Executive Ownershift

This chapter helps you turn your vulnerabilities into assets for leadership performance and results. Leaders that are unable or unwilling to express their vulnerability, especially within their leadership team, struggle to master the massive challenges that they face. As a leader, if you are really striving to play at your best, at some point you are going to struggle. As a leadership team, the cost of not expressing vulnerability compounds itself because those around you mirror what you do and what you say. When you are not asking for help, people that report to you will not either. When people feel that they have to manage everything on their own, or risk being seen as weak or helpless, everyone struggles. Leaders who express vulnerability as a positive and necessary leadership characteristic invite openness, sensitivity and demonstrate self-confidence within their team; and this is a real game changer. It reminds us, and those around us, that we are authentic, and above all human. When you know, and can publicly share, what you do not know or you cannot do, you can learn it.

Leadership teams that manage dilemmas, recurring dramas and differences develop resilient relationships and creates trust that leads to increased collaboration, more innovative solutions and breakthrough results. This chapter helps you identify and master such challenges. Simply because a group of men and women call themselves the executive leadership team, it does not mean that they automatically work together as an effective team. Leaders should not confuse arriving in the team with succeeding as a team. There is a big difference. Only after you arrive does the real work begin. When your company and senior leadership team roles do not take precedence over your functional and personal roles, your team will struggle to perform at its best. If leaders are always arguing about what to do from their own functional point of view and how it will impact their function, your executive team exchanges will resemble turf wars; in-fighting amongst team members for resources and talent leading to a toxic and low performance environment. This isn’t an “all or nothing” switch, it’s more of a give and take, but with that said, leadership teams that play at their best have their default setting at company interests and leadership team interests over function and personal interests.

In this chapter, we explore the ten obstacles to high performance, resulting from fractional leadership practices and how leaders and their teams can transform these obstacles into results. Fractional leadership occurs when leaders do not create and lead with an open and holistic executive agenda. Playing with only a partial agenda at the executive level leads to low employee engagement, little willingness to challenge the status quo, and a lackluster strategy that does not create an intellectually clear and emotionally compelling story of their strategic future. Even executives are confused about what an executive agenda is. Some think it is the organization’s strategic plan. Others think that it is a series of events in the life of an executive. Still others think it is the actual agenda at an executive meeting. The executive agenda is not a plan. It is the collective output of your leadership team. The executive agenda is like a film of how relevant others perceive, experience and are influenced by the senior leadership team. Relevant others include stakeholders, shareholders, colleagues, peers, staff and customers. If you feel that parts of your organization do not show the ownership you expect of them, come back to the clarity, alignment and ownership of your executive agenda.

In this chapter, we introduce the four cornerstones of executive ownershift and the significant six indicators that help your leadership team play at a level that your competitors envy. If you really want to get ahead of your competition and stay ahead as a market leader, the place you have to start at is at the top with the leadership team. Anything else is a distraction. This chapter describes how successful leadership teams lead change, improvement and growth that starts at the top of the organization. While each leadership team is special and unique, there are distinctions and patterns of success that separate mediocre leadership teams from those that thrive and succeed through continually adapting to their changing business environment. Use the significant six scorecard in this chapter to see how your leadership team performs against the best.

In this chapter, leaders learn how to recognize and manage the unspoken feelings and beliefs in the leadership team. It is not the visible part of the iceberg that threatens most leadership teams; it is the part hidden from view, which represent the titanic challenges. To play at their best, executive teams must manage two realities, represented by the iceberg. The material reality, that is visible part of the iceberg above the water; and the non-material reality, the aspects that are not seen, not written about and seldom talked about. Business leaders understand the material reality, the world of hard facts: sales forecasts, strategy, the balance sheet, product launches, and regulatory guidelines. At the end of the month, or reporting period, you can look and determine whether you have been successful or not. In the non-material reality trust, respect, openness, and power play out in the leadership team. Sacred Cows, white elephants, hidden agendas and emotional viruses influence the levels of trust, collaboration and ultimately, results. Through the insights and tools in this chapter, leaders learn how to manage both the material and non-material leadership realities.

In this chapter, you learn six insights to structure and lead meetings that stimulate performance and a culture of continuous improvement throughout your organization. There is too much cruising in leadership meetings. Not only do executives miss opportunities to accelerate the impact of their leadership decisions in the business, they set a “cruising culture” for everyone else in the organization. When meetings are not organized properly, people are not prepared, the right people are not present, or there is little sense of urgency to use the meeting as a catalyst for improvement and growth, the costs are staggering. The way you do anything is the way you do everything. This means the way your meetings run is the way your business runs. In this chapter, you learn how to create and use meetings that give birth to a high performance company culture.

Creating, implementing and executing business strategy is the responsibility of the leadership team. While there are many activities that leadership teams can delegate to others, strategy is not one of them. Few leadership teams disagree with this, and most believe they are doing their best to be successful. Results, however, show that few actually deliver. In this chapter, you are introduced to the five elements of a senseful strategy, namely clarity, connection, collaboration, contribution and consequences. A senseful strategy helps people in your organization act as if they have a sixth sense, enabling everyone in the organization to make choices and take decisions that support the success of your business. Use the senseful strategic scorecard introduced in this chapter to pin point areas of strategic development for your leadership team and your organization.

Low employee engagement costs industry $500 billion dollars a year, in the USA alone, according to the Gallup Organization. In Chap. 8, you learn how poor performing leadership teams contribute to low employee engagement and how highly effective leadership teams create an ownership (highly engaging) culture where people thrive. As the most significant environmental influencer in their organization, leadership teams often underestimate how their communication and collaboration inconsistencies influence people in their organization. Learn to identify these inconsistencies and transform them into ownership magnifiers. Let the nine markers of the ownership epidemic serve as milestones to help you create the conditions that enable people to play at their best throughout the organization. Money might buy love, but you cannot buy an ownership culture. In this chapter, learn to create deep levels of ownership in your business that contributes to the overall growth of your business.

In this chapter, we continue the journey to create highly effective leadership teams by listening to the executives that head up these teams. In every leadership team, there stands one person that encourages, guides and sometimes demands things from the team. How does one balance being a member of the leadership team and at the same time, as the head of this team, challenge and stimulate them to move beyond their comfort zone? How does the leader hold team colleagues accountable when one deviates from agreed norms? How, as the most senior executive, do you decide which of the many initiatives to choose from, that will steer the company successfully into the future? In this chapter, meet C-levels leaders who share their successes, and their challenges to create highly effective leadership teams.

In Chap. 9, we reinforced the importance of leadership development as a team experience. We should never send a coached leader back into an uncoached team. Taking leaders out of their team and out of their environment for individual development is not the best way to improve leadership performance and will have little impact on your organization results. In this chapter, you learn to distinguish between leader development, that is support for an individual leader and leadership development, which involves the leader and her team. Individual leader development can support behavioral or skills issues for individuals, but only leadership development, as a team, can improve both leadership performance and improving organizational results. We compare different types of development initiatives for leadership teams and the advantages gained through executive ownershift and why and how to put the customer at the center of everything you do. Last, but not least, you can measure your leadership team against the six signature team strengths to plan your next steps for continuous growth and results.