How to Launch a Highly Effective Leadership Team

When that doesn’t exist, people are at the mercy of politics, squeaky wheels, and HIPPOs (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion), leading to local optimization, high work in progress and task switching, and feeling lost in a sea of conflicting requests.

Organizations succeed or fail in large part based on the quality of their leadership. But most so-called “leadership teams” aren’t really teams—they’re just leaders who have meetings. In this episode, we look at why and how to launch a cross-functional leadership team so it achieves meaningful results.

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Episode transcription

Peter Green

Many so called “leadership teams” don’t have collective responsibility for a shared objective. In other words, they’re not actually teams. As author and consultant Patrick Lencioni puts it, “Teams don’t just form by themselves. They require careful, intentional effort and dedication”.

Richard Lawrence

We’ve been doing a lot of leadership team launch workshops over the last couple of years. In this episode we’re going to share what we’ve learned about helping a leadership team form into an actual, healthy, collaborative team.

Peter

Before we get into it, a reminder that this show is a free resource sponsored by the Humanizing Work company.

Humanizing Work exists to make work more fit for humans and humans more capable of doing great work. To that end, we support organizations in three areas:

  1. We help leaders lead empowered teams and individuals more effectively
  2. We help product people turn their ideas into good visions, experiments, and backlogs
  3. We help teams collaborate better to produce meaningful outcomes on complex work

Richard

So, if you or your organization would benefit from better leadership, better product management, or better collaboration, and if you find our vision for human-centric work compelling, visit the contact page on humanizingwork.com and schedule a conversation with us.

Peter

OK, on to the lessons we’ve learned from a couple years of leadership team launches…

The first lesson we’ve learned is that a compelling, shared purpose is critical for leadership teams.

For a cross-functional product team, even if you don’t do a lot of work around purpose and vision, the team can often infer the reason why it exists: We exist to build the thing that we build. Now, we still recommend crafting a strong purpose and vision for product teams, so they understand why they’re doing the work they’re doing. But lots of product teams still function well without a written purpose.

Richard

Leadership teams though, are different. It’s not obvious what makes a particular group of leaders a team. They need some reason to work together as a team. And that reason needs to be distinct from the larger purpose of the company and from the purpose of the teams the leaders lead.

This is harder than it sounds. Few leaders have ever had to get specific about their distinct contribution as a leader. Even fewer have done it for a cross-functional team of leaders.

But when you get it right, it’s suddenly clear what leaders need to do and, importantly, where they need to collaborate together to do it.

Peter

Second, we’ve seen that team boundaries matter. Leadership teams often have pretty fuzzy boundaries. It’s not clear who’s in and who’s out.

Sometimes this is because no one has really thought about it. Often, it’s really about conflict avoidance. “Jim doesn’t really need to be in these meetings, but he’s a VP and all the other VPs are included, so I guess he’s part of the team.”

Fuzzy team boundaries lead to fuzzy commitments and very inefficient meetings. It’s much better to be clear about who’s on the team, why, and what that means.

Richard

Third, it’s become clear that there are different kinds of work that leadership teams do and those require different ways of working.

In their book, Senior Leadership Teams, Ruth Wageman and J Richard Hackman describe 4 kinds of teams CEOs might assemble around themselves:

Information sharing teams are just what they sound like. They don’t do work together. They just make each other aware of what’s happening in their respective silos.

Consultative teams give advice to the CEO and to each other.

Coordination teams align their separate work but don’t directly collaborate. This is common around big initiatives like mergers.

And, finally, decision making teams collaborate to produce decisions and artifacts as a team.

Peter

In addition to C-Level teams, we often work with teams that are one level down in the organization. Like, the team leading a product line or business unit, or a team assembled to deliver on a mid-term company outcome like a merger, a strategic shift, or an emergent opportunity that crosses departments. They’re often a team of peers rather than a team supporting a CEO.

But we still see a continuum in the work from shared awareness through coordinated effort to actual collaboration.

Shared awareness can be done asynchronously. It’s about making things visible.

Coordinated effort still requires making things visible but also benefits from regular meetings to stay in sync about what each leaders’ area is doing.

Collaborative teams tend to need some kind of regular cadence of planning and review that aligns with the frequency of the change in the work. And they need dedicated time to actually work together, whether that’s making decisions or preparing strategy presentations or whatever.

Richard

Of course, many of the teams we work with are doing all three kinds of things. The big question is how much of each and what that means for their work structure.

BTW, if you listened to episode 63 that we did, about the six conditions for effective teams, which was also from Hackman and Wageman’s work, you’ll recognize that a lot of what we’ve learned here is about how the six conditions apply to this kind of leadership team.

Peter

All right. Another lesson we’ve learned is that it’s hard to protect the time for leadership team work. Leadership teams are made up of leaders with important responsibilities to their department or functional area. Contributing to cross-functional efforts takes time away from that “day job,” so team members need to be clear and dynamic in communicating to their teammates their current level of commitment to teamwork. In addition, so much of what leaders do is reactive—responding to emails and Slack notifications, putting out fires, dealing with people issues. So, it takes discipline and commitment to prioritize what’s often strategic, longer-term leadership team initiatives.

And it seems to go best when leaders delegate anything they’re not uniquely qualified or positioned to do, especially things that fall outside our 3 Jobs model. If it’s not creating clarity, increasing capability, or improving the system, and if you’re not uniquely qualified or positioned to do it, it probably should be delegated.

Richard

And unlike a member of a product team, leadership team time commitments often fluctuate over the lifespan of a team. There are times when the work of the leadership team is a top priority for everyone on the team. There are other times when departmental work takes precedence. That’s OK. But the critical thing to do is to communicate the current level of commitment to the team’s work, and then to negotiate priorities with other leaders when there’s a conflict.

Now, let’s talk about what we do in our Leadership Team Launch workshops—and feel free to steal this approach for your own teams: it works really well.

First off, we help leaders craft that compelling purpose for why they exist as a team. We test and refine that purpose with examples of work their leaders and their teams would want them to do.

We help them confirm that they have the right membership on the team, so there’s a clear boundary around the team—one group we worked with actually turned out to be two teams with two distinct purposes, not one; even though it started as one leadership team launch, it quickly turned into two.

Then we facilitate building a working agreement so team members know what’s expected of them and what they can expect of each other.

Peter

Then, we get down to the nitty gritty and figure out how the team is actually going to execute their work. Based on where they are on the teamwork continuum from shared awareness to coordinated effort to collaborative outcomes, they decide what they need to make visible, how often and when to meet, and how much time to allocate for collaborative work.

That frequently leads to a conversation about delegation. As we mentioned, leaders are already busy. How will they make space to collaborate towards the leadership team’s compelling purpose?

Of course, this is all theoretical until they actually start working—it’s a complex problem. So, teams typically build in some kind of retrospective schedule and then adjust their work systems over time.

We really like it when we’re able to support a new leadership team for at least their first quarter after a launch. There are a lot of problems that are more easily solved with an outside perspective.

Richard

This, of course, is a lot of work for busy leaders to form and to work on a leadership team. So, let’s look at a few of the benefits that we’re seeing from well-formed cross-functional leadership teams that makes it worth the effort to form and be a member of a team.

The first and most common is clarity for leaders in their role as leaders. Our 3 Jobs model helps leaders think about what’s theirs and what’s not, and keeps them out of the weeds, but it can be kind of big and abstract. There are two things we do in the leadership team launch that make it more concrete. One is hammering out that specific purpose for the leadership team. That makes it clear how they’re going to contribute uniquely as a team of leaders.

Peter

And then there’s another exercise that we do that really creates a lot of clarity for leaders.

We invite participants to brainstorm sticky notes in three concentric rings: The biggest ring, the biggest circle, is all the things we could work on.  And then, within that, we draw another circle. And this one is the things only we can accomplish (in other words, nobody else can do the things in this ring). And then, within that circle, the smallest circle on the inside is the things that only we can accomplish, and only by collaborating.

Richard

I remember one leader who, when we did that exercise, and he saw all the things that only he could do or only the LT could do collaboratively, said, “Oh, wow, I really need to delegate some of those things in that outer ring. I’m spending a lot of time there right now, and it’s keeping me from doing this other stuff, that I really should be focusing on.”

Peter

A second benefit is that establishing a cross-functional leadership team increases the organization’s ability to accomplish objectives that span departments (e.g., producing a coherent strategy).

For maintaining the status quo, running the business, it can sometimes be enough for each individual leader to focus on their department or specialty. But when a business is trying to innovate, whether that be attracting new customers, or building new products or services, or doing anything that is complex or creative, having a cross-functional team of leaders share that outcome as more important than the day-to-day work turns out to be critical.

One of our clients had a really successful hardware business dating back something like 75 years, but they were seeing more and more opportunity to provide software solutions to their customers. They had spun up software teams, and those had been operating for a while but until they formed a cross-functional leadership team, they didn’t see the software business really take off. As the CEO described it after the fact, that leadership team adopted a “probe sense respond” approach that enabled them to learn very quickly and provide clarity to the teams working on the software products. The outcome was that they far exceeded their targets for revenue, profit, and customer acquisition in their software business.

Richard

Speaking of clarity for teams…

Prioritization is a key challenge for basically every organization we work with. Different stakeholders have different perspectives about what matters. Deciding what’s actually important requires the capability to dig into that conflict of perspectives, to align on what’s important, and most importantly, to disagree, then commit, and hold each other accountable for following through on the agreement. Those are the behaviors of a high functioning team.

Peter

When that doesn’t exist, teams in that part of the organization are at the mercy of politics, or squeaky wheels, or HIPPOs (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion), and this leads to local optimization, high work in progress and task switching; just feeling lost in a sea of conflicting requests.

We helped one of our clients form a cross-functional leadership team with a mix of marketing leadership and the technology leadership that supported that marketing. Once they all started working together towards a shared purpose, they were able to see how scattered their teams were, and they could take steps to speak really clearly with one voice about what’s important to work on across all of the teams. They’re still doing a lot to try to align around that so all the teams are pulling in the same direction and so emergent work doesn’t throw teams off track, but even that effort is working better because of the leadership team’s internal alignment and clarity.

Richard

We also notice that when leadership teams are meeting together regularly, there is less of an “us vs them” dynamic across the organization because the leaders of each function identify more with their peers across functions—their fellow leadership team members. And this cascades down into each area and seems to create more alignment across the board.

We had one client where there was an ongoing conflict between finance and customer facing service teams. Finance leaders had the metrics they cared about—things like revenue recognition and profitability. Service teams’ leadership had their own metrics that mattered to them—things like customer satisfaction and responsiveness. Once the leaders started working more closely together, they were able to bridge that gap and come up with a combination of indicators that balanced short-term and long-term results. The CFO ended up teaching service teams why the numbers mattered and how they could reason about them day by day. And, when we observed daily standups for these teams, they were using both sets of metrics in conversations to figure out what to work on each day, which was really cool to see.

Peter

This reminds me of a common variation on this with mergers and acquisitions. I can think of several examples of our clients where each part of the company, the acquirer and the acquired, has their own products, customers, cultures, and processes. Often with an acquisition, there is a strategic way that the products of the two previous companies can integrate to create some kind of advantage. But this rarely goes as well as anyone had hoped.

In fact, really the only times that I can remember, that we’ve seen it go well involved the creation of a leadership team that had a common objective for success through integration. Without that, the two parts of the company just continue to operate as separate cultures, with strong incentives to keep things the way they were before.

In one example, a year after an acquisition, the original company and the acquired company were organized as separate business units. They could see how integrating some of the capabilities of those products across the two parts of the org would give them a strategic advantage over their competitors, but no matter how often the two BU leaders met to map out an integration road map, when push came to shove, they always ended up optimizing for their part of the business. Which makes total sense. Their incentives were tied to their respective business units’ performance, and while they reported to the same executive, they didn’t have any shared objective together

After yet another quarter where the integration features didn’t get prioritized, the CEO decided to form a cross-functional leadership team with a shared objective of aligning and executing around the integration strategy. Now, with a shared objective, one BU leader was willing to move some of her people over to the other leader’s teams to create that integration and let it really take off, something that never would have happened in the previous structure. The next quarter, those integrated products began taking hold in the market, and a year later were responsible for a significant percentage of new customer acquisition and a growing percentage of the company’s bottom line.

Richard

Forming a high functioning leadership team doesn’t happen by accident. There are specific conditions that need to be in place. The most important among them is the identification of that compelling purpose that unites the team. That purpose needs to be consequential, challenging, and clear to all team members. The purpose should be something that matters so much that it reinforces the priority of the leadership team’s work over the competing things that individual leaders could focus on. When leadership teams come together around a truly compelling purpose, and with good structure and agreements to organize their collaboration, we’ve seen no more powerful force for success in an organization.

Peter

The things we’ve described here in this episode are all things you could do on your own as a senior leader with your team. We’ve drawn a lot of good ideas from three books along with our own experience. We’ll share these with you:  They are Scaling Leadership by Bob Anderson and Bill Adams, The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni, and Senior Leadership Teams by J. Richard Hackman and Ruth Wageman. We highly recommend these to every senior leader, and studying these and their advice on your team will make a big difference.

Of course, there’s a lot of value from enlisting the support of people that have done this before in a lot of contexts. And of all the work we do, nothing is more rewarding or provides more impact than helping launch or re-launch a highly effective leadership team. If you could use a hand in this important work, please reach out.

 

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