The Change Catalyst

Chapter 32Building Extraordinary Leadership Teams

While it is vitally important that your organisation's leaders are all doing the best jobs possible, most of the results in today's collegiate, meritocratic, open-plan business world are managed and performed by teams. So it is vitally important that you make sure you get the most out of your most important of crews: your organisation's leadership team.

Most employees look at their company's leadership team with a mixed air of awe and bemusement; awe at the confidence, wealth and status of the diners at the corporation's top table, and often a sense of bemusement as to how they got there and the lengths to which some of them will go to hold onto their seat.

Let's be honest with ourselves, behaviour among the top team doesn't always live up to expectations. Just two of many examples of this I could name include:

1. Differences of opinion almost caused fisticuffs during a Board meeting of one of the world's largest banks as the Group Marketing Director dared to disagree with the pronouncements forthcoming from the all-conquering head of the Investment Banking arm.
2. The Board of one of the world's leading global pharmaceutical companies was described by an insider as ‘a pack of Alpha males trying to score points off one another.’

And family businesses can often be worse, as childhood pecking orders and ancient squabbles can come to the fore during times of stress, and family members are promoted over more competent employees.

Of course, ...