When is a leadership team not actually a leadership team?
When it’s a team of leaders.
What’s the difference, you say?
You can have a room full of really talented, experienced, successful leaders - each doing a brilliant job in their own area - and still not have a genuinely effective leadership team.
A team of leaders tends to report in.
A leadership team thinks together.
A team of leaders protects its own function.
A leadership team takes responsibility for the whole organisation.
And a team of leaders often asks:
“What do I need from this meeting?”
Whereas a leadership team asks:
“What does the organisation need from us?”
And that’s where it can get become a stretch for individual leaders.
Because being part of a leadership team sometimes means putting down the thing that you’re personally responsible for, and taking responsibility for something bigger.
It means being able to say:
“Yes, I lead my team, my department, my function - AND I’m accountable for what happens across this organisation.”
How do you go from a team of leaders to an effective leadership team?
For starters, the next time your leadership team meets, notice what actually happens.
Are you exchanging updates?
Or are you doing work together that only this group can do?
Because those are two very different things.
A high-performing leadership team isn’t simply the sum of its individual leaders.
It becomes a leadership system in its own right.
It does the work that only this group can do together.
Strategy.
Trade-offs.
Priorities.
Culture.
The difficult conversations.
The decisions that affect the whole.
And this is where many otherwise excellent leadership teams get stuck.
They are full of good leaders.
But they haven’t yet become a collective leadership system.
If you are nodding along and recognising this in your own team or organisation, let me know.
Part of the work I do with senior teams is helping talented groups of leaders become genuinely effective leadership teams.
One of the tools I use is the Collective Leadership Assessment by the Leadership Circle, which helps a team see how it is currently leading together - and what may need to change.
Because sometimes the biggest leadership opportunity isn’t developing the individual leaders.
It’s developing the leadership team itself.
