Leadership Team Traps

Check all that apply:

  • Speed Traps and Tyranny of the Urgent – flooded by e-mails, endless meetings, and crisis management our team is often reactive and loses sight of the big picture.
  • Partial and Piecemeal Programs – leadership development, succession planning, customer service, lean, safety, talent/performance management, IT systems, executive coaching, are separate programs not well linked together.
  • Leadership Lip Service – leadership team members send contradictory messages about our core values and desired culture through inconsistent behaviors.
  • Not Building Change Capacity – our change and development efforts don’t engage the hearts and heads of key leaders and frontline staff and don’t energize and equip them to make it happen.
  • Teams Not Pulling Together – strong leaders drive change in their “silo” and work at cross-purposes. This weakens the team and our culture development efforts.
  • Communication Breakdowns – leadership teams aren’t united in strategic priorities, key messages, behaviors that model our vision and values, and rigorous implementation planning.
  • Failing to Follow-Through – strategies and development plans often lose focus because we don’t have a robust implementation process engaging key teams with a disciplined follow- through process.

An organization’s culture ripples out from the team leading it. When leadership teams slide into these traps, their culture is weakened. It’s one of the main reasons for the high failure rate of efforts to improve customer service, quality, safety, innovation, employee engagement, retain top talent, or introduce new technologies.

Yesterday I delivered a webinar on Executive Team Building and Culture Development. This 60 minute session started with a deeper look at these traps. We then walked through the key steps to an offsite leadership team retreat that refocuses the team on critical strategic issues to strengthen their teamwork and their culture.

You can now view the archived webinar by clicking here.