3 Essential Workshop Topics for Leadership Teams

It’s no secret that successful organisations invest heavily in developing the leadership skills of their individual senior managers. But often they give less attention to the collective skills of the senior management team and the impact this has on overall business performance.

Most senior team members are selected with a great deal of care and thought given to their personalities and suitability to the role. However, organisational objectives can and do change, and this often results in new senior teams being formed or merged together to address new goals. This team “formation through necessity” approach, and the subsequent mixture of personalities, can often make the collective transition on focus more challenging than it needs to be.

When senior teams are formed using this piecemeal approach, a number of negative outcomes can, and often do, arise:

The team’s common goals become diluted

Demonstrated through:

• Operational team leaders having conflicting interests
• A lack of trust evident amongst team members
• Team members avoiding conflict situations 

The team suffers from a lack of clarity on goals and strategy

Demonstrated through:

• An inability to concisely articulate business objectives
• A lack of focus on essential priorities
• Operations appearing chaotic and unfocused 

The leadership team struggles to get the best from their colleagues

Demonstrated through:

• Staff lacking engagement with goals
• People being confused with what to do and what not to do
• Management systems measuring and monitoring ineffectively

The fundamental challenges are to bring the leadership team together with a way of working that addresses team functionality, team outputs and their ability to communicate with operational teams around what’s newly important.

As individuals, and as a team, members must honestly appraise their skills, knowledge, attitudes and behaviours, so that they can start doing more productive things and stop doing wasteful things.

There are 3 workshops topics which we have used with great success in the past, which address these challenges and help sustain the changes required to achieve overall business objectives.

• High Performance Teaming workshops – These sessions focus on getting teams to work together more effectively, with an absence of politics. By the end of these workshops you should be able to provide a model and an instant action plan, which acts as a blueprint for teams to work more powerfully together, drawing on the strengths, motivations and behaviours of each individual. 
• Strategic Clarity workshops – These workshops should focus on giving the team a common view of objectives, key results and the strategic choices that will help achieve the corporate objectives. These sessions should aim to take the mystery out of goal and strategy setting. With the use of plain English they should be supported by robust reasoning behind the strategy formation. Delegates should leave these sessions with absolute clarity on business strategy and the goals that each element of the strategy is addressing. 
• Deployment Planning workshops – It’s no use everyone on the leadership team being clear on the goals and strategy of the organisation, if it is not communicated effectively to the rest of the business. These workshops should provide a clear action plan for leading the changes required. This action plan should include how the management and operational teams engage to achieve the required results. This enables everyone in the business to choose the right priorities and actions because performance measures cascade down as a result of strategic clarity. 

It’s important to note that these workshops are not mutually exclusive and results may only be achieved using a combination of all 3. Before the senior team can effectively communicate goals, motivate and engage the rest of the business, they need absolute clarity on the strategy that will contribute to the overall objectives. And before a team can get clarity on their strategy, they need to be aware of what individual strengths and behaviours will contribute most towards this strategy.

Whether you’re focused on individual or team development, One Performance can be your business partner to help accelerate your progress.