Most senior leadership teams aren’t. They are the chief executive’s direct reports, meeting monthly, each reporting on their own patch, with the real decisions taken elsewhere in pairs and corridors. That isn’t a criticism. It’s the default shape, and it works well enough until something changes and the organisation needs a group at the top that can decide and act together.
What makes a team a team
Richard Hackman spent thirty years at Harvard studying what makes teams work, and his first condition, set out in Leading Teams, is the one most senior groups fail: a real team has a task that only the group can do, members who know who’s on it, and boundaries that stay put long enough for people to learn to work together. When Hackman and Ruth Wageman turned that lens on senior leadership teams in Senior Leadership Teams, a study of more than a hundred top teams, they found that most had never settled what the team was for. Members couldn’t agree who was on it. The chief executive treated it as a sounding board on some days and a decision body on others.
Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith drew the same line in the Harvard Business Review in 1993: a working group pools individual contributions, a team produces work that needs the members to do it jointly. Both are legitimate. The mistake is to run a working group, call it a team, and then wonder why the team-building day didn’t take.
That matters for anyone thinking of buying team coaching, because coaching a group that hasn’t decided to be a team gives you a friendlier working group. Hackman’s own view was blunt: get the design right first, then coach. A compelling purpose, the right people and a clear remit do more for a team’s performance than any amount of help with how members talk to each other, and coaching lands far better on a team that has those things than on one that doesn’t.
Three questions before you commission anything
What is the work only this group can do? Not the sum of the directorate reports, but the decisions, trade-offs and judgements that need the whole group in one conversation. If the answer is “approve things”, you have a committee, and committees don’t need coaching, they need a shorter agenda.
Who is on it, and does everyone agree? Ask each member to write the list. In my experience the lists rarely match, and the gaps (the deputy who attends but doesn’t vote, the finance director who’s in every decision but not in the meeting) are where the trouble sits.
What has just changed? Teams become real, or fall apart, at turning points: a new chief executive, a strategy that’s shifted, a merger, a founder stepping back, a first leadership team formed out of a partnership that ran on instinct. These are the moments when the purpose and membership questions are live and can still be answered. A year later the shape has set, and changing it costs far more.
What that means for coaching
If the first two questions have clear answers and the third has just happened, the team is ready for coaching and will get more from it than at any other time. That’s the work I do, and the shape of it is on the senior leadership team coaching page. If the first two questions don’t have answers, that’s the work to do first, and it’s shorter and cheaper than coaching. I’d rather tell you that in the first conversation than find it out in the third session.
And if the group at the top isn’t the problem at all, if it’s reflecting something in the organisation around it, that’s a different article.
References
Hackman, J.R. (2002) Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Katzenbach, J.R. and Smith, D.K. (1993) ‘The discipline of teams’, Harvard Business Review, March–April 1993. hbr.org.
Wageman, R., Nunes, D.A., Burruss, J.A. and Hackman, J.R. (2008) Senior Leadership Teams: What It Takes to Make Them Great. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.