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For many years, research has shown that sustaining high-performance in any organisation is largely dependent upon the level of excellence at which the executive leadership team operates. Indeed, this foundation has often been cited as one of the key reasons that GE grew so successfully during Jack Welch’s long tenure as CEO.
Many years ago, McKinsey’s work with executive teams across the globe led them to conclude that executive teams which demonstrated excellence in 3 key areas were the most successful. These 3 key areas were:
The team’s collective alignment to the company purpose
The quality of the team’s communication/connection between themselves
The team’s ability and agility to stay ahead of change.
The reality is that without the first two elements in place, the third element of agile change is practically impossible.
In early 2020, McKinsey published data highlighting that just under half of executive teams they researched were aligned to the organisational purpose, while more than half failed to communicate effectively. In such circumstances, an organisation’s ability to stay ahead of change is obviously negatively impacted. Indeed, McKinsey’s research concluded that a third of failed organisational transformations were directly due to ineffective executive teaming.
In today’s fast-changing world of ever-increasing complexity, it is even more important for executive teams to fire collectively and efficiently on all cylinders. Five key points to achieve this are:
Be Clear on what your shareholders need you to deliver and how they want it to be delivered.
Determine your strategy to fulfil this in a way that creates value for all involved, including staff and suppliers as well as the obvious clients. You need the best from all of them to sustain excellence.
Build great relationships between each member of your team and continue to develop as a high-performance team and a beacon to your organisation.
Build great relationships with all other stakeholders, continue to adapt to their needs and ensure your connection verifies the value you are creating for them.
LEARN – intentionally, continuously and in everything you do. Then accelerate your progress by leveraging your learning successfully across your organisation and through your stakeholder network.
With our collective experience, we have been supporting executive teams to become their best for over 30 years. Contact us via jonathan@pmsystems.co.uk to help your executive team shine even more brightly.