Senior Team Coaching & Development

The senior management team (SMT) is arguably the most important group in any organisation. They have the most overt power and their decisions have implications for everyone else in the organisation, as well as for the future of the organisation itself, and yet the senior management team is often poorly resourced to accomplish its tasks. Despite all the importance we purport to give to the value of the ‘team’, we continue to celebrate in our society the achievement of the individual leader; the CEO standing proudly atop their organisation. Yet the current economic, technological and cultural environment that organisations currently find themselves immersed in, whether they are private or public sector organisations is one which can only be described as both extremely complex and as equally uncertain. Never before has it been so important that leaders are required to tap into the wisdom of the whole senior management team and work as one, if they are to survive, let alone thrive. What’s required of these senior management teams and their leaders is to morph into a more integrated senior ‘leadership’ team, which is both agile and yet able to make more insightful decisions by accessing the knowledge and experience within the diversity of its membership. This is where senior team coaching and development comes in.

In the same way that executive coaching makes individuals more competent as leaders, so team coaching helps senior teams work more effectively together by increasing their shared sense of leadership. A relevant quotation is “talented teams outperform teams of talent” (David Whitaker). Whereas teams spend most of their time on the tasks they need to complete, team coaching specifically focuses on the process of how they work together to realise their combined potential.

Most senior level teams find it almost impossible to work together effectively and achieve the results that the business demands of them. We work with  senior teams to both develop individuals within the team and to develop the team’s capacity to work effectively in relationship with their peers and others, allowing the team to realise its true potential.

A modern perspective in considering what constitutes leadership is to view leadership, not just as a set of qualities which reside in the leader, but to consider leadership as a process defining the relationship between a leader and all the team members. Looking at leadership this way brings into importance the need to create and then maintain these complex relationships. This is the role of team coaching; to explore and help the team agree the ways which they need to work together to be effective and to uncover and resolve dysfunctional team behaviours which impeded team effectiveness.

Our team development programmes are tailored to the specific organisational needs and increase individual and team awareness and develop participants’ understanding of how they contribute to the overall effectiveness of the senior management team. We begin by interviewing the senior team and its leadership to identify what shifts are needed by them to be more impactful, to be more trusting of each other and be able to co-create the outcomes desired for the organisation and then to be able to hold the organisation to account for delivering these outcomes. We diagnose where the team is in relation to this, identify the gaps and work with the team to eliminate these gaps through both a supportive, yet challenging set of team interventions.