Leadership Team Coaching

Developing Collective Transformational Leadership

Peter Hawkins

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789667462
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Mentoring & Coaching
• Index: Business

FINALIST: Goody Business Book Awards: Leadership: Team Building Organizations are most effective when the teams responsible for their success work together collectively and in a dynamic relationship with the rest of the company. For those involved in developing leadership teams, understanding coaching practices and techniques is essential for enabling the best performance. Leadership Team Coaching provides a comprehensive roadmap for team coaching, explaining all the key elements alongside practical tools and techniques for developing international and virtual teams, executive and non-executive boards and project and account teams in all types of organizations. Featuring case studies and insights from organizations including Deloitte and General Electric (GE), it also contains guidance on choosing the best team coach, creating a team-based culture and common pitfalls to avoid.This fully updated fourth edition of Leadership Team Coaching contains new material on agile teaming, using digital team coaching apps and AI, and training team leaders to coach their own team. It remains an indispensable resource for coaches and senior leaders as well as for those studying coaching as part of a degree or coaching qualification.

Part One

High-value creating teams

01

Why the world needs more high-value creating leadership teams

In our global highly complex world, the heroic leadership figure has increasingly become a relic.

(MANFRED KETS DE VRIES, 2011A: 56)

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

(ATTRIBUTED TO MARGARET MEAD – SOURCE UNKNOWN)

I was working with the senior executive team of a leading financial company. After an exploratory round of individual meetings, I was struck by how much of the views of the team were focused on what was wrong with their chief executive. I was aware that they had had a number of chairmen and chief executives who had quite short tenures and there had been competition before the latest (internal) appointment. After my first few months of working alongside them in their meetings and facilitating a team off-site, I was still being lobbied in the corridor about the CEO’s weaknesses. At the next meeting I said to the team: ‘I am fed up with you all telling me what is wrong with your chief executive.’ The chief executive, who was sitting next to me, turned and looked at me with shock and anger, and the team members all looked down at their papers! I continued, somewhat in trepidation: ‘I think you are all delegating leadership upwards, and playing the game of waiting for the perfect chief executive, or waiting to be the perfect CEO. Well, I have some bad news for you. In all my years working with a great variety of organizations, I have never met a perfect chief executive. So, the question for you as senior team members is: how are you as a team going to take responsibility for his weaknesses?’ The team coaching had begun.

The myth of the perfect CEO or perfect leader is prevalent in many companies, organizations, sports teams and indeed even in the politics of nations. We expect more and more from our leaders and invest such hope in their miraculous powers to turn things round, and then are quick to criticize and blame them when they do not live up to our unrealistic expectations. Warren Bennis, who has spent a lifetime studying leadership, writes:

Our mythology refuses to catch up with us. And so we cling to the myth of the Lone Ranger, the romantic idea that great things are usually accomplished by a larger-than-life individual working alone. Despite evidence to the contrary – including the fact that Michelangelo worked with a group of 16 to paint the Sistine Chapel – we still tend to think of achievement in terms of the Great Man or the Great Woman, instead of the great Group.

(Bennis, 1997)

Since Bennis wrote this, the challenges of the world have continued to grow exponentially in terms of complexity, interconnection, speed of change and the major threats now facing us as a species, and there is more to come. ‘The next 30 years will be the most exciting time to be alive, in the whole history of human beings on this planet.’ So said Tim Smit, the founder of the Lost Gardens of Heligan and the Eden Project, at the Institute of Directors Annual Convention Lecture on 28 September 2009. He continued: ‘For in that period we will discover whether Homo is really Sapiens or whether we are going to join the fossil records of extinct species.’ The ecologist Paul Hawken echoed these statements when he addressed the Class of 2009 at the University of Portland:

Let’s begin with the starting point. Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating... Basically, civilization needs a new operating system, you are the programmers, and we need it within a few decades.

The challenge is greater now than it has ever been, for when we wake up in the morning and look in the mirror we see staring back at us one of the many endangered species on this planet.

The challenge would be great if we were just facing global warming or population explosion or technological interconnectedness or the exhaustion of accessible oil supplies or the extinction of species at a rate 1,000 times greater than ever before; but we are not. We are facing a world where all of these challenges and many more are happening in a systemically complex web of interconnecting forces, at an exponentially accelerating rate so that no expert can possibly understand the whole pattern, let alone know how to address it.

The challenge so positively drawn by Tim Smit and Paul Hawken cannot be addressed satisfactorily by individual expert scientists, or by teams of scientists drawn from the same discipline, not even by multidisciplinary teams of scientists drawn from the finest institutions in the world. It certainly cannot be solved by politicians, even with a greater level of cross-border cooperation than has ever existed, nor by pressure groups focusing on one aspect of the complex pattern. The current world challenges task us as a species to find a way of working together, to become what Rushkoff (2019) calls ‘Team Human’, partnering across disciplines and borders, beyond local and self-interest in a way that has never been attained before. In working together we need to generate new ways of thinking, for as Einstein so memorably pointed out, you cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.

There is an urgent global need for much greater collaborative intelligence, which I have termed ‘We Q’. In recent years we have seen a retreat from exploring global collaborative responses to the great challenges of our times, back into ‘my country first’ attitudes, a mix of nationalism and populism. Yet the great challenges of our time, such as the climate emergency, global inequality, loss of biodiversity, world health and mental health, cannot be solved by individual countries. One of the lessons we should all be learning from the 2020 pandemic of COVID-19 is that our health is not our own, and what affects one part of the world quickly affects all of us. Our challenges are earth-sized, but our collaboration efforts are still short-term, local and transactional (Krznaric, 2020; Hawkins, 2020b).

As Minna Salami (2020: 41) writes:

We may have made tremendous advances economically, scientifically and technologically, but without matching psychological and social progress, those advances have only led us to where we are today – heading towards environmental, political and social disaster of dimensions heretofore unimaginable.

The changing challenge for teams

So how do these global challenges manifest in the world of leadership teams? Here are some of the key themes that are experienced by nearly all the leadership teams we have worked with or seen reported in the major research studies. These challenges are requiring all the members of leadership teams and those who coach and support them to raise their game.

1. Managing expectations of all the different stakeholders

A CEO of a successful financial company told me how everyone saw him as having enormous freedom, power and choice as CEO, but his experience was that he had less freedom, power and choice now than when he was a frontline team leader. He explained how his diary was fixed for him and driven by the corporate calendar; how he was constantly at the beck and call of regulators, board members, shareholders, key customers and partner organizations; and how every division and function expected a personal visit at least once a year. There were more meetings he was expected to attend than hours in the day and at every meeting he was being lobbied from different perspectives and interest groups. He told me how he felt like the intersection of all the conflicting demands within and around the company.

I have spoken to heads of government departments and CEOs of local government and health bodies who tell similar stories. It is no surprise that the average time most CEOs stay in post is becoming shorter and shorter. Korn Ferry’s research shows a decline in average CEO tenure, from 8.4 years to 6.9 years, a 14 per cent decrease in just three years from 2016 to 2019.

The expectations and demands of followers on leaders are greater than ever before. In 2000 Hooper and Potter wrote:

The key issue facing future leaders is unlocking the enormous human potential by winning people’s emotional support... our leaders of the future will have to be more competent, more articulate, more creative, more inspirational and more credible if they are going to win the hearts and minds of their followers.

Since then all the research on millennials and generation Z suggests that future generations will have even greater expectations and less automatic respect for titles and roles and will demand that leaders earn their respect.

2. Leadership teams have to run and transform the business in parallel

Team coaching can also focus on the senior team or board running their business, and not recognize fully enough that most senior teams, in parallel to running the business, have to focus on transforming the business and its wider system. These two activities require different approaches from the team and hence different forms of team coaching.

Bill Sharpe (2013) has usefully shown that all leadership and all teams need to be able to work in three horizons:

1. the immediate, business as usual;
2. innovating for tomorrow;
3. future foresight requiring radical change.

Importantly he goes on to show how it no longer works moving through these sequentially and innovating (horizon 2) out of horizon 1, as that leads to continuous improvement in yesterday’s game. Rather, today’s leadership need to go from horizon 1 to horizon 3, ‘future foresight’, and then focus on innovating in the light of what tomorrow’s world will require. This is further explored in Roman Krznaric’s (2020) excellent book A Good Ancestor: How to think long term in a short-term world.

Many years ago I worked with the Airbus division of British Aerospace. They were struggling to assemble four wings a week and the whole business was large, cumbersome and inefficient. The CEO needed his top team to spend much more of their time on collectively leading the much-needed transformation of the business and less time running their individual functions. I sat next to him in the executive meeting when he announced that from that day he wanted them to spend at least 50 per cent of their time on the transformation agenda. Their jaws metaphorically hit the table, as they were already on average working over 80–90 hours a week just running their functions. ‘How can you possibly be demanding more from us?’ they exclaimed. As team coach, I suggested they all examine their last month’s diary schedule and identify the 10–20 per cent least value-creating time and then work out how to remove this from their ...