Senior LeadershipTeam Coaching Will Transform Your Business
Posted on Fri, May 04, 2012 @ 01:27 PM
Carefully study the executive management of any successful business and you will find a cohesive and comprehensive senior leadership team. The strength of this team is structured around the individual strengths of the team members, and how well those strengths blend and complement each other. It is not necessary that each member be well rounded, but it is an essential characteristic for developing a successful senior leadership team.
Results from a recent survey based on the work of Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D., the creator of the Clifton StrengthsFinder® assessment, identified four general categories of leadership strengths. Following are the categories and some of their characteristic traits.
- Strategic Thinking:
- Analytical
- Contextual
- Futuristic
- Creative
- Learner
- Executing:
- Achiever
- Arranger
- Consistency
- Focus
- Responsibility
- Relationship Building:
- Adaptability
- Developer
- Connectedness
- Harmony
- Individualization
- Influencing:
- Activator
- Communication
- Competition
- Self-Assurance
- Significance
A highly effective senior leadership team must have members who represent each of these four categories. A more successful team will not have one dominant person who tries to do everything alone, or a group of individuals with similar strengths. Instead, there will be a broad representation of these four general classifications.
The next obstacle in creating the best senior leadership team possible is to evaluate the strengths of the team members. It is important to realize each member will very likely have strengths that fall into different categories. Then it is necessary to determine how to best utilize these strengths and how to blend them all together into a cohesive team.
How will you develop these strengths to the best advantage of the team and the company? How will the team work together to strengthen each other? Is there an important component missing from your team?
Team coaching can take the individual strengths of your team members and multiply them, creating one single powerful and extremely effective leadership team.
With team coaching you will learn to recognize the true potential of your team members and your team as a whole. That potential will then strengthen your entire business.
Some advantages of team coaching for your senior leadership team:
- The individual strengths of your team members will be identified and developed. People will discover they have strengths they were unaware they possessed.
- Self-esteem among your team will increase, and this will be carried from the meeting rooms to the rest of the business.
- An outside team coach has no pro-conceived ideas of where any individual team member fits into a category or area of responsibility. This opens the possibility to discover a multitude of unknown talents and skills.
- Your team will experience increased personal belief in their individual achievements and that of the company.
- Communication and feedback will be expanded, leading to new and innovative ideas.
- With the team working together and balancing each other’s strengths, productivity will increase.
The senior leadership team within any business should be the most important group in that organization. The decisions they make have serious implications for everyone within the business, and for the continued future of the business.
Albert Einstein said, “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created then.”
Senior leadership teams within major businesses are a relatively new concept. The idea of team coaching is even newer. Nonetheless, both ideas have proven to be very valuable. The complexities inherent in today’s global business world have made it impossible for one, or even two, senior executives to effectively operate a successful business.
Diversity in the marketplace calls for diversity in the management team. Team coaching can help you harness that diversity.
