CEOs and Team Building

By Mike Myatt, Chief Strategy Officer, N2growth

A CEO who views him/herself as an army of one will fail. Whether you like it or not, your success as a CEO will be largely tied to your team building ability. Not only do great CEOs understand how to recruit a top executive team, but they also understand how to build cohesion among team members through collaboration while addressing specific situational and contextual needs. Great CEOs realize the importance of being consistently and intensely engaged with their CXOs. They understand how to effectively deploy these highly productive and valuable team members to create tremendous leverage and velocity across the enterprise. In today’s post I’ll share the questions that great CEOs use to align the interests and focus the efforts of their executive team…

It is not uncommon when working with new clients that I find very fractured executive teams where team members more frequently work against one another, rather than with one another (see “Managing Tough Relationships“). I often observe ego centered conflicts among senior executives, which turn into a competition for turf, budget, power, influence, control, and ultimately survival. As a CEO you can either pit your executives against one another, or have them collaboratively engage in supporting one another for the overall good of the enterprise. An executive team that actually embraces the concept of collaboration will substantially out perform a silo-centric executive team focused on empire building.

Great CEOs not only view their interactions with team members as coaching and mentoring opportunities, but also as learning opportunities for themselves. In other posts I’ve shared thoughts on more formal leadership development and team building practices, but in the text that follows I’ll provide you with a resource that is immediately actionable, and highly productive. I have found that one of the most effective ways for CEOs to lead their senior executives is by helping them refine and justify their reasoning through the use of intelligent questions. This serves to not only align interests and areas of focus, but also to facilitate the exchange of insights, and to acquire useful knowledge and information. I strongly recommend to all CEOs that they routinely ask team members the following questions: 

• Why? (my personal favorite and the most powerful one word question on the planet)
• How can I help you with that? What do you need from me in order to make that happen?
• That’s an interesting thought, what process did you go through to reach that conclusion?
• What’s our biggest risk in this, and what’s your fallback position? 
• What if we did nothing at all, what would happen?
• If we fail in this can we live with that?
• How does this add value to our <<fill in the blank>>?
• Can you give me a bit more detail on the logic used to arrive at your <<costs, timing, return estimates, etc.>>?
• How will this impact <<individual, team, business unit, competitive advantage, brand perception, customer satisfaction, etc.>>?
• What are the greatest challenges you face in pulling this off, and how do you plan to deal with them? 
• Where do you see “X” account in <<insert time period>> and what can we do to (improve customer satisfaction, increase influence with key stakeholders, increase the life-cycle value,  etc.)?
• Which markets, partners, clients, or other opportunities can add significant value to our business?
• What specific steps can you take to increase your area’s contribution margin? 
• Does this add value to our core business? How? Why?
• Does this effectively and efficiently support our values, vision, and strategy? How? Why?
• What can you offer as validation of proof of concept? 
• What will be the key performance indicators for this? How will we measure them, and what hurdles do we need to hit to be successful?
• Do you have the necessary resources (financial, technology, talent, infrastructure, etc.) to hit your objectives?
• How can we improve the risk management, governance, control, and reporting functions for this?
• Why should we make this investment? How does it drive revenue, profit, brand equity, competitive advantage, etc. What are the potential risks vs. possible rewards and what is the downside of not making the investment?
• What are your biggest obstacles and barriers to success? What are your plans to deal with them and what do you need from me?
• Are all your resources properly aligned and connected?
• What are the weakest points in your area and how do you plan to deal with them?
• Who are your strongest leaders and how are you developing them to handle more responsibility?
• What are you doing to attract new talent?

While the aforementioned list of questions is clearly not exhaustive, it offers some insight into where a CEO should focus their efforts and attention…Perhaps best of all it places you in a constant position of being an active listener, learner, and mentor. If you have a favorite question(s) you use to focus and/or refine your team’s thinking that you’d like to share, please leave a comment below…