4.4
By Henrik Graungaard, Strategic Leadership Consultant at CfL, updated September 2024
In the best case, the leadership team functions as a dream team. In the worst case, competition among the individual leaders becomes destructive, and mediocrity prevails.
Assuming that a well-functioning leadership team is crucial for your organization’s performance, my most important advice is: Prioritize time to build and maintain the leadership team.
I have advised on leadership development for over 20 years and have participated in numerous leadership teams myself. Unfortunately, what often goes wrong for leaders of leaders is that they do not prioritize work on the leadership team. It may function adequately, but, as is well known, that is rarely conducive to value creation.
The leadership team must ensure that your company achieves its goals and that the entire organization remains focused on delivering what it was created to do. Regardless of level, the leadership team is responsible for ensuring that the company pursues its strategy and fulfills its purpose.
Moreover, the leadership team serves as the cultural carrier of the company’s values, so work on developing the team cannot be overemphasized. Time is the most essential factor—but prioritization alone is not enough.
Below, I have summarized my 7 recommendations for making the leadership team a success.
A leadership team is usually composed of leaders from different business units or functional areas. This means that, by default, the members do not share a common working community.
The first step is to establish a foundation for collaboration. Do this by identifying what you have in common:
Then consider:
It is important to design your collaboration so that it is clear what constitutes common tasks and what falls within individual departments. Without a shared purpose, you may simply wait for your own topics to come up. Boredom can set in if you are not clear on what is mutually important.
Teams, Groups, and Systems
In smaller organizations, there’s usually just one leadership team, while larger companies often operate with an entire leadership system made up of subgroups.
Whether you’re working with a team, a group, or a full system depends on the task at hand—but the purpose remains the same:
The leadership system’s key role is to set the direction, ensuring that everyone in the organization is working toward a shared goal.
Henrik Graungaard
Henrik is a Strategic Leadership Consultant at CfL. He has extensive experience in leading strategic change projects across both the private and public sectors. His work ranges from advising senior leaders to facilitating leadership teams and transformation initiatives, as well as designing internal leadership development programs.
He also teaches on CfL’s courses in board governance.
Get to know one another. As with any team, it is crucial to work on trust, motivation, communication, and feedback. In order to trust that the others in the leadership team have something valuable to offer, everyone must be aware of their own position and challenges.
At CfL, we use various tests to map personal profiles and decision-making styles, and it is good practice to continuously evaluate your leadership team and your way of working together.
The leadership teams I work with often take off for a couple of days twice a year, focusing, among other things, on whether the team has the right setup.
In larger organizations, it is also important to get to know other leadership teams, as there is often a tendency to think “them against us.” In addition to prioritizing your own group, as a leader of leaders, you must break down silos to shift resources from one department to another.
It is about creating a culture where you help each other and where, in terms of values, you see yourselves as part of a leadership system characterized by trust and loyalty. Remember, it can be lonely to be a leader. When you become a leader of leaders, you join a new community—think of the group as your secure base where your leadership colleagues have your back.
In any leadership system, a hierarchy will always exist. This is natural, and it is therefore important to clarify who has the mandate to make which decisions. When should you report back if there are deviations from, for example, budgets or other specific matters?
One of the tasks of the leadership team is to make sound decisions. This requires that you are clear about how decisions are made and that the process is of high quality. In addition to setting the direction, you must be able to regulate it when questions arise. This demands execution and decision-making power from the top.
There must be a hierarchy regarding decision-making power, but it is equally important to delegate decisions as far down the organization as possible—to subordinate leadership teams or employees—in order to create ownership throughout the organization.
Read also: How to Transition from Strategy to Action
There is substantial evidence that diversity pays off and is valuable for a team’s efficiency and ability to produce results. Often, it is desirable to bring in individuals who stand out in terms of personality, gender, education, or other factors.
Turnover always causes disruptions, and diversity requires effort from the group in order to succeed.
First, it requires psychological safety. It is important that members feel free to be themselves and speak their minds without fear of consequences. Second, it requires onboarding.
For new leaders to quickly get up to speed, they must be introduced to how the organization operates. In some cases, a new leader may shadow an experienced leader for a period to understand the day-to-day and what is expected. A key element of this process is prioritizing time for togetherness.
Sometimes a leadership team that has functioned for a long time may become stagnant. It can be difficult for outsiders to integrate, which is why it is beneficial to create variation in the leadership team’s working methods. As with other teams, you should regularly review meeting structures and the composition of the group.
Read also: Why "the best for the job" is a poor argument
One of the toughest phases when working with leadership teams is creating openness around the issues no one dares to bring up. People differ in how open they are, how much control they want, and how involved they wish to be.
When psychological safety is lacking, I sometimes work with the metaphor of “the elephant in the room”: What is it that we’re not talking about?
Another metaphor I use is the “cheese dome.” Everyone sees it, but no one dares to lift it—because what’s underneath stinks.
For example, there might be a team member who consistently underperforms. Everyone knows it, but no one says anything. It could also be someone who’s overly submissive—or, on the contrary, someone who regularly disrespects their peers. When these issues are left unaddressed for years, they can create serious dysfunction.
An overly dominant CEO who constantly directs the leadership team is also problematic. Ask the CEO, and it’s probably not even their intention.
That’s why leadership development is essential. At CfL, we also use team assessments as an entry point to understanding the underlying dynamics.
By definition, it is the CEO’s responsibility to focus on external changes – what changes occur politically, technologically, among customers, and competitors. However, the CEO is highly dependent on receiving information from leaders in various business units or functional areas, so everyone must be responsible for staying informed.
In the private sector, frameworks for salary and bonus schemes are typically set at the top, so the CEO must have a thorough understanding of any incentive systems. If you create a culture where leaders compete, it will have consequences. The question is whether it supports the way you want to lead the company.
Regardless of level, it is your responsibility as a leader of other leaders to prepare and conduct meetings and follow up on them. How are your leadership team’s motivation, well-being, and performance relative to the group? Do they contribute sufficiently?
If someone is particularly struggling during a period, it must be addressed. Create openness so that the leadership team can help each other with the difficult issues.
When I work with leadership teams, I always target actions that generate the best results for the given organization. There is no universal recipe or quick fix, but a rule of thumb is to always ask yourself: Is the work value-creating?
In crisis situations, many find it useful to meet weekly to take the temperature of various departments; however, this does not necessarily have to continue. And if, as a leader, you have 10–12 people in your reference group who do not naturally belong to the same team – for example, in a municipality – then you might only need to meet a few times a year.
Meeting frequency will depend on tasks and context, so you must continuously assess what the situation calls for.
The challenge is that traditions can easily develop for doing things in a certain way. Therefore, I recommend that you together periodically reassess and step out of the usual context to focus on developing the leadership team rather than simply holding meetings.
Read also: Why You Should Work with Situational Leadership
All my recommendations should be viewed in light of the fact that leadership systems are not as linear as they once were.
In the organizations of the future, hierarchies will be broken down—and that is already underway. Decision-making power is being pushed closer to customers and users, which increases the demands on leadership teams. You must be even clearer in setting the direction and communicating with precision.
As leaders, you take on a more facilitative role, which naturally affects how you create effective leadership teams.
And remember, you are never finished. Like all teams, your leadership team must continuously adapt to changes in tasks, strategy, technology, and the external environment. It is an ongoing process that must be regularly evaluated. And we return to my initial advice: You must prioritize time to build and maintain your leadership team.
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