CEO/Board Member Briefing
Executive Team Effectiveness

The executive team (e-team) has emerged as a defining force in modern corporate governance. Due largely to the ever increasing challenges of corporate stewardship more and more CEOs are taking advantage of the team approach to organizational leadership as opposed to managing their VPs one to one. However, the tremendous leverage a team approach offers can only be realized when the CEO and the team fully understand the elusive dynamic of executive teams and what it takes to lead them.

This paper provides an overview of the steps and processes considered critical to developing a high functioning e-team. We are assuming you value the team approach and are biased toward investing in developing your executive team. Also we assume that you are willing to function as the team builder, facilitator and coach of your team, a complicated and sometimes confusing role. The role requires an awareness of what the team is doing at any moment (the content) and how the team is interacting while working on the content (the process).

The E-Team
To begin, let’s define the e-team as a set of managers who together take on the role of providing strategic, operational, and institutional leadership for the organization. Their work as an e-team is planning, decision making, and problem solving. Each member is responsible for their role on the executive team and also for their own unit or function. It could be said that the effectiveness of the e-team is directly related to and strongly impacts the effectiveness of the organization at large.

The Problem
While it’s clear to us that teams are very important, research on teams suggests that individuals who move to the top of organizations tend to be very high on the need for power and achievement. Often, they have moved through the ranks via individual achievement thus find it difficult to work in the more collaborative manner required by the dynamic of an e-team. For this reason, the CEO and potential team members must be aware of the possible differences in the way they have worked, how they interact with others and what is required for a highly successful team interaction.

Interdependence
Probably the most critical element a successful team is how members handle their dependencies with each other. Potentially any team has more cognitive power, experience and energy than any one individual however the tremendous value proposition of “team” can be left unrealized if the manner in which members handle interdependence is not structured, managed and continually developed.

While there is a cost in time and energy working to get people to pull together and organizing their efforts, there are a number of advantages, as opposed to working one to one with individuals. However, there are certain situations in which individual action and initiative are far more productive. Research suggests that the type of task to be performed should is the best single factor for making a choice. The team approach is recommended when one of the following conditions is present:

• The problems or issues being addressed calls for a wide range of skills, experience and/or view points.
• The various components of the work are highly interdependent.
• The leader has time and energy available to create and develop a team.
• It is very important that people are aligned and committed to implementation of decisions and plans of action.
• The kinds of problems and/or issues need to be thought through over time so that high quality decisions can be made.
• The kind of work being addressed calls for innovation and creative thinking.
• You assess that team members can work together constructively and productively.

Effective versus Ineffective Teams

It is well documented that bringing people together can result in either a positive impact or a negative impact on overall productivity and innovation. The e-team is infinitely more complex than other teams in the organization, thus e-team members are often unprepared for the dynamics they will encounter at this level.

Research on effective teams has suggested that CEOs who successfully build and lead a team are able to focus on 1.) What the team is doing and 2.) How the work is being performed by the team. That is, they are able to see both the content and the processes that are taking place around dealing with the content. In some cases the CEO used a facilitator to observe and address processes while he/she worked with content issues.

Additionally, successful e-teams had CEOs who took the time needed to address the following questions:

• Who should be on the team? (Collins: “Get the right people on the bus.”)
• What is the charter of the team? What does it need to produce?
• What is the appropriate value-added work of the team? What is inappropriate for the team to work on?
• What are the roles and responsibilities of the various team members?
• What operating guidelines and procedures are required to guide the team interactions and performance of individual responsibilities?
• What kinds of behavior will be encouraged or discouraged (i.e. open expression of ideas and viewpoints, healthy conflict, etc.)
• What will the team do to periodically check itself and review its performance?

It is clear that the CEO is the team builder who grows the competence of the team to work constructively, adding value to the organization and to each member. The CEO needs to invest the time and energy required to develop his or her own skills in this complex endeavor.

The forgoing has been adapted from Executive Teams by Nadler and Spencer, (1998).

For more information regarding developing the executive team please email us at roblaur@lauridsengroup.com and ask for CEO/Board Briefing: The Dimensions and Core Processes of Effective E-Teams.

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