What happens when the innate traits of leaders conflicts with the dynamic of cohesive teams and how can leadership development mitigate against this? Fredrik Malmsten, Chartered Psychologist at Alumni, outlines the common barriers to creating cohesive leadership teams and how organisations might overcome them.

Leader – Noun - the person who leads or commands a group, organisation, or country
Team – Verb – come together to achieve a common goal.

Leadership teams not only have an overarching responsibility to drive through organisational objectives, but they also set the standards and culture for communication and learning more broadly through the business. The ways in which they interact, discuss, and formulate plans for execution, affect and effect every member within the business.

Leadership teams by their nature are most usually populated with results driven individuals; successful people who want to see progress and, most importantly, positive action within their own area of responsibility or interest. They often feel in competition with their peers for scarce resources, recognition, or advancement. Such highly focussed individuals can often benefit from taking a step back and aligning more closely with their peers in the management team in order to drive forward their organisation’s strategic objectives and this sometimes does not come naturally to them.

“Learning to speak with a united voice and managing the perceptions of the wider organisation from a common standpoint, can bring improved efficiency and results from what is often a complex remit.”

Similarly, many leadership teams do not invest enough in aligning their personal goals with the common purpose and business objectives that they are trying as a group to address. Learning to speak with a united voice and managing the perceptions of the wider organisation from a common standpoint, can bring improved efficiency and results from what is often a complex remit.

Shifting a discussion from ‘Yes – but’ to the more productive ‘Yes – and’ takes a particular awareness of individual motivation, it takes patience and the practical application of reflective listening, rather than ‘listening to answer’ where focus can be lost on planning a reply rather than hearing an alternative opinion. Creating the psychological safety within the team to voice opinions without fear of reprisal or derision is also key to achieving this.

In leadership teams where not all voices are heard, the difficult strategic topics, i.e., those that are ‘edgy’ or ambiguous can be put aside in favour of discussing the issues and areas that all the team are comfortable in discussing – the routine, the same old – same old. But with teamwork and leadership development the dynamics can shift to create a results-driven team from the sum of its results-driven individuals.

Each member of an executive team has a responsibility to build a better way of communicating and aligning with their peers. There is an additional responsibility for the senior leader (usually the CEO) in ensuring that each member of the team has their voice heard. Often a CEO for example will talk, state their opinion, and then ask for input; far better is to talk, ask for opinions and then give their viewpoint. Just this simple action, prevents a scenario where a subordinate leader is not speaking because their view is in opposition to their ‘boss’.

A tailored approach to meet unique requirements

At Alumni we treat every organisation according to its individual needs and requirements. However, we typically would approach leadership team development by firstly understanding the CEO and what they want from their team. We often then undertake a people audit to see whether the right roles and people are actually within the team through interview and assessment.

Our highly experienced consultants would then look at the dynamics of the leadership team as a whole– the full range of strengths and weaknesses in communication and listening styles. By using concise theoretical explanations and contextual examples, our consultants demonstrate how to ‘level-up’ on efficient and cohesive teamwork.

Most practically, by working through one or more topics that are on the table for the client organisation provides the team with an opportunity to evaluate all that they have learnt on a real-world active organisational issue. In short, leadership development and leadership team development delivered on the job and building skills than can not only be taken into the future but applied to other teams across the business to create real improvements more broadly.

If you are interested in learning more about Leadership Team Development we please do leave your details below to receive information about our upcoming seminars, or reach out to me directly.

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