According to a study conducted by DDI, EY, and The Conference Board, only 14 percent of CEOs have the leadership talent needed to grow their companies. This research analyzed over 28,000 leaders and HR professionals, showing there’s a huge problem with the leadership teams businesses build. When companies don’t effectively create an executive leadership team, it puts the entire organization in peril. Leadership starts at the top and dictates company culture, a business’s ability to succeed, and what type of impact it has on the world and the lives of those driving the organization’s mission forward. Without it, a company and those who work at it will inevitably suffer.
A business is only as successful as its leaders. Leadership expert John C. Maxwell refers to this as “The Law of the Lid” in his book The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, stating: “The higher you want to climb, the more you need leadership.” In short, he means, company growth gets capped depending on how effective or ineffective its leaders are. To determine how great your leaders are, all you need to do is take a closer look at the organization because leadership reflects upon the business itself.
As the statistic above shows, most companies do have room to improve when it comes to building a stronger senior leadership team. To do this, find out more about the role of a leadership team, what a good one looks like, its top priorities, common problems, and tips for growing your leaders and business.
Developing a strong leadership team is crucial for any organization that wants to thrive and grow in today’s rapidly changing business landscape. Leadership teams set the vision, values, and strategic direction for a company. They ensure alignment across the organization and drive execution of key initiatives. However, building an effective leadership squad takes thought and intention.
In this article, we’ll explore practical tips on how to build a skilled leadership team that delivers exceptional results.
Promote Emerging Leaders Already Within Your Organization
Strong leaders often rise up from within an organization. Look around your company and identify high-potential employees who demonstrate leadership abilities. Key traits to look for include emotional intelligence, critical thinking, passion, and the ability to inspire and develop others.
Invest time getting to know these emerging leaders. Understand their talents, motivations and development areas. Provide challenging assignments that help ready them for bigger leadership roles. Mentor them to strengthen their skills. When the time is right, promote standout employees into key leadership positions
Internal candidates already understand your company culture and industry Promoting from within builds loyalty and retains institutional knowledge, Just ensure rising stars get the development and training required to be effective leaders at the next level,
Recruit External Leaders Who Align to Your Culture and Strategy
While developing internal talent is ideal, gaps will emerge where your company needs to recruit leaders from the outside. Target executives and managers who possess the specific skills and experience your leadership team currently lacks.
Look for leaders who align with your organizational values and culture. Bringing in someone who clashes with your company’s ways of working can quickly become problematic.
When interviewing external candidates, look beyond skills and experience. Evaluate their leadership style, mindset, emotional intelligence and other intangibles that make a good leader. The best hires will quickly assimilate into your culture.
Empower Leaders to Make Decisions Aligned to Company Goals
Effective leaders take ownership and make decisions, rather than constantly defer upwards. To build an empowered leadership squad, you need to delegate authority appropriately.
Define each leader’s realm of authority and the decisions they can make independently. This boosts accountability and avoids confusion.
Communicate key company goals and guardrails. Equip leaders with the data and insights they need. Then trust them to make good choices that align to the overall corporate strategy.
Mistakes will happen. Resistoverride decisions or micromanaging. Instead, coach leaders after missteps to strengthen their decision-making. Empowered leaders will gain confidence, engage their teams and help move the organization forward.
Provide Ongoing Mentorship and Development
Leadership capabilities must continuously evolve and improve for an organization to succeed. Provide personalized mentorship and development to strengthen your up-and-coming leaders.
Assess each leader’s strengths and development areas. Some may need to improve strategic thinking, communication or conflict resolution skills for example. Others may need to build self-awareness, emotional intelligence or inclusiveness.
Create leadership development plans that address these needs. Training workshops, 360 reviews, executive coaching, mentoring programs, job rotations and challenging project assignments all build leadership skills.
Be patient. Leadership development takes time and happens through experience. But the investment pays huge dividends in the performance and impact of your management team.
Foster Open Communication and Collaboration
Siloed teams and information hoarding kill productivity and innovation. To perform at their best, your leadership squad needs to communicate openly. Encourage transparency, healthy debate and sharing ideas across the organization.
Create cross-functional leadership teams to collaborate on major initiatives and strategic priorities. Break down walls between departments. When leaders model openness, it becomes contagious.
Facilitate regular leadership team meetings for updating projects, addressing concerns and solving problems collectively. Have skip-level meetings where senior leaders interact directly with frontline employees to hear their perspectives.
Communication and collaboration ultimately create alignment and agility to continuously improve.
Hire Coaches to Provide Objective Third-Party Feedback
Unbiased feedback is invaluable for leadership development but often hard to find internally. Hiring professional leadership coaches can accelerate growth.
Experienced coaches assess each leader’s capabilities and tendencies using validated tools. They identify unseen blind spots and provide brutally honest feedback most will never get internally.
Ongoing coaching helps leaders improve self-awareness, emotional intelligence, communication, conflict management, strategic thinking and other skills. Coaches give leaders impartial advice and hold them accountable to commitments.
Leadership coaching delivers an ROI between 500-700%, so the investment pays dividends. But coaches must be carefully evaluated to ensure a fit with your leaders and culture.
Conduct Team Building Exercises and Retreats
Bringing your leadership team together regularly for team building deepens connections. This fosters trust and improves collaboration to achieve shared goals.
Host fun team building activities outside the office. Shared unique experiences and even friendly competition help leaders get to know each other’s personalities.
Annual leadership retreats allow your team to immerse in strategic planning and culture building. Get away from distractions and focus on strengthening relationships.
Team events should reinforce your core values. Weave in community service and attending inspirational leadership events. Find ways to have fun together and create shared memories.
The camaraderie and trust gained from team building pays back tenfold in performance. But make sure to balance relationship building with producing results.
Reward and Recognize Great Leadership
Positive reinforcement develops leaders faster than criticism. Catch leaders doing things right and recognize their wins, no matter how small. Praise them publicly. Send thank you notes. Award fun experiential gifts for achieving key milestones.
Celebrate both great leadership and great culture. For example, call out leaders who role model collaboration or live your values exceptionally well.
Link rewards and recognition directly to your leadership competencies and success metrics. This reinforces and incentivizes the exact leader behaviors you want to see.
Recognition is most powerful when it comes from peers. Have leaders recognize each other. This builds camaraderie and healthy competition.
Positive reinforcement of wins creates an upward spiral of performance and aligns your leadership squad.
Prune Leaders Who Don’t Meet Expectations
Handling underperformers decisively is crucial. Leaders who consistently miss targets, demonstrate toxic behaviors or clash with your culture must be removed. This isn’t easy. But failure to prune ineffective leaders demoralizes the whole team and hampers results.
Set clear expectations and give struggling leaders opportunities to improve. Provide mentoring and development plans. If issues persist, have candid conversations about finding a better role fit elsewhere.
While pruning leaders can be uncomfortable in the moment, it ultimately benefits your culture and performance. Your “A players” will appreciate inconsistent performers being held accountable. And you create space for strong leaders to grow.
The above tips will help you build a cohesive, empowered leadership team equipped to drive your organization forward. With the right team in place, you will see improved communication, smarter decisions, and consistent execution on strategy. But remember, leaders also need ongoing development, coaching and care to sustain high performance. Invest in your leadership squad and they will rewarding your organization tenfold.
Top Causes of Ineffective Leadership Teams
Just because a leadership team exists doesn’t mean it’s effective. Differing personalities, agendas, and motives can all be contributing factors to this problem. Additionally, failure or ineffectiveness can also occur due to outside circumstances like changing CEOs. To find out more about why leadership teams don’t always drive impact, learn more below.
New Leaders Don’t Practice Change Management
Sometimes businesses need a change in leadership to be effective. Yet, when this isn’t coupled with organizational change management practices, it can cause panic and chaos. New leaders that come in with a heavy hand and start changing everything about the company need to understand that too much disruption too quickly produces fear, anxiety, and cynicism among their leadership team and the employees those people are responsible for guiding.
Unfortunately, many businesses struggle with this problem. As the Harvard Business Review provides, over 50 percent of CEOs at the largest American companies will be replaced within the next four years. Because this leader dictates who’s on their leadership and management team, a new CEO could come into the business and shake up the roster, which can cause a ripple of upset across the company.
