Focus on aligning top teams - Learning and considerations

Aligning top teams is really a critical part of the top wo/man’s job. This by itself can provide the single most significant leverage towards building a sustainable successful organization.

We are often called in with a wide variety of briefs and scope of work with respect to aligning top teams. Very often the issues expressed by the clients appear the same on the surface. But as you dig deeper through a formal or informal diagnosis, a wide variety of contextual, personality and interpersonal nuances are visible, differing from each top team to the other.

Looking at the data over the last 6 years, broadly there are three kinds of interventions which are asked for and are also found useful. 

Type 1 interventions are relatively more cognitive in nature and closer to strategy work than teamwork. For purposes of this piece of writing, the consideration set is 14 companies where we have been involved in top team alignment work over the last 12 months or so. These companies range from about 250 million USD to about 3500 million USD, spanning across industries such as biotech, pharma and healthcare, IT/ITES, Chemical, Financial Services, Hi-Technology and Infrastructure, and across Asia and Middle East.

While there is an element of people (including those in the room) that comes in, the work in this space is more about the organization, with the top team being viewed as ‘trustees’. Typically, this kind of work involves alignment around four key elements:

• Vision, purpose and goals
• Common values to help drive the organization
• Roadblocks and limitations
• Execution planning, including capability maps and metrics

The key findings for us in these interventions have been as below. For limited purposes of this article, areas where significant gaps were visible in the top team, focus and functioning are only mentioned. Areas of strength are not specifically mentioned here.

• Almost all organizations have a stated vision/mission, but less than 50 percent are happy with the cascading of these into goals down the line, and consequent execution. The top team expresses inability, lack of focus and time limitations as key challenges in this regard.
  
  
• Less than 30 percent of the top teams rated ‘the vision connects to and makes meaningful the day to day work for our employees’ high.
  
  
• There were clearly articulated values for all except one organization in this set. However, a clearly laid out set of behaviors aligned to values was missing in 50 percent of the set, leading to a lack of clarity on guidelines on code of conduct, rewards and punishment.
  
  
• There was a very little exploration of the individual values of the top team in relation to the stated organizational values, and how these played out. There was an assumption that there automatically would be value alignment if the individual is part of the top team. Only in two of the 14 organizations, there was specific and explicit work to examine values of top team members, look at potential conflicts with organization values, and actions planned.
  
  
• In 8 of the 14 organizations, when looking at limitations and roadblocks, the working together of the top team came up as an issue for discussion or resolution.
  
  
• In most organizations, the top team saw themselves as a part of driving the link between vision, goals and execution. However, detailed execution plans were apparently left to the next line. Except in 4 cases, the missing piece was the mechanism, format and governance mechanism of collective monitoring (as a top team- all members together, as against monitoring as individual BU leaders/functional heads). As a consequence, while each function or BU seemed to hit their goals, collective and strategic organizational goals were very often not met.
  
  
• Members of the top teams wore the functional or BU hats much more effectively that the hat of the ‘member of leadership team’ and integrator across boundaries. This came up as a roadblock to executing plans in 8 of the 14 organizations.
  
  
• In terms of execution and skill gaps, capability maps at an overall organizational level were not on the radar of the top team in 6 of the cases. Top team members were very knowledgeable and insightful about talent in their ‘own patch’ but had limited understanding of the overall talent map of the company, especially from the futuristic perspectives.
  
  

Type 2 interventions are mostly about working together as a team. These require a much deeper work on the personalities, styles and behaviors of individuals on the team. This kind of intervention also requires (almost as a starting point) appreciation from the sponsor and team members around elements of emotional intelligence, interpersonal chemistry etc., and how these can play a supportive role in helping build a high performing team.

For purposes of this article, the consideration set is 10 companies we worked with over last 24 months across 5 industry sectors, all industry leaders in their space.

The three key observations, apart from issues around personalities and individual capability revolve around the following:

• Conflict management is a capability issue that is ignored as a high priority item for top teams. All companies in the sample acknowledged it as an issue which hampered better alignment and eight of the ten responded that there was no or limited concrete action around this issue.
  
  
• Teams spent a fair amount of time on the targets, strategies etc., but seven of the top teams admitted that there was almost no time spent on personal development of the individuals in the team or on collective team working. For six of the teams, the experience with us was their first experience in the last 24 months where they were coming together to discuss items beyond targets and deliverables.
  
  
• There was almost no formal assessment of the top team members on a regular basis. It was assumed that those who had reached the top would be automatically effective. Only in two of the ten cases was there a formal method of regular assessment on individual capability and value creation role as part of the team.
  
  

Type 3 interventions are around providing the infrastructure to help individuals in a top team perform better. These interventions work around HR processes and policies exclusively applicable to the top team.

In our work with a wide variety of companies in this space, there are four key observations¹: 

In our work with top teams, these have been some of the key learnings. With several corporations, to our delight, we have been able to move from a diagnosis stage to a ‘let’s work together to find a solution’ stage. Companies are increasingly recognizing top team alignment as an area of focus and concrete action. 

¹Specific data is available but not referred to because of issues of overlaps and certain contradictions