Teams at the Top:
How to Achieve Executive Team Alignment
By Roz Turner
President
founder of Roz Turner & Associates
www.rozturner.com
If you are a member of a “team at the top” of your organization, then you are charged with setting the strategies that put your company on course for its success. Nothing is worse than when a decision-making team gets bogged down and finds that it has difficulty moving forward. A “team at the top” sets the pace and direction for others to follow. It can send a bad message to the rest of the organization when the Executive Leadership team gets mired in ineffective operating behaviors that slow down the action.
Executive Team Alignment can help leaders to quickly face critical challenges, rapidly make tough decisions and sustain ownership of the decisions made. Sounds good, doesn’t it? If you’ve been on a team that often gets “stuck”, you may be thinking, “how can I sign up for that?”
What Executive Alignment Is and Isn’t
Alignment is not a type of agreement, “buy-in” or a willingness to “go along with” something, but rather, a commitment to work in new ways. To achieve authentic alignment, most executive teams need to fundamentally change how they interact and behave. Alignment is an ongoing process not a one time event. It’s a way of working together that demands that each member of the team be willing to communicate openly and honestly and not hold back.
Put simply, alignment is the commitment to “own” a decision even if you might not agree with it. Let me give you an example of how “alignment” works. Let’s say XYZ Team is charged with the decision concerning which of its products to showcase at an upcoming trade show. Tom, VP of New Products, has just launched a brand new product and he really would like to “showcase” it at this event. However, the bugs have not been worked out of it yet, and there still are some risks. Most of the senior management team wants to “showcase” a different product – one that is the “bread and butter” of XYZ’s organization’s business. Tom has delivered his message about why he thinks it would be important to “showcase” his division’s product, even though there are some risks, but the rest of XYZ’s team still supports the other idea. Using a democratic vote, the decision has been made to showcase the “bread and butter” product at the next trade show.
Tom is disappointed, but can he still be “aligned” with this decision? The answer is yes, if he is willing to “own” the decision that the team has made, even if though this is not the decision he would have made, if it was up to him alone to make the decision.
How do you “own” the decision and achieve “aligned action” with your team?
It’s hard for a team to move forward, if even one person on the team is not pulling in the same direction. What we’re going for here, is for all of the arrows to be pointing in the same direction – called “aligned action”, vs a team operating like a bunch of arrows being pointed in different directions.
The Aligned Executive Team:
An Executive Team operating from various “agendas”
In Tom’s case in the example above, he could be in trouble if what he says publicly in the meeting is that he’s “okay” with the decision. But instead of “owning” the decision and helping it to move forward successfully, the minute Tom hits the hallway, he sees Sally, one of his direct reports and he tells her, “I can’t believe this Leadership Team. They (like he’s not even a member of it!) don’t want to feature our new product at the trade show. I can’t believe they are making this huge mistake.” This is what I call a “hip pocket” veto because Tom is not upfront about his veto, but lets it loose when he leaves the Leadership Team meeting.
The leadership fall out from a “hip pocket” veto is huge. Sally, spreads the message that Tom gave her even further and has no interest in supporting the other product’s success at the trade show – even though her department has been asked to help prepare the exhibit and marketing materials. Soon other priorities get in the way of trade show preparation and …. You know the rest… they definitely are not all pulling in the same direction in this example.
If Tom had “owned” the decision, he would have realized that he needed as a member of the Leadership Team, to do everything he could do to enroll and lead others so that the trade show was a success. The place for him to talk about his concerns is with the Leadership Team itself, not with others outside of the team.
Being “aligned” with a team occurs when our participation in the overall success of the organization is greater than our need to “be right” about a decision.
Red light, yellow light, green light – it’s no child’s game!
Once I was working with an Executive Team that adopted a very simple formula for getting things “out on the table” and getting each team member to voice their concerns about a particular decision. This team used a simple “red light, yellow light, green light” model to summarize where they were at in their discussions:
- a red light – meant that it was a “show stopper” – the team member could not support the idea or decision;
- a yellow light meant that he or she had some concerns or reservations that still needed to be discussed,
- a “green light” meant that the team member was in full support and “ready to go” with this decision.
What Works to Create an Aligned Team
I have worked with hundreds of Executive Teams and have found the following characteristics and behaviors need to be in place for a team to become capable of being an “Aligned Team”:
- Being willing to engage in straight communication about the tough issues and having no “sacred cows” or things that are deemed “undiscussable”
- Communicating often and intentionally as a team. This means having regularly scheduled meetings that you can count on.
- Knowing your own and each team member’s strengths and limitations and being willing and able to coach one another
- Constantly improving your leadership capacity – by getting feedback from the people who report to you and from others on the team
- Learning how to work together to turn a “breakdown” into a “breakthrough” without getting stuck in blame or hidden agendas.
- Embracing a set of “best practice” leadership team operating behaviors. Identifying the team behaviors that are important to your leadership team and modeling them for the rest of the organization.
Pay now or pay later
Given today’s current economic climate and the challenging business environment, now’s the time for better executive team alignment. It takes a high degree of intention, commitment and time to create an aligned executive team. Executive leaders can “pay now” by taking the time and making the commitment to work together to increase their effectiveness as a team, or they will “pay later” when they have business challenges and their team is not up to the task.
For more information, contact Roz Turner at 425-746-8757 or roz@rozturner.com. Please visit our web-site at www.rozturner.com.
