How to Drive Performance by Aligning Your Executive Team

I believe that you can’t coach height—there are certain things that don’t change much. In this session, I’ll show you how you can dramatically improve the results of your executive team.

• If you’re the kind of leader who seems 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 love this because I’ll show how to stop the chaos of no-impact coaching.
• If, on the other hand, your executive team could not operate more effectively—they hold each other accountable, they bring great ideas, they know how to challenge each other without chewing each other up—you’ll love this because you’ll get some insights into WHY this is working so you don’t mess it up with your next hire to the team.
• And, if you’re suffering some recurring issues as a team that seem never to go away, you’ll find out why and what to do about it.

These challenges to optimizing an executive team happen everywhere.

Here are a few steps to get your executive team quickly working more effectively:

Step 1: UNLIKE personality tests, which are, unfortunately, the person’s own interpretation of their behaviors (which tend to be wrong and usually offer little insight into how to fix the gap), have your executives take an emotional intelligence assessment. Then, you’ll be able to see how they think and what’s driving the behaviors you want to correct.

Step 2: Look at your “human capital audit”—fancy words for the summary 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 “group think” and meetings that have meetings.

But the outcomes and deadlines are not likely to be hit.

Or if you have too high of adherence to organization skill, you may have a lot of people who might miss the big picture or the key info AND insist on being right—causing a lot of friction. Look at the gaps and create a hiring and development plan to fix the recurring issues.

Step 3: Create a hiring and development plan. From the short-comings, create a plan to get better results as an executive team and to know what positions you need to hire for.

You’ll not only correct behaviors; you’ll discover the true core abilities of everyone on your team. You might even discover that there other different—better—“seats on the bus” for some of your executives. You may also find that there are some 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—because 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.
• Second, find the gaps in the human capital audit.
• Third, through hiring, career paths, 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, where I’ll show you how you can create more authenticity in your conversations during executive team meetings.