A high-performing senior team is the most important lever you have as an organization to powerfully impact business performance. Smart and experienced executives don’t necessarily come together as a high-performing senior team on their own. A little professional guidance can go a long way.
Leadership team development is about working with a senior team to increase their collective effectiveness as a team. We work with Executive Leadership Teams and Regional/Divisional Leadership Teams in a facilitated team process as a catalyst for accelerating team performance.
- Team development for senior leadership teams.
- Focused on enhancing team alignment, dynamics, and effectiveness.
- Designed for executive (ELT) and senior (SLT) leadership teams.
How We Help
For Executive Leadership Teams (ELT’s)
As your top team, the Executive Leadership Team is collectively responsible for achieving business results. Each member of the team is not only responsible for the functional area or business unit they lead, but they also assume a role in organization-wide leadership. They wear two hats – one functional, one organization-wide. It’s the second hat that often doesn’t get the time and attention it needs, and that is where we come in.
For Divisional, Regional and Functional Leadership Teams
As with your top teams, these Divisional and Regional Leadership Teams perform similar functions for their part of the business. Like ELT’s, members of these teams also wear two hats – one functional and one organization-wide. It’s the second hat that often doesn’t get the time and attention it needs, and that is where we come in.
Wearing the Second Hat
The focus of executive team development is on the second, organization-wide hat. It’s about how the team comes together in the work of leading the organization. The most effective executive teams are strategically aligned and exhibit a cohesive team dynamic that is productive in achieving results together.
Key Inflection Points to Engage in Leadership Team Development
- New chief executive leading the team
- New senior leaders joining the team
- Team wants to take it up a level and up their game
- Established team will benefit from a catalyst for change
- Organization is embarking upon a major strategic or culture shift
Strategically Aligned and Cohesive
The most effective executive leadership teams are strategically aligned and exhibit a cohesive team dynamic that is productive in achieving results together. Strategic alignment begins with having a clear and agreed upon strategic direction that directs everything the organization does. It’s about ensuring that this clarity and agreement exits, the ongoing dialogue a team has about that direction, the twists and turns it may need to take, the strategic priorities across the organization that may need to shift as a result.
The team dynamic is what happens when leaders come together to do their work. It’s observable and palpable, you can see and feel it in a room. This dynamic either fuels their ability to lead the organization together, or it impedes it.
Leading Strategic Organizational Change
When organizations are embarking on major strategic shift, we support executive leadership teams in expanding their thinking about strategic change and their capabilities in leading that change, as a team, with their teams, and throughout the organization.
Our Approach
Our work with executive leadership teams begins with a conversation with the CEO in their role as the leader of the team. We meet with each leader on the team individually and collectively as a team to understand their perspectives on the team today. We work in concert with the Chief Executive in designing a team development process that will work best for the team, and in parallel with them in co-leading the sessions.
Powerful Team Facilitation
Set within an understanding of your business context and goals for the team our master facilitators use their deep understanding of team dynamics in team sessions to create an open dialogue centered around a strategic vision and leading change. Our facilitated team process transcends team building in the conventional sense. Sessions are pragmatic, lean, and challenging. We talk about the most important, and sometimes most uncomfortable, issues and we help the team collectively move forward.
Team Assessment
Our team assessment helps the team assess for itself where its strengths lie as well as its biggest challenges. We find that having a scorecard to assess where the team is now, and to see progress over time, can be a powerful tool.
Chief Executive (CEO) Coaching in Parallel
The CEO’s role as leader of the executive team is the single most important factor in shaping the team’s dynamics and ultimately its effectiveness. Executive teams augment the chief executive’s leadership in running the organization. But it’s the chief executive who leads the team and their effectiveness is essential if the team is to function at its best.
We have found that executive coaching for the Chief Executive, in conjunction with an investment in senior team development, is a powerful combination and makes the most sense. Depending on the situation, it may also make sense to invest in executive coaching for the other C-suite members of the team to achieve the best outcome.
At Perceptive, we’ll work with you to customize an approach that will work best for your senior team. We utilize a highly customizable and proven framework that provides senior teams with the support they need to take their performance to the next level.
Perceptive Senior Leaders and Their Teams Framework©
A Powerful, Practicable and Proven Process
The Perceptive Senior Leaders and Their Teams Framework© has been developed specifically for senior leaders and their teams for elevating their leadership to the next level.
We believe that no senior leader can be successful without being an effective leader of their senior team. Leadership is quite simply a team sport. The impact of a high-performing senior team ripples outward and is perceptibly felt across the organization in powerful ways. It’s the proverbial effect of the rising tide raises all boats.
The framework is powerful in its ability to help senior leaders accelerate their individual leadership and to help senior leadership teams elevate their collective leadership. It’s practicality rests in actionable practices that a senior leader and their team can readily take into their work together.
We use the hub, spokes, and rim of a wheel as a metaphor. Where the hub is the leader of the team, the spokes are their direct reports, and the rim is where the team comes together, as a team. Every part of the wheel works together to propel the team forward.
Grounded in fifteen years of working with hundreds of senior leaders and their teams, in organizations ranging from small emerging companies to large global corporations, and the latest research and best practices in leadership development.
We originally wrote this eBook for our clients. Sharing our proprietary Senior Leaders and Their Teams Framework© proved be to a helpful tool for them as they thought about how they lead and their senior team.
We are making this abbreviated version available to you as a senior leader in your organization. Our intention is to share some of our learning and perspectives with you, and if we’re successful, help stimulate your thinking in ways that will help you in working with your senior team.
We started engaging with Lori at the executive team level. We were having the age-old issues of working hard but not maximizing all our talents as a team, so the hard work alone was not producing the outcomes we wanted. Lori spent time learning our Company, our culture and ourselves and with that knowledge set about some inspiring and practical improvements for us to take. Today we are a far more effective team. The engagement in our communication, our interactions, and, by far most importantly, our trust with each other is what allows for many of our conversations resulting in the best decisions and behaviors for our company.
Dennis Stoltenberg, Vice President, Human Resources, LogRhythm
I absolutely marvel at Lori’s ability to take a complex organizational challenge – involving people, strategy, mission – and break it down…More »
Michele Stowe, COO, Mercy Housing
Lori has been incredible at supporting my individual growth and leadership skills as well as coaching me through the journey of building…More »
Ismael Guerrero, President & CEO, Mercy Housing
I engaged Lori Zahn to work with me and my eight-member management team over a period of two years. This consisted of a series of…More »
Rhonda Kavanagh, CFO, Fiserv
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