It is hardly a revelation that the Australian executives we encounter during our consulting assignments showcase an exceedingly high calibre. These are individuals who have ascended to the top of their organisations over the span of decades, mostly by accumulating deep industry-sector expertise, developing powerful networks, and by astutely navigating the intricate political landscape.
What is less evident, however, is that the success of these c-suite leaders has been significantly influenced, if not determined, by the quality and performance of the leadership teams they have assembled over the years. It would be even tempting to suggest that none of these executives would have been as successful without the support of their high-performing leadership teams.
Even more surprising is the fact that many of these seasoned executives are often ill-equipped or lack the bandwidth to identify and deal with performance challenges of their teams, spanning from interpersonal conflicts, deficiency in meaningful debate, groupthink, to issues of fragmentation.
Given the intrinsically symbiotic relationship between executives and their teams—a relationship in which success or failure is inevitably shared— we argue that the pivotal challenge for executives concerning the future relevance of both themselves and their teams lies in their capacity to:
- identify common warning signs that suggest their team is struggling
- determine differentiating capabilities their team’s need to develop to thrive in today’s context
- acknowledge the strategic importance of evolving leadership teams to secure their future relevance
In an increasingly volatile and intricate market landscape, many executives have yet to come to terms with the fact that to prevail in this novel competitive landscape they cannot afford to continue following a BAU strategy for much longer as the rules of the game have just changed too much.
In the remainder of this article, I will share some insights gained from our client work that challenges the underlying assumptions of what it takes for a high-performing leadership team to thrive in today’s context. I examine this by sharing common signs that a leadership team might be struggling and provide a brief explanation of likely root causes. I have clustered these signs under the following three categories:
- Constant need to check on team’s progress
- Team members not fully stepping into their roles
- Conflict is avoided at all cost
Pretty much all the executives we speak to are starting to feel the heat building up around them. They are all under the same intense pressure to deliver on ever growing stakeholder expectations, and that at a vastly accelerated pace in an environment that is volatile and ambiguous.
One of the most important tell-tale signs to consider is that of how well executives can pass on, and evenly distribute, these increased performance pressures amongst their leadership teams without them crumbling under the additional workload.
By default, increased performance pressures have a tendency to travel downwards in the hierarchy and how well these pressures are absorbed is a vital indicator of how prepared a leadership team is in terms of their adaptive capacity, and in performing as a collective unit.
Sign #1 – Constant need to check on team’s progress
A telling sign that a team might be in trouble is that of a senior leader experiencing the urge of having to constantly check-in, and closely monitor, on their team’s progress. The rationale behind the additional scrutiny is simple, having additional balls up in the air significantly increases the likelihood of one of them being dropped, thereby exposing senior leaders to the risk of serious reputational damage. The fear of coming across as unprepared or disorganised in front of peers or, even worse one’s superior, can be an incredibly potent motivator that fuels such controlling behaviour.
The constant fear of being blind-sighted can also drive senior leaders to insert themselves more often into day-to-day operational activities, thereby inadvertently redirecting their attention away from being on the ‘balcony’ to descending onto the ‘dance floor’. Not only is this an extremely poor use of the senior leader’s time but the close monitoring is likely to be negatively interpreted by the team as a loss in trust. This could significantly raise the group’s levels of anxiety, leading them to narrow their attentional focus – thereby, ironically, increasing the odds of something being missed even more.
It is worth pointing out that by stepping up the monitoring behaviour, the senior leader only addresses the symptom of the issue but not the actual root cause, thereby perpetuating the undesirable team behaviour. Team members are also likely to misinterpret the increased monitoring activity as ‘my leader has everything under control so I don’t have to’ and react by becoming even more removed, thereby fuelling the vicious behavioural cycle.
Unquestionably, the pressure to be across all their team’s deliverables will become too time consuming and arduous for any executive to handle over an extended period. If you recognise yourself being one of those senior leaders, it is advisable for you and your team to put this issue on the table and not wait until this pressure becomes unbearable.
Sign #2 – Team members not fully stepping into their role
The next sign to watch out for, closely related to the previous one, is team members appearing reluctant to fully step into their assigned leadership roles and embrace taking calculated risks.
We often encounter this type of team behaviour in relatively new teams and in organisations with highly political subcultures. In both instances, leadership teams are unsure about what exactly is expected of them and find it difficult to fully grasp the implicit cultural norms and unspoken leadership behaviours deemed necessary in their roles. Learning how to be effective, particularly when unfamiliar with implicit organisational norms, is among the key reasons why team members may appear hesitant to approach their roles with greater resolve.
Another reason for the reluctance among team members to take more of an emotional stake in their roles, we have observed, stems from the challenge posed by an increasing number of key initiatives that are ambiguous, complex, and require the engagement of multiple stakeholders to progress.
These types of initiatives usually are high-profile and form an integral part of the CEO’s or board of directors’ agenda, covering a range of current topics such as diversity and inclusion, social values, community and stakeholder engagement, risk management, and sustainability.
The primary challenge of implementing these kinds of initiatives lies in their divergent meanings to different stakeholders – an agreeable definition of what a successful outcome for such an initiative would look can be quite elusive. It is often left to leadership teams to interpret and translate these initiatives into actionable plans, a task that is not only time-consuming but also demands a very different, creative frame of mind to solve. Most leadership teams we encounter just do not have the bandwidth to figure out how to deal with them effectively, nor do they have the adequate headcount to support them.
Mixing high workloads with ambiguous strategic initiatives generally makes for a deadly combination, leading many teams to become trapped in a reactive fire-fighting mindset. Within this cognitive framework, constant busyness, back-to-back meetings, and ad hoc support requests from key stakeholders become the prevailing state, dominating team members’ agendas. This undesirable situation further elevates their anxiety levels and significantly impairs their creative thinking abilities and ability to focus on what matters, reducing the odds of delivering outcomes that they would be capable of.
Finding themselves trapped in this reactive mental state, team members have little choice but to resort to shallow thinking. They often recycle past solutions, delivering only the bare minimum to key stakeholders and resulting in suboptimal outcomes.
This predicament largely stems from executives mislabelling and treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical ones (Heifetz, 1994). Technical challenges are clearly defined problems that can be solved using existing skills, whilst adaptive challenges are more complex, lack clear solutions, and involve changes in attitudes, values, and behaviour. Most key initiatives sponsored by CEOs and BODs, alluded to earlier, fall squarely into the adaptive category and cannot be effectively addressed by leadership teams that find themselves mired in a constant state of anxiety.
If you are an executive who feels that your team is not fully embracing their roles, chances are that the root cause lies in either unclear expectations or being overwhelmed by the sheer number and scope of adaptive challenges that your team confronts.
Sign #3 – Conflict is avoided at all cost
The final sign that your leadership team is in trouble is also the most counterintuitive. We observed that leadership teams who actively avoid conflict – with their senior leaders, their peers, and their direct reports – perform significantly worse than teams that are comfortable to initiate and manage it productively.
It is worth clarifying that when we mention conflict, there are two different types to consider:
- Relationship conflict, which pertains to contention between individuals; and
- Task conflict, which centres on issues, processes, or problems rather than personalities.
We actively encourage leadership teams to avoid the former and learn how master the latter.
The tangible benefits of encouraging productive conflict in leadership teams are substantial and, in our opinion, far outweigh the fleeting moment of discomfort they create.
For example, the senior leaders we engage with are initially uncomfortable when being asked about the quality of interactions with their direct reports. “When was the last time a direct report openly challenged you?” is one of the conversation starters that catches many senior leaders off-guard as the display of open dissent by a direct report is usually frowned upon in most organisational settings.
The real danger of team members not feeling at liberty to openly challenge their senior leaders lies in them engaging in self-censorship, where critical information or dissenting opinions that could improve outcomes and identify risks at an early stage are deliberately withheld.
Once senior leaders come to terms with the notion of welcoming this type of conflict – seeing it as a means to surface invaluable data points from their inner circle – they begin to look past the initial discomfort and fully embrace it.
The tendency to avoid conflict can also undermine the credibility of leadership team heads when engaging with their own workstream. In one of our client engagements, for example, several department leaders exhibited an unwillingness to address counterproductive employee actions, including disruptions and late arrivals to meetings. The failure to call out this bad behaviour on the spot compromised their leadership reputation and raised tensions among other subordinates who expected their leaders to step up to the occasion.
It is worth remembering that any meaningful improvement in performance requires challenging the status quo, which inherently involves the management of conflict.
If you notice that your leadership team continuously shies away from initiating and managing conflict productively – with you, their peers, their team, and relevant stakeholders – chances are that they are in trouble.
Summary
It is easy to forget that we find ourselves in rather uncharted territories these days and there is a real temptation for leadership teams to try and ‘play it safe’ by holding on to behaviours and mindsets that served them well throughout their careers. Following these ‘true and tested’ strategies from the past provide a false sense of security that stops leadership teams from realising that they need to develop a new set of capabilities to successfully compete in today’s non-linear world.
The purpose of this article was for me to alert readers of some of the early warning signs that suggest that many of the past business practices and behaviours are on their way to becoming obsolete, and new market realities calling for a profound rethink in what is required to maintain a high-performing team going forward.
There are too many variables to predict exactly in which direction team competition will evolve. However, what is certain is that leadership teams need to evolve if they want to maintain their futrure relevance.
It is worth remembering: If your leadership team is not evolving, it is falling behind.
