Building a united senior management team

I frequently come across social media threads where organisations are forcing people to come back into a physical office and often the grounds for that are that individuals are swinging the lead and not really working if they’re at home.  

But my experience is that the quality of an employee’s work is very highly influenced by the quality of the manager. If your management is really good it honestly doesn’t matter where folk are based – they will work hard and do their best.  If the quality of management isn’t good no amount of dragging people into an office is going to change that.

As a CEO we know we can achieve nothing without those people who are at the front line doing the work: either looking after beneficiaries or service users; engaging and supporting volunteers; sending out funding applications; paying the invoices and keeping track of the money; keeping the building working and so on. 

But we are rarely able to directly influence them – we will often have managers between us and them and it is the managers who will either make or break their teams. 

So our job at the top is to focus on our management teams. If we can get them in the right head space, stepping up to the culture and values we want the organisation to live by, then we will have high performing folk across the board. 

I always look to my managers first if there is a problem in the team. Are they leading well? Are they providing the right level of support? Are they having the right sorts of conversations? Do their teams feel safe and supported by them?   

Too often CEOs don’t take the time to make sure that their leadership teams understand what is expected of them; are clear about what they are being measured on; understand what the values and culture of the organisation are, and how they are living up to them. 

There are three key things we do at DSC – firstly we make it clear that our leadership team is responsible for the whole, not just their bit – no point them claiming success if the rest of the organisation is sinking.   

Secondly, we discuss a set of values-linked behaviours at the beginning of each financial year where we agree what behaviours we expect of each other. And thirdly, we revisit those behaviours for the first half hour of every monthly leadership team meeting, without exception, to see if we are living up to them. 

Those are just three of the things we do that help us to have a very high-performing organisation. If you want to know more come to our It’s Tough at the Top Leadership conference where I’ll be discussing how you can build  a united senior management team. Register here today. 

Look forward to sharing with you!