle to deliver the "new” strategy.
• Out of date practices: meeting frequency, agendas, formats don’t keep up with the dynamism of the business.

The leader isn’t immune either.

Their behaviour may be the root cause of the difficulties, whether due to over-confidence, insecurities, impulsiveness, narcissism, or other pathologies.

A few high-profile individuals come to mind: FTX’s Sam Bankman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes.

What does it take to develop the best possible leadership team?

Here are ten suggestions:

1. Develop a “vision board” for what you want the leadership team (teams in fact – see next point) to do and be.
2. Define and capture the capabilities?required of the teams. Map out the changes required – whether development, recruitment, promotion or leaving – to get to the desired group.
3. Create networks of leadership teams – yes there will be one at the top, but you also need teams of influential people who can guide, inform, stimulate, and agitate change, e.g., informal, authentic leaders, emerging leaders, expert groups.
4. Identify clear, specific objectives for each leadership team, coherent with outcomes for the organisation. Refresh them, according to new insight and the stage of development of the business.
5. Orientate the teams around opportunities, problems, and questions – give it work to do, avoiding it becoming a “talking shop” for a decision taken by the Chair, CEO or Founder.
6. Open the team to outside influences systematically – customers (of course!), experts, experts, emerging talent in the business. This provides both stimulus and challenge, keeping them on their toes.
7. Review performance of the teams, and individuals within them, against the requirements of the strategy. Invite critical stakeholders, such as investors, ecosystem partners, the leadership team below the C-Suite, to share their views and advice for improvements.
8. Invest in development, even in a downturn. Improve the quality of listening, decision-making, exploration (of new opportunities) in particular.
9. Learn from successes: identify pivotal decisions or discussions, draw out lessons on what went well, and embed the behaviours and practices in future interactions.
10. Develop your own personal “Board of advisors” to complement your leadership team. The people you need as experts, allies, mentors, networkers help you to do your best work, identify opportunities and risks ahead, and call you out if you're not on your A-game. It pays to be strategic about the leadership teams you need across the organisation.

Dr. Gena Cox, organisational psychologist, and executive coach, emphasises the importance of leading everyone, reminding us that

“you’re not an effective leader if you’re not leading 100% of the people in your team”

In our podcast conversation – listen here – she talks about how to tackle biases, and why leadership shouldn’t be special or different for people who don’t come from the majority group.

Resource

Regular readers of this newsletter know that I admire (and work with) visual artists. I’m regularly amazed by their creativity, clarity of thought, and simplicity of expression. Liz Fosslien is one of the best. She shares her portfolio of images here, which are great to use in projects, presentations and social media. I’m delighted to say that she’ll be a future guest on my podcast. I particularly liked this image about conversation patterns in teams - how true!

If you’re looking to create your own vision board, try this canvas.

Recommendation

It’s rare to have two eminent strategic thinkers on the same stage and debating topics properly; they don’t want to share the limelight or subject themselves to challenge.

Martin Reeves, Chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, convened Roger Martin and Prof. Rita McGrath, two of the heavyweights in the world of strategy, to debate whether competitive advantage is more or less sustainable today, whether it has shifted in nature and whether it will shift prospectively. It’s a fascinating, insightful, and important discussion. Listen here.

Wishing you well, and thanks for subscribing,

David.

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