Senior Teams

“Never have boards been so in need of help and support in developing their collective capacity to rise to the growing challenge and expectation”

– Prof. Peter Hawkins 2014

The Role of the Senior Team

The board or senior team has four key roles:

• Ensuring the organisation has the right leadership
• Deciding on the strategic direction of the company and how this is executed
• Monitoring execution and results, including governance
• Providing advisory and support capability

The success of the board is judged by their ability to create value by defining the strategy, aligning resources and engaging the organisation to execute the plan.

Challenges

In our work with senior leadership teams, we have observed a number of common challenges.

• A lack of collective thinking when together
• Poor communication from the senior team to their organisation
• Team members operating from their functional responsibility rather than as a member of a senior team bringing a broader perspective
• Failure to take their key stakeholders’ views into account

How we help

Communication between board members is crucial, and there needs to be a healthy balance between constructive dialogue and challenge.

The team coach uses proven communication tools to encourage healthy debate that leads to collective decisions. The coach also guides the board on how and when they communicate their collective decisions throughout the organisation and their key stakeholders. The credibility of the board is directly affected by the unity, consistency and clarity of the messages they have agreed together.

Our work enables the board to understand their people better, to be clear in how they communicate, encourage initiative and diversity of thinking but still make timely decisions and execute effectively.

We work with these senior teams to develop strategies to strengthen leadership capacity and leadership bench below the board. Through robust profiling and a structured approach to talent management we improve the organisations ability to attract and retain the right people.

Our team profiling helps leaders to fast-track business team performance. It provides insight to guide leaders in executing strategy and developing their senior teams. Click here to read more about our PROPHET Senior Team Assessment and Profiling.