Russel Honoré
“I’m frustrated with the tension and disconnect I see between my executives, John. I’m hoping that getting them together to build a strategic plan can solve my problem.” Bill was the CEO, owner, and founder of Friction PR, a very successful public relations firm. He had just signed a major new client and was worried that their own internal executive friction could prove disastrous.
We scheduled the two-day strategic planning meeting for a Friday and Saturday at a local hotel, a neutral off-site location. However, the negative chemistry of the executive team would prove to pose multiple challenges, as you’ll see shortly.
Chapter focus
Successful strategy requires healthy executive team chemistry. This chapter discusses the importance of developing an effective five- to twelve-member leadership team with a balance of competing passions and sufficient strategic and tactical business understanding to shape strategy. It explores ways to develop mutual trust, strategic leadership, and teamwork.
Team chemistry
A healthy executive team is one in which each member:
An effective strategic planning process will build and strengthen healthy executive team development and chemistry.
An effective strategic planning process will build and strengthen healthy executive team development and chemistry. A poor one will damage or destroy team chemistry.
Bill’s company had one of the unhealthiest executive teams I’d encountered. At the first strategic planning meeting I facilitated for Friction PR, the worst eight of negative strategy meeting behavioral archetypes showed up.1
Let’s look more closely at each of these negative meeting archetypes one by one.
The Absentee – the individual who is present physically but “somewhere else” mentally. Manuel’s head was bent down to stare at his smart phone while he read and responded to emails. He would periodically step out to take or make a phone call. At best, he was half-listening to the discussions, only contributing when asked to comment. Even after I drew the line and insisted that every cell phone, pager, and iPad had to be turned off, Manuel appeared to spend most of his time mentally focused on things happening outside the meeting. (He was staring into space, had us repeat the question whenever he was called on for an opinion, and filled his notepad with stuff unrelated to the discussion at hand.)
Manuel was not invited the next time the executive team met to plan strategically. He was strictly a tactical thinker and Bill needed strategic thinkers for these meetings. Eventually, Bill ended up transferring executive management of Manuel’s department to a true executive, allowing Manuel to focus on what he did best – operational excellence.
The CEO – the leader acting in his “Chief Executive Omniscience” mode. Most CEOs are highly intelligent and very intuitive, able to quickly anticipate where any discussion is heading and likely to supply a conclusion to save everybody the time of figuring it out for themselves. Bill fit this profile and acted just this way. Unfortunately, whenever the team had reached a conclusion this way in the past, team members saw it as Bill’s decision rather than their own. Whenever an implementation issue came up, they put the monkey on Bill’s back to “fix his decision.” In addition, like many entrepreneur CEOs, Bill was notorious for the sheer volume of topics he could raise in one meeting, intermixing the major strategic with the minor tactical. Over time, the executive team members had unconsciously tuned out the noise, which ended up sounding like “blah, blah, bonus, blah, blah, fired, blah, blah, blah… “
I had to enforce the rule that in every discussion during this two-day strategic planning meeting, the CEO would speak last. This enabled Bill to judge how well people truly understood the points of view he had communicated in the past. When Bill did speak, everyone listened intently, since they understood he would be providing new information or correcting a misconception.
Bill’s participation in the planning meeting was essential. Actively listening to the discussions enabled him to understand not only what the team members wanted to accomplish but why. He was more supportive of the resulting strategic plan because he knew what alternatives had been considered. While not initially comfortable in the role, he acted as a participant rather than a problem-solving, time-saving omniscient individual.
The Consultant – the individual who never commits to a team-developed decision. Every time it looked like a decision was about to be made, Ed would pipe up with a comment like “Let me play devil’s advocate and outline how we could fail.” As if the devil needed an advocate to restate obvious hurdles that everyone in the room already recognized! This would put him in a winning position no matter the ultimate outcome. If the decision turned out to be successful, he would enjoy the triumph of having been part of the team. If it should fail, he could say, “I warned you we shouldn’t do that.”
I short-circuited this lack of accountability by making it clear that there never is 100% information or certainty when you make a strategic decision, but it’s necessary to make a decision and commit to following through. Ed was forced to go on record as supporting the decision. Remember, a strategic plan is not a plan until the executive team leaves the meeting with consensus and commitment. (Consensus means that even if a team member might have made a different decision if it were left entirely up to him, he agrees that it makes sense for the organization and he will commit to support it.)
The
