Creating a high performance organization starts with building a high performance senior management team
In the classic children’s story, The Emperor’s New Clothes is a tale of two weavers who promise an Emperor a magnificent new suit of clothes that is invisible to those who are incompetent or intellectually inferior. Out of fear he be judged unfit for his own position, the Emperor pretends to see the cloth even though he can’t.
His Ministers share his fear and follow suit. The Emperor dons his ‘new clothes’ and parades naked through his Kingdom. His subjects, afraid they will be judged inept or intellectually inferior, pretend they see magnificent cloth as well. Everyone in the Kingdom is deluded until an innocent young boy cries out “he’s wearing nothing at all” and they all confronted with the truth.
Unfortunately, we see similar scenarios played out in modern organisations. Some leaders and their senior teams don’t recognise that dysfunctional behaviour leads to dysfunctional team performance. Others recognise poor team performance but are unsure of how to improve and some simply put up with it. Just as the behaviour of the Emperor and his court strongly influence their subjects, the performance and behaviour of the senior management team is mirrored in the organisation they lead.
Senior leadership performance has never been so important. The decisions they make have an exponential impact on the organisation practices and performance. New trends have made the development of high performing leaders a strategic imperative.
Senior Leadership is a team sport
Today, high performing organisations need high performing teams. The speed and complexity of business challenges demand that leaders are able to influence the multiple skills, experiences and judgments offered by real team work. However, no matter how skilled the leaders are, unless the performance of senior management team improves, it is unlikely the organisation will.
Most teams underperform
Despite the importance of senior management team to organisation results, the performance is most of the time low to medium. The three reasons for this are:
• there is a lack of team performance measurement;
• the traditional view of leadership, where the focus is on the role of individuals over that of teams. As such, when the team members are regarded as high-performing, there is an expectation that the team is as well; and
• the systemic nature of team dynamics creates powerful and invisible dynamics that undermine team performance, as team norms may mould their belief and create behaviours which only occurs in certain circumstances.
High performance is very possible
Despite this, some senior teams do rise above these challenges and maintain high performance over the long term. In 2009, a study on senior teams of high performing organisation in Canada was undertaken by Deloitte. Ten companies were randomly selected from Canada’s 50 Best Managed Companies (Best Managed) programme. Deloitte used the Team Diagnostic Assessment to assess the overall performance of each senior management team and identified specific strengths which contributed to high performance.
The outcome of the study indicated that the Best Managed senior teams were significantly stronger in every key competency linked to team performance, which is consistent with Deloitte’s experience that high performing teams are relatively good in everything because they don’t allow significant weaknesses to longer and erode performance.
The three key factors differentiating the high performance senior management team are:
• they are acutely aware of the influence their performance has on shaping organisation practices and performance and team members take responsibilities seriously;
• the teams understand the distinct role the organisation requires of them; and
• team communication and accountability are fundamental and highly inter-related competencies.
As such, there is a need for any organisation concerned with organisational performance to create high senior management team performance by:
• building a high performing senior management team as other initiatives aimed at organisational performance will be directly affected – limited or enhanced;
• building leaders with team leadership skills;
• engaging them in leader development programmes to teach others;
• not tolerating a low performing senior team anywhere;
• starting with team communication and accountability if you can only do a few things to improve team performance or skills of team leaders;
• using teams to create a high performing culture. Once senior management team is high performing, it makes members accountable for improving the performance of key teams they lead.
In conclusion, in modern organisations, there is a need to develop leaders with the skills necessary to create and maintain high performance teams. This is especially true for the senior management team. Because the organisation reflects the performance – like the Emperor and his Ministers, when it underperforms it can unwittingly generate organisational performance and results that are opposite to what it wants – the senior management team becomes the organisation’s most important team. Furthermore, the senior management team of high performance organisations reminds us of the link between senior teams and organisational performance and provide insight into the key factors differentiating high performers from others.
It does seem that senior management team development is a good place for leaders to look to improve as the organisation reflects the performance of the senior management team. And unlike the unfortunate Emperor and his Ministers, it creates the very impact and performance it is working so hard to achieve.
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