To stay afloat, their organisations must cope with unprecedented complexity and continuous change, even as the effects of the depressed economic climate and pinched credit are increasingly felt - the 'wiggle room' for manoeuvre has rarely been as tight.

The leaders who thrive will be those who take bold and nimble strategic decisions (do the right things). They will decide to control costs in a sound manner but also to invest in the future with innovation and shrewd expansion whilst the competition is inwardly focused – after all, the first PC was introduced in the midst of a recession, and the iPod weeks after 9/11.

Successful leaders will also need more than ever to be able to optimally execute their strategic decisions (do things right), ensuring that they enable their organisations to realise the related benefits.

However, it is sometimes an organisation's leadership who, having set the strategic objectives, collectively ensure that their organisations struggle to achieve these. The reason for this is simple – most strategic initiatives today are large, messy and full of interdependencies. They require cross-organisational delivery, and this in turn requires an aligned cross-organisational leadership team to set direction and provide governance. However, this critical success factor is, all too often, critically absent.

Mind The Gap Many companies today suffer from the paradox of the 'leadership team gap', whereby a group of talented, experienced and capable individual leaders come together to form an ineffectual, unaligned and dysfunctional leadership team.

When this leadership team gap exists, the whole is unfortunately less than the sum of the parts. The existence of this gap is clear in leadership meetings:

Discussion feels unfocused and uninformed
There is no shared visibility of the organisational environment
Members are more passionate talking about their needs than shared needs Debate feels adversarial rather than constructive
Key decisions seem rushed and often lack genuine consensus

Yet, even those who can't peek into the boardroom can identify the leadership team gap further down the food chain:

People identify with their business area to a far greater extent than to the overall organisation – an 'us versus them' attitude is the norm
People in different business areas recite different, or even conflicting, priorities
People feel that they are going out on a limb by prioritising organisation-wide initiatives over 'internal' work
Poor performance in one business area is routinely blamed on other areas – empathy is a scarce commodity
There is a 'cynicism cascade' in place – people at each level, from senior management down, unashamedly share negative views with their subordinates about other leaders and parts of the organisation

The Gap - Nature versus Nuture

Robust jockeying, vigorous debate and competitive dynamics will always be present whenever a group of strong-willed leaders come together.

However, these should be positive elements of the organisational fabric - challenging group think, catalysing change and reflecting 'passion for the job'.

Where a leadership team gap exists, political interplay is no positive element, but rather a force driving the behaviour of the leadership team towards negative outcomes. The politics controls the leaders, rather than vice-versa.

Suffering with a chronic leadership team gap is by no means a natural state of affairs. Rather it can be resolved, but first it helps to understand two fundamental causes: shortcomings in management thinking and some widely held leadership team myths.

Cause 1 - Shortcomings in Management Thinking

The fact that so many organisations are suffering with dysfunctional leadership teams can partially be attributed to deficiencies in management education, which has tended to treat leadership and teamwork as two distinct areas.

Moorhouse management thinking

1. Leadership – Management thinking has almost universally focused on the leader as individual, shedding little light on the nature and behaviour of a team of leaders. Situational Leadership is one example of a highly useful and applicable model – one of many that focuses on individuals. Recently, leading thinkers have begun to move past the traditional view of the leader as a purely individualistic concept towards more fluid notions: in Leading Change, John Kotter talks about 'guiding coalitions' of senior management aligned to strategic change. Likewise, proponents of 'shared leadership' make a case for groups who work together to lead.

Yet, these newer ideas, whilst stimulating, have yet to truly filter through into praxis with hard-edged application in the real world.

2. Teamwork – Management thinking also offers a wealth of insights on team dynamics, but the focus is on teams of doers rather than teams of leaders.

A well-known example is Meredith Belbin's team roles. Whilst extremely useful in identifying how individuals tend to behave, contribute to, and interrelate with others in a team setting, applicability at the leadership level is less compelling. Only a minority of Belbin roles directly correlate to leadership roles.

A key challenge for management thinkers today is to integrate knowledge about leadership and teamwork in order to develop practical frameworks and skill sets that can help organisations to address the leadership team gap.

Cause 2 – Common Myths about Leadership Teams

The prevalence of the leadership team gap also results from five common 'real world' myths about leadership teams:

Myth 1 - Dysfunctional leadership is merely the fault of an ineffective chief executive – address that and the leadership team will come together. Good leadership from the chief executive is a necessary ingredient of an effective senior management team, but it is far from sufficient. Senior managers are by definition opinionated, resolute and ambitious, and will positively engage only if they perceive it to be in their interest.
Myth 2 - Dysfunctional leadership is a result of performance systems rewarding the wrong behaviours – fix the incentives and you'll get the cooperation. A key failing in many organisations has been the inability to align performance rewards with desired behaviours, especially in a fast-changing environment. However, most studies show that compensation is a relatively minor motivator for most Senior Managers. Getting them to work positively together requires much more than just tinkering with the bonuses.
Myth 3 - The interest of the overall organisation is synonymous with the interest of each business area – if everyone promotes their own interests, the organisation as a whole benefits. Whilst this is an attractive idea, reality is more complex. As in game theory, the best outcome for the leadership team can indeed be achieved when they work together, but leaders may assume that their counterparts will make decisions based on parochial interests, and therefore that they are better off doing so as well. This leads to enterprise-wide, strategically vital initiatives often getting sacrificed in favour of local priorities and pressures, leaving everyone worse off.
Myth 4 - Senior Management require neither leadership nor teamwork training themselves – they surely already have those skills. A significant proportion of senior managers today may have been trained in an earlier period with less emphasis on teamworking. Furthermore, people often rise to leadership roles based primarily on technical, rather than leadership, competence. The assumption that senior leaders would not benefit from continuous training in the very skills needed to do their jobs is a naive one.
Myth 5 - Senior Management disagreements stem from conflicting answers to the same questions, rather than from disagreement on the questions themselves – Surprisingly often, leadership teams do not share an understanding of how the whole organisation fits together, what each constituent part does, or what the overall strategy is. Simply assuming that they have one can be dangerous. Also, leaders often receive different or conflicting management information, and without shared visibility it is impossible to arrive at consensus on the right answers.

If the leadership team gap is to be addressed, leadership teams need to take a sober look at themselves to understand which if any myths above they subscribe to.

Physician heal thyself

The truth is that the leadership team gap cannot be resolved bottom up – most senior leaders are so time constrained that any resolution requires the chief executive to vocally and actively make it a collective priority.

Once the will is there, each of the following eight drivers of effective leadership teaming must be addressed:

1. The chief executive must take active ownership for leading the leadership team towards the desired behaviours. This includes pledging to:
- practice as they preach – serving as an example to the leadership team of collaborative leadership behaviours
- defining consequences – rewarding the right behaviours whilst actively pushing back against behaviours which go against the collective interest – make no mistake, resolve to 'fundamentally change how we operate' will be tested early on.

2. The leadership team must invest effort in building a common understanding of the organisational context. In particular, there should be a shared view of four key areas or joint decision-making will be near impossible:
- Our strategic objectives – what are we collectively seeking to achieve?
- Our operating model – what does each part of our organisation do? - Our portfolio of change initiatives – where are we investing in change? - Our management information – what is our performance, risks and issues?

3. Leadership team members must engage, engage, engage. Improving leadership team dynamics can only happen if busy leaders devote a substantial amount of their time to cross-organisational leadership needs. In today's increasingly inter-connected organisational environment, cross-organisational leadership should be a core part of a leader's role description, and not simply an afterthought. Leaders need to ensure that their own senior teams are made able to handle day-to-day management of their business areas.

4. Take time to define the ground rules. Amazingly enough, very few leadership teams have clear principles of co-operation defined – anything less than explicit enunciation of these is liable to fail. One example of this is an agreement to “speak openly behind closed doors, but once a decision is taken, then speak with a shared voice”. Negative commentary to subordinates about other areas must become a cultural taboo – viewed as unspeakably serious failing in one's duty as a leader.

5. Build governance capabilities. Effective leadership teaming is as much science as art. Ensure that the basics are in place:
- Clear terms of reference for management forums
- Clear role descriptions for senior management roles, where accountability is aligned to authority – this is particularly important with the introduction of matrix and 'double-hat' management structures - Clear modus operandi for governance processes
- How do we make decisions?
- How do we delegate downwards?
- How do we review performance?
- Effective meeting disciplines – ensure an effective secretariat is in place so that meetings are decisions-focused with inputs circulated sufficiently in advance.

6. Address skills deficits. The leadership team should be given skills assessment and one-to-one mentoring in leadership and teamworking. Assuming that they 'know it already' is fraught with risk.

7. Ensure that the right behaviours are enabled. Carry out an exercise to map the desired behaviours of the leadership team as a whole against other organisational frameworks such as performance appraisal and financial budget allocation to identify and resolve gaps.

8. Address and remove unhelpful behaviours. Do not shy away from discussing the 'elephants in the corner'– negative behaviours which everyone is aware of but no one challenges:

- Divide and conquer – too often, the chief executive may take an approach with their senior team which encourages jockeying and competition at the expense of collaborative working, viewing this as a valid leadership technique – it is anything but productive in the longer term

- Multiple owners (the hedge) – a variation of the above, some chief executives like to give ownership of the same objectives and remits to multiple senior managers, with the notion that this will improve the odds of delivery by providing redundancy – unfortunately the reality is that this simply creates confusion, turf battles and delays between business areas

- 'Machiavelli Mania' – some leaders are addicted to the thrill of the sport and tend to engage in gamesmanship out of habit and the expectation that it's only 'realpolitik'. It is important to create a culture which deplores rather than glorifies backroom dealing and maneuvering

- 'Pork barreling' – a cynical but all too present gambit, whereby members of leadership teams trade support for each other's parochial agendas – also known as mutual back-scratching.

- 'Cheap decisions' – a highly damaging and not uncommon situation where so many decisions are not followed through on that leaders become comfortable agreeing to things which the expectation that nothing will happen afterwards.

A brighter future

The era when senior leaders could get by doggedly protecting and promoting their own parochial interests has ended. Today's competitive climate rewards those leadership teams that can make the right strategic decisions and execute them quickly and effectively across the organisation through enterprise-wide collaboration.

Addressing gaps in how these leadership teams perform together is neither easy nor without risk, but will leave the organisation in a much stronger competitive position.

Finally, it will also bring a more personal benefit to each leader. After all, like everyone else, they want roles and colleagues that make work a fulfilling, enjoyable and meaningful experience. A key contributor to this, and one that will enhance motivation, performance and retention, is the development of a high performing leadership team.