Developing Effective Strategic Leadership Teams

The key elements in organizations today, to confronting 21st Century problems, and designing 21st Century organizations, is a strong, effective, coherent Strategic Leadership Team.

Designing, crafting, sustaining an effective Senior/Strategic leadership team is the responsibility of the Senior Executive (sometimes but not always the CEO).  Is this a challenging task?  You bet!  Senior executives often focus more on their individual roles then their team shared work.  If the CEO fails to set the team up correctly, these high-powered managers may have difficulty pulling together to move their organizations forward.  Often they even disagree on what constitutes the right path forward.

So how difficult is it enabling a successful Strategic Leadership Team?

The real challenge is articulated in the 2008 publication, Senior Leadership Teams: What it Takes to Make Them Great (Wageman, Nunes & Burruss, 2008).

They describe the dilemma of Senior Teams as: 

“On the one hand, they are responsible for leading their own organizational units, on the other they are expected to be fully engaged and committed members of the enterprises senior team. It can seem like being caught in two powerful cross currents. Given a choice about how to spend their time, most of the executives we talked we do not hesitate: ‘Just let me focus on my real job,’ they say, ‘rather than waste all this time in endless meetings that accomplish nothing.’  

For many overburdened executives, senior team meetings become obligatory appearances at events that have little to do with their leadership roles or the pressing organizational issues they face – an understandably, they would rather be somewhere else. 

It doesn’t have to be that way.”

A successful, productive Strategic Leadership Team is the essential element for successful 21st Century organizations.

As you approach the challenge, here are some questions you need to ponder:

  • Does your organization really need a Strategic Leadership Team?
  • Why must the team be strategic? What is strategic?
  • How can the team as a team provide leadership to the organization?
  • What does this collective leadership look like?
  • How do you get these high-powered, often individually successful leaders, to work effectively as a team?
  • How do you, and the team, articulate a compelling team purpose?
  • How can you tell whether the right people are on the Strategic Leadership Team?
  • How should the Strategic Leadership Team be structured in terms of size, mix of members, and norms for interaction?
  • What kind of organizational support does the Strategic Leadership Team need?
  • How do you make sure that the Strategic Leadership team has skilled, knowledgeable,”hands-on” coaching?
  • If a Strategic Leadership team, at the helm of the organization is essential, how do you, as the leader, craft a successful Strategic Leadership Team?

Sheila's most popular program:

Strategic Leadership: Leading in a 21st Century World

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