Senior Team Development
We believe the world’s best executives often struggle to perform at their best when in a team environment. Our Senior Team Development solutions focus on the challenges and skills of leading at the highest levels of business by helping leaders increase their external orientation and improve their ability to deal with dilemmas, influence their peers, and integrate the business.
CASE
STUDY
The leadership team of a Fortune 100 company was perceived as critical, disengaged and far too internally-focused. Learn how we helped them elevate their leadership and become a true team.
THE CHALLENGE
How do you get great individuals to be a great leadership team?
The CEO of a Fortune 100 company was our longtime client. We’d worked with him to transition into the role of CEO, then returned to help him with a new challenge.
As he considered his legacy, he realized that he had the right executive team in place; a group that was incredibly bright, ambitious, and hardworking. But there was a problem. Despite their unambiguous individual talents, their meetings were a place where innovations went to die.
Leadership team red-flags:
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Meetings were boring report-outs, rather than strategic problem-solving sessions.
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The organization as a whole perceived the senior leaders as disengaged and critical.
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Direct reports dreaded bringing ideas to senior leaders, who spent much of their time listing what was wrong with any given proposal.
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Senior meetings devolved into turf wars and individuals advocating for pet projects or their own agendas.
The company leaders had been in this culture for so long they couldn’t even see it as a problem, it was just how things had always been.
The CEO was understandably frustrated that his senior leaders didn’t take more responsibility for the whole business and seemed unable to come up with innovations to increase the company’s competitiveness.
He realized that the executive team members were so invested in their internal focus and culture of critique that it had stifled innovation organization-wide. He invited EDC in to help the team change and become more future-focused and concerned with improving the business as a whole.
THE SOLUTION
Learn the unique tools senior leaders need to succeed
This was a leadership problem that couldn’t be solved with a simple offsite. Just like a professional sports team needs regular practice to stay at the top of their game, world-class business leaders need to invest in developing their skills over time. We designed a journey to help an executive team work better together while also improving the leadership skills of each team member. Our work with the team involved:
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Met with the full team three times over six months. We created workshops where the team learned new frameworks and addressed their real business challenges, so sessions felt more like a great business meeting than a dry lecture.
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In between group meetings, met with each leader individually. Individual coaching held everyone accountable for their role in changing the group dynamic.
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Normalized that senior teams often face conflict and tension due to the very nature of their work. Exercises like establishing a common goal don’t serve senior leaders well. Senior leaders don’t have a common goal—they’re in constant negotiation for resources and have to resolve differing perspectives on how to grow the business.
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Emphasized that leadership at the highest level requires different tools than the ones that serve most teams. The work of a senior leadership team is to manage unsolvable problems, not to come up with solutions. Sorting out the best strategy among many flawed options and making difficult trade-offs is what the organization needs from their senior leaders.
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Brought in a futurist to work with the team on looking forward in their industry. The exercise helped the team develop a shared understanding of the challenges they’d likely have to face together.
THE IMPACT
A team that champions innovation
The team experienced a profound transformation. Instead of seeing their value as “problem-finders,” they developed an understanding of what their role actually was: to focus on the long term future; to be more strategic and champion innovation; to have productive conflict about how best to move the business forward and to take smart risks together. They created a narrative around the decisions they were making and how they mutually saw the role of the business in the future.
The other result? The rest of the organization started to view them as engaged leaders ready to take the company into the future.
Meet the Team
Stacey Philpot
For over 20 years, Dr. Stacey Philpot has advised some of the world’s most admired companies on how to use leadership development to accelerate growth and increase their competitive advantage. Her work has helped companies such as Apple, Bristol Myers Squibb, General Mills, Harley Davidson, Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan Chase, Nike, PayPal, and Time Warner. Stacey received her doctorate in Organizational Psychology from Rutgers University. Her doctoral research explored how early family experiences influence women’s career expectations and selection of work roles.
Adam Ortiz
Dr. Adam Ortiz is particularly known for his work assessing executives and assisting them to develop core leadership, self-management, and communication skills. His perspective has evolved over the last 20 years through working with leaders across a wide range of Fortune 500 companies including American Express, Bank of America, BlackRock, Johnson & Johnson, Nike, Thomson Reuters, and Time Warner. Adam received his doctorate in Counseling Psychology from the University of St. Thomas. He is a licensed Psychologist in the state of Minnesota.
Widely experienced.
Specifically creative.
Ron Meeks
For the past 20 years, Ron has guided and supported global clients such as Johnson & Johnson, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Exelon, and Daimler AG in their strategies for developing senior leadership talent. Focusing on executive teams and boards, Ron uses his past experience as a line executive to design and deliver customized sessions that bring together strategy and leadership development.