Test Your Executive Team to See Where They Come Up Short

I believe that you can’t coach height—that certain things don’t change much.

In this session, I’ll show you how you can dramatically improve the results driven by your executive team and its effectiveness.

If you seem to be coaching the same people on the same things to no avail—the proverbial, “every day at the landscaping firm, the green side goes up, and the brown side goes down”—and you’re wondering why you do not see changes in behavior, you’re going to enjoy this, because I’ll show how to stop the chaos of no-impact coaching.

If your executive team could not operate more effectively—they hold each other accountable, they bring great ideas, and they know how to challenge each other without chewing each other up—you’ll love this anyway, because you’ll get some insights into why this is working so you don’t mess it up with your next hire.

And, if you’re suffering some recurring issues as a team that seems to look like “problem 278” and “problem 132,” you’ll find out why and what to do about it.

These challenges to optimizing an exec team happen everywhere.

Here are a few steps to get your executive team more effective quickly.

Step 1: Personality tests are, unfortunately, the person’s own interpretation of their behaviors. These tend to be incorrect and often offer little insight into how to fix any gaps. Instead, make sure to have each of your executives take an emotional intelligence assessment, so you can see what the thinking is underneath the behaviors that are causing the same problems to occur.

Step 2: Look at your “human capital audit”—fancy words for the summation of how your executive team scores compared to the highest-performing executive teams. With that information in hand, you’ll see why you have some of the issues you have. For example, if your intuition and empathy are too high while your results orientation is too low, you have “groupthink” and “meetings to have meetings,” but the outcomes and deadlines are not likely to be hit. Or if you have too high adherence and organization skills, you may have a lot of people who might miss the big picture or the key info while insisting on being right, thus causing a lot of friction. Look at the gaps and create a plan, through hiring and development, to fix what will otherwise be a recurring issue.

Step 3: Create a hiring and development plan. From the shortcomings, create a plan to get better results as an executive team and to know what you need to hire in for. You may also find that there are better career paths for some that better utilize their core abilities. For example, a CEO with a high self-awareness score and a high results orientation score needs a president who can run the day-to-day so the CEO can be out there using that position to pull in big deals—that is how that person is built.

Three steps. First, assess, not with personality assessments but with emotional intelligence assessments that are proven to be useful in developing an executive team and comparing it to the highest-performing teams. Second, find the gaps in the human capital audit. Third, through hiring, career-pathing, and development, fix the gaps.

Emotional intelligence outranks skills and IQ in terms of whether an executive will be successful. Use it to make sure you get everyone going home feeling successful and good about who they are and how they fit.

Make sure to tune in next time, when I’ll show you how you can create more authenticity in your conversations during executive team meetings.