Executive Teams

International executive team

The challenge

The international CEO of this global entertainment company asked us to facilitate his leadership team's strategy offsite - the outcomes to be a strategy to improve the performance of the core business, and plans to develop an online business model.

There was a problem, however. We'd been working with the company for a while and knew that the CEO and his team did not yet understand how to take shared accountability for the performance of the whole business. They operated in their own "silos" and the team meetings were a series of functional reports. There was little mutual accountability and there were few collective results, and the team did little real work together. The requirements of the new strategy demanded the team radically raise its game.

The team needed to see this for themselves. So we prepared for the session by interviewing team members, and also surveying a wider group of stakeholders, to collect feedback while looking closely at what the new strategy would demand of the team. In addition to what we knew already, we discovered:

• A vision existed but there was no shared strategy.
• In fact, they were missing shared clarity about strategy, structure and roles - there was no clear line of sight - between vision and personal objectives and actions
• There was a major relationship problem between two executives, linked to unresolved structural questions
• The wider perception of the "team" was poor. The CEO didn't fully recognise the extent of the reputational problem the team had and the negative knock-on effect this had on the strategic agenda

The result

Multiple actions were agreed during the offsite and followed through afterwards:

• Rework the vision and strategy... in a way that resonated with the people who would be responsible for delivering it
• Create two-year rolling objectives to achieve the vision... so that each leader understood both their shared and individual responsibilities
• Develop internal "contracts" between team members... to ensure everyone understands how their contribution affects the work of others
• Build a change road map... to manage the changes in strategy, organisation and roles necessary to deliver the two-year objectives
• Create international bonus measures... applied to all team members to reinforce shared accountability
• Improve team meetings... to breathe life into shared accountability and team work
• Individual development objectives... to enable people to learn how to contribute in new ways
• Develop team operating principles... to foster the behaviours that would change "the life of the team" positively

Together, these actions improved the performance of the team on every key dimension. Six months later, a survey of the team and its stakeholders found that the changes were being implemented effectively and that the team had made "huge progress". The CEO realised that he needed to guide the company in a different way - through his leadership team rather than through a group of individuals.

The improvements led by the team are now paying off in the execution of the strategy and improvements in business performance.

How we helped

We worked in partnership with the CEO and his VP of HR throughout. We used our insight to steer them towards fact-finding and an agenda that directly addressed the challenges facing the business, and what needed to change to address them. These changes impacted the strategy, the organisation, leadership and HR practices.

Given the challenges, it was important there were no surprises for the CEO, and that he could see what needed to change before the offsite. We also dealt constructively with the sources of conflict within the team prior to the offsite.

During the offsite we helped the team to:

• Clarify and agree on a business strategy
• Develop a plan for clear, unified, inspirational leadership to enable them to achieve the vision and strategy
• Create the foundations for becoming a high-performance leadership team

Our sharp and consistent focus on what drives business performance helped everyone involved to stay on the right agenda. What was also apparent was the learning, the growing trust in each other and the fun that people had in successfully confronting their challenges and becoming a real team. This spirit is an important part of what it means to work with Value Partnership.