What Your Team’s Not Telling You

To successfully navigate and lead in a highly complex and turbulent business environment, a CEO needs to actively develop a team that can create a step change in business performance. Here are three steps CEOs should consider:

1. Know when to lean in or out

As CEO, your presence and approach to engaging the team (i.e., declarative, collaborative, inquisitive, etc.) influences the issues they raise, which impacts your ability to accurately assess and diagnose the “real” problem and guide toward an optimal solution.

On one end of the spectrum, there are CEOs who are very directive leaders with a strong command-and-control style. On the other, there are CEOs who tend to avoid conflict and want to maintain harmony. The most successful CEOs blend “hard” and “soft” styles to engage the team and drive results. They display empathy, compassion, humility and vulnerability — qualities critical for leading with an empowering style — yet at the same time they provide clear direction and focus on what’s most critical.

CEOs can foster the right environment by inviting the team into the dialogue while establishing the guardrails for the discussion. They can model an open, transparent way of interacting, putting issues on the table, openly discussing the wins and the challenges of the business as a whole and its individual parts.

Consider: How am I affecting the team’s performance?

2. Define the team’s role

Building true commitment so the top team can fully own and drive the company strategy (as opposed to individual business units and functions) is more difficult than most CEOs realize. CEOs often assume because they had an offsite and discussed strategy everyone is aligned conceptually and operationally.

In practice, individual leaders on the executive team tend to focus on the area they lead — because that’s where they are held most accountable for performance — rather than collaborating to drive enterprise-wide results. CEOs need to define the work that only the top team can do together while creating an environment for high performance. Providing this clarity and focus enables the team to fully own and drive the strategic initiatives across the organization that impact financial and operational performance.

Consider: Is my team focused on the most critical strategic and operational initiatives and working together in a way that will materially drive business performance?

3. Set the agenda and cadence

CEOs frequently underestimate the importance of a strong operating rhythm for running the team, including the cadence, decision-making rights and, yes, meeting agendas. Without a clear purpose and agenda for each meeting, team members often become frustrated because time is spent rehashing previous decisions or on non-value-added topics which often exacerbates friction and creates team dynamics that inhibit performance.

Ideally, team meetings provide an environment where leaders can raise questions about key issues, ask for help solving the problems they’re facing and focus on the work that only they can do together as an executive team — setting the strategic direction, monitoring key operational and financial metrics, resource-sharing, prioritization, roadblock removal, setting the talent agenda, and defining and shaping the culture. When this happens, everyone’s engaged and contributing, and the team is drawing on all the minds around the table.

The CEO’s role is to set the agenda for their meetings, keep discussions focused and drive decision making and action. They create an environment for the “real” conversation to happen in the room by establishing agreed-upon operating norms (i.e., attendance, participation and even cell phone use) and behavioral norms (i.e., debate and discuss, focus on outcomes, challenging assumptions). CEOs also should consider the mix of operating techniques beyond meetings to drive alignment, information flows, collaboration and decisions.

Consider: What conversations are happening outside the room that need to happen inside the room?

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Building a high-performing team is difficult and takes concerted and focused effort. CEOs play an outsized role in defining the work of the team and creating an environment that both leverages the individual capabilities of each team member and that builds collective momentum on the organization’s most critical strategic and operational priorities. To drive greater success, CEOs should evaluate how they are affecting the team’s performance.