Team | Unifying old and new in an executive team

Client

Executive team of a national transport company

Focus

The team had been through a period of major change. Change in strategic direction in the parent company (not UK based) had put increasing pressure on the team to enhance financial performance and bring work practices into line with the rest of the company. Four members of the team had changed in recent months, including the MD. They recognised they needed to build a unified approach in how they dealt with the challenges facing them.

Formulation

As part of preparation for the team work 1:1 sessions were held with all team members and with the strategy lead in the parent company. A number of critical issues were identified that required resolution for the team to be successful:

• There were major relationship difficulties between three of the original team members which had become more dysfunctional with the introduction of the new team members
• Cross functional collaboration was poor at all levels of the organisation
• Financial performance was patchy across the organisation and at company level targets were only being met with difficulty

Intervention

Quarterly team workshops were held in the first year reducing to six monthly and then annually. Initial workshops focussed on individual relationships and team processes. From the second workshop improving business performance and problem solving occupied the agenda. In summary the team worked on:

• Understanding what made each other tick and what behaviours got in the way of effective working
• Changing their approach to leading collaboration across the different functions
• Improving the way they debated and arrived at decisions so that they “stuck”
• Tackling long standing performance issues in the senior management cohort
• Developing a new business improvement strategy to reduce the cost base of the operation and improve quality of the service

Outcomes

The first workshop enabled many old grievances and styles of interacting to be resolved so much so that the team moved very quickly to tackling the business issues. After one year they had:

• Levelled out the patchy financial performance and were on track to meet parent company profit expectations
• Employee surveys showed that the executive team were now perceived to be working better together
• The business improvement agenda was gathering speed with cross functional teams working on agreed projects
• The executive team reported that they felt like a team that was achieving