How to Get Your Executive Team to Grow into Even More Effective Leaders

I believe that being a great executive requires each of us to grow as people.

In this session, I’m going to share with you how to get your executives to grow in how they communicate with each other.

• If you’re the kind of leader who feels like your executives get along well, but they don’t always go into the eye of the needle to address tough subjects as effectively as you’d like, you’ll discover there is more they can do.
• If, on the other hand, you think your executive team has tremendous growth potential, if they’d only bring their A-game, you’ll love this because I’ll show you how you can help develop them and get bigger results.
• And, if your team is super-effective—challenges one another productively, and works through conflict while growing their affinity for each other—then great news, you’re going to discover how to evolve your team even more so that you can grow your profits even faster.

There are a few challenges to getting your team to be more authentic and powerful in their communication.

• First, there are often one or two on your executive team who, although they are good people, participate in intentional or unintentional passive-aggressive behavior. It causes complexity, confusion, and a deteriorating feeling of safety in the productivity of conversations.
• Second, some people don’t have the skills or confidence to have tough conversations. Instead, they skirt important conversations that need to be held, causing slower implementation and reduced results.
• And third, when people conflict with each other, they damage their relationships. It can cause a “shut down” of productive communication as resentments rise, and game-playing becomes accepted.

From talking with hundreds of CEOs, I hear these happen almost everywhere.

I’m now going to give you three steps to help you develop your executive team’s ability to work together more productively.

Step 1: UNLIKE so many executive development programs that teach you to “pick your battles,” the reality is that you want team members to be fully heard on all issues WHILE they are listening to each other with respect.
Whenever I talk to the highest performing organization’s CEOs, I often hear them tell me that their executive team meetings are extremely lively, and topics are hotly debated. And at the end of the meeting, people walk away closer—not resentful that they didn’t get their way.

Step 2: As opposed to what many executive teams have accepted as “normal”—including accusatory and blaming language—set the expectation that all conversations must be “advancing.”

IF someone repeatedly can’t advance the conversation in a productive way, he may not be executive material.

Step 3: Unlike the three-step management development program—“here’s your desk, here’s your phone, good luck”—realize you must grow your managers into executives and grow your executives as people.

Utilize executive development that includes “ontological coaching”—”how to be” coaching, that makes them the source of the solution, and addresses that it is not just what you do but who you are that makes or breaks an executive.

Three things:

• Expect them to speak up whenever they disagree.
• Require that all disagreements be attacks on the ideas, not on the people. Everything that’s said is said in a way that moves the ball down the court.
• Finally, don’t expect them to know how to do this—instead, make sure they get the coaching and development about how to “BE” an executive. It’s not enough to learn the skills of an executive—they need to know how to be if the team is to create peak performance together.

Developing an executive team so that each person becomes the best person they can be and brings their higher-self to work will not only catapult your profit and growth, but it will create ease and joy in the workplace.

Make sure you tune in next time where I’ll show you how executives should bring ideas to each other and your board or CEO for approval so that you can make far better decisions in much less time and make the experience of being an executive more fulfilling and easier.