Why your top team might not be moving as on
Genuine team alignment is rare and nowhere is this more evident or important than at the very top of organisations.
According to a recent study by PwC, as many as one third of UK CEOs question whether they have the right leadership team around them, and the same proportion recognise that their organisation is being held back by bureaucracy and internal politics (PwC CEO Survey). I wonder, as I read this statistic, whether these same CEOs acknowledge that the solution may sit incredibly close to home and be simpler than they imagine.
Misalignment is costly, especially at this level.
It shows up like whack a mole throughout the organisation; unclear priorities competing for the same resources, squabbles and avoidable escalations further down the line, meetings upon meetings to revise decisions, critical conversations happening outside meetings rather than inside them, false agreement, silos and factions competing rather than collaborating, the list goes on.
The consequences of misalignment at the top ripple through the levels, causing friction all the way, and according to Acas, this friction carries a potential cost of £1,000 for every employee (Acas – Workplace Conflict: Estimating the Cost to Employers)!
So, what stops genuine alignment at the top?
Fundamentally, a senior team is no different from any other, but the stakes are much higher; the expertise around the table is usually deeper, the opinions more firmly held and the reputations more carefully protected. The kind of trust required to hold lightly personal stance and status requires a level of vulnerability and openness that can feel uncomfortable with age and experience. Paradoxically, this can make top teams more resistant to the very work that would help them perform better together.
In our experience across multiple leadership and culture transformation programmes, senior leaders can be quick to invest in strategy, structure and execution, and indeed personal development in junior and middle managers, but less comfortable investing in the deeper personal development they need to perform collectively and consistently under pressure. Yet, the more senior the team, the greater the organisational cost when that work is avoided.
As Patrick Lencioni reminds us:
“It’s not finance, not strategy, not technology, it’s teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.”
So what do genuinely high performing senior leadership teams do differently?
The senior teams who perform consistently, under pressure are not free from tension, difference or disagreement. Quite the opposite, they just know how to use this, and themselves constructively. They put the success of the whole organisation ahead of the interests of their own part of it.
Which means shifting from:
- My priorities to our priorities
- My function to our organisation
- My expertise to our collective intelligence
- My success to our success
This shift sounds really straightforward in theory, but in practice and particularly if they are operating within a system that recognises and rewards individual over collective performance, this asks a great deal of people who have often reached senior positions by being decisive, knowledgeable and orientated towards a specialism or geography.
More than anyone else in an organisation, senior leaders need to really understand themselves deeply, collectively, and under pressure.
From self awareness to collective awareness
Every leader needs to understand their own strengths, preference and impact, but high performing senior leadership teams go further, they develop collective awareness.
They become curious about the team as a system:
- Which perspectives dominate and which are missing?
- Are we playing to our collective strengths?
- How do our behaviours change under pressure?
- What conversations do we repeatedly avoid and why?
- Are we creating clarity and momentum or complexity and drag?
- Are we enabling and empowering people or keeping them small?
With greater collective awareness comes greater collective capacity; the ability to challenge, decide, align and act together, especially when it matters most.
A September reset
As people return from summer and the pace picks up again, September offers a natural moment to pause and reset.
Before launching into the next round of targets, plans and priorities, perhaps every top team should ask itself:
Are we genuinely clear about what we must achieve together?
Are our functional priorities supporting or competing with our shared priorities?
Are we having the conversations we most need to have?
Do we leave meetings genuinely committed, or merely appearing to agree?
Do we hold each other accountable?
What does the organisation need more, and less, from us?
And most importantly, are we all moving in the same direction and are we genuinely moving as one?
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