“High-performance team” is a phrase that resonates in every strategic meeting, promising a vision of seamless collaboration and groundbreaking innovation. We all aspire to lead or be part of such a team. Yet, the reality for many organizations is that they fall short of this ideal. The concept of “high performance” is a constant buzz phrase but teams who consistently deliver accordingly are surprisingly rare. In fact, as little as 20% of teams may actually be delivering on their priorities. So, what is the secret ingredient for those truly high-performing teams?
In this episode of the Life + Leadership Podcast, I dive into the common pitfalls many leadership teams discover during coaching. Also, I discuss the tangible benefits of executive coaching in the field, and how it differs from one-on-one coaching. The hidden truth, often revealed via executive coaching, is that: true high performance isn’t merely a collection of talented individuals; it’s built upon deep, unwavering alignment.
The Cost of Misalignment
Many leadership teams believe they are more aligned than they actually are. This delusion creates a significant challenge for CEOs and senior leaders. Aligning a leadership team is more complex than most people realize, yet we intuitively understand its importance.
When a team lacks alignment, the consequences extend far beyond missed deadlines. Executive teams often struggle to be productive despite their individual capabilities. It’s like a group of strong swimmers trying to reach an island by swimming, waiting for each other to arrive. Instead of waiting, they could have taken a boat together; alignment is the boat. Results are simply not as robust when teams are unaligned. You might meet goals, but exceeding them becomes highly unlikely, and the journey will be slow and riddled with conflict.
This internal friction can permeate the entire company culture, leading to organizations splitting into “fiefdoms” under different executives. Even more concerning, those aspiring to senior leadership roles may learn through the modeling of poorly aligned teams. This is certainly not the message we want to send within our organizations.
The Power of Aligned Leadership Teams
Effective leadership teams are the backbone of any successful organization. Aligned teams drive strategic initiatives, inspire innovation, and foster a culture of trust and cohesion. The ripple effect of their unity is profoundly positive.
Consider the inverse: when a leadership team lacks alignment, it creates an environment of internal friction and struggle.This can lead to conflict and drama that impacts the entire company culture. Imagine the difference in an organization where leaders are rowing in sync versus pulling in different directions. The latter leads to wasted effort, delayed progress, and a demoralized workforce.
How Team Coaching Catalyzes Alignment
So, how do we cultivate this crucial alignment? The answer, increasingly, lies in executive team coaching. This isn’t just about individual development; it’s about elevating the team as an entity.
Unlike one-on-one coaching, where a coach collects and then delivers feedback in a singular moment, team coaching offers a dynamic, real-time experience. For each leader, their peers essentially act as ‘mirrors,’ constantly reflecting how the entire group experiences them. This means immediate data on communication effectiveness, strategic contribution, and relational investment. When a team coach is in the room, they gather constant feedback and work with it live as the team performs. This “catalyzing” effect ensures that individuals and the team are constantly learning and growing in the moment.
Moving Past Off-sites: The Power of In-the-Field Coaching
Traditional approaches to team development, such as personality assessments or conflict training, can sometimes be helpful, but are often episodic. While they might feel good at the moment, science tells us they rarely create lasting change or drive results. True team coaching must meet executives within the actual work of the team. It’s about instigating alignment around that work and coaching them as they deliver on shared objectives. This “in-the-field” coaching naturally addresses conflict and communication challenges as they arise. This helps the team navigate differing perspectives while simultaneously delivering business results.
This is a key differentiator from short off-sites or generic team interventions. Executives simply don’t have time for extensive periods offline; their coaching needs to be embedded in their work.
Measurable Results: The True North for Team Coaching
Perhaps one of the most compelling aspects of effective team coaching is its insistence on tangible, measurable goals for the team. Certain goals in one-on-one coaching can be difficult to measure, such as increased courage or improved vulnerability. With team coaching, however, the approach is much more measurable.
High-performing teams need very specific, clear measures to work towards; without them, their development is unmanageable. We often find that one of the most common struggles for executive teams is the absence of measurable targets for their collective performance. They have enterprise goals, departmental goals, and individual goals, but what do they deliver on together as a leadership team? Very seldom do they have specific achievements defined and top of mind.
By guiding CEOs and their teams to articulate and measure these collective goals, we help them discover the expansive value an aligned executive team can deliver. It represents a different, more sophisticated way to lead, moving beyond simply having individuals report into the CEO.
Real-World Impact
The efficacy of this approach is not theoretical. Consider these powerful case studies from companies coached by Bright Arrow:
- Technology Company: A client undergoing rapid expansion experienced a 30% increase in team productivity after engaging in leadership team coaching. Enhanced communication within the team truly delivered results. The improved communication resulted in the resolution of some long-standing conflicts within the team. With clearer communication and roles more defined, the team experienced faster decision-making, and a renewed focus on strategic goals. Their improved team operation directly contributed to the accelerated growth of the entire company.
- Healthcare Organization: Another client, a healthcare organization, was navigating a challenging leadership transition. Through team coaching, executives developed a shared vision, clarified their roles and decision-making authority, and fostered stronger internal agreements. This resulted in significant improvements in employee engagement and retention across the entire organization. Improved alignment and operations clarity within the team delivered these improvements within the business.
These examples demonstrate that when team coaching sets clear, measurable goals upfront, it yields tangible results that directly impact the business.
Embracing the Hidden Truth
The hidden truth about high-performing teams is not a complex secret, but a fundamental one: alignment is the indispensable catalyst. It’s a sophisticated mix of science, art, and relationships, and it demands intentional cultivation. By embracing tailored, embedded team coaching that focuses on real work and measurable collective goals, organizations can move beyond the buzz of “high performance” and become high-performing teams.
Are you ready to unlock the full potential of your leadership team through true alignment? Contact us to learn more about our tailored team coaching programs.
Links & Mentioned Resources
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Tegan Trovato: LinkedIn
Transcript
Tegan Trovato: Let’s talk today about fostering collaboration and high performance teams. The high performance team is such a buzz phrase right now, but there are really good teams out there.
There are few teams who perform and truly deliver. In fact, as little as 20% may actually be delivering on their priorities. So that’s part of the reason we focus so heavily on teams at Bright Arrow and why a good percentage of the work we deliver out in the world focuses on the team as an entity.
So one of the top things teams struggle with right off the bat is the ability to align behind very clear key initiatives. And it is really difficult as a CEO or senior team leader to create that alignment, partly because leadership teams need coaching that’s going to deliver measurable results. And to me, that’s more important than even in the individual coaching model where you work one-on-one with a coach.
Alignment and Team Goals
So let’s just take a minute for some real talk here on this part. Aligning a leadership team is harder than most people realize, and often teams are not even as aligned as they think they are. Alignment is a sophisticated mix of science, art, and relationships. Think about aligning in relationships. How abstract does that sound? Of course, it would take a mix of science and art.
And having someone from the outside come in and see you as a fresh set of eyes and to facilitate a team objectively is such a gift, and it’s part of what catalyzes a team when they need to reset. So while it’s ultimately the team leader’s job to instigate and regularly assess for alignment, it is truly every team member’s job to co-create the alignment. So headline, we start with alignment when it comes to thinking about high-performing teams.
Also, being able to be clear on the what, so what are you even aligning to to begin with? We intuitively know alignment’s important. And here’s what may surprise you. I say this a lot of times to executives, and they look a little surprised in the room when I say this, but leadership teams can get things done even when they’re not aligned. But we all know what that looks like. When we work with executive teams that are not aligned, what we end up finding is that they’re not getting things done quickly.
And the scenario or the metaphor I would use for that is they’re having to swim and wait for each other to arrive at the destination versus all just taking a boat. So alignment is the boat. Results are not as robust when teams are not aligned. At best, you may meet goals. You are certainly not going to exceed them. And if you do meet the goals, it will certainly take you longer.
If you do meet the goals while you’re unaligned, there will be conflict. So you can really enjoy the journey as a team a lot more if there’s alignment because you can avoid that conflict and internal friction and struggle. We often see that organizations will split into fiefdoms under different executives when there is not alignment on the team.
So the stories and the drama that results from the conflict in an unaligned team permeates the entire company culture. And another drawback of that is that those who aspire to more senior leadership roles are being taught through the modeling of that poorly aligned team that this is how you get work done here. That is not a message we want to send.
And when we share this back, the senior leaders are just mortified to find out that some of the earlier career leaders think that that’s how they’re supposed to get their work done. So effective leadership teams, obviously the backbone of any successful organization. And when they are aligned, they’re driving strategic initiatives. They are inspiring innovation. They’re building a trust culture, a cohesive culture. And we’re clear on the ripple effect we just talked about when they’re not aligned.
One-on-One Coaching vs. Team Coaching
One of the reasons I love focusing on teams as a firm, is how rich the feedback is for us as team members. So stay with me on this. When we are in one-on-one coaching, the team or the coach has to collect data on the executive, stakeholder interviews, psychometric assessments.
And there’s sort of a singular moment in the coaching experience where we hold the mirror up for the coaching client and say, here’s how the world’s experiencing you. Here’s the themes of your feedback. And then we work with that feedback for quite a long period of time through their coaching.
We may check in with their stakeholders periodically in the one-on-one coaching to see how they’re doing, to see how the world’s experiencing their change and growth, et cetera. The differences with team coaching is that for each leader, there are multiple mirrors being held up for them all the time. There’s just real data coming in at us constantly about how we’re being experienced. If we’re communicating well, if our ideas are landing, if we’re being strategic enough, if we’re investing in our relationships enough.
When there’s a team coach in the room, we are able to gather all of this constant sort of feedback and data about each person in the room; about the team itself, and work with it live while they’re trying to do their work. Think about how catalyzing that is when we can use all of that stimulus in the moment for growth. When you’ve got a team coach in the room with your team, you’re not going to leave the room unchanged.
You will certainly walk out of that room with a different perspective and certainly plenty to think about after the experience with your team and a coach in the room with you.
So our approach on that note, when we work with leadership teams, has innovated over the years. We know from team science that we follow out of Harvard, that the traditional approach to teams, the way it’s quite honestly done still quite a bit, is that using personality assessments or conflict or communication training with a team is at best episodic.
So they might feel good in the moment as team interventions, but we know from the science that it does not create lasting change or drive results. So as team coaches, we need to meet executives in the work of the team and instigate alignment around that work, coach them while they deliver on that body of work together. And by coaching them in the field as a team, we naturally end up addressing conflict over time.
We address communication challenges when they come up in the moment. We can help them work through their differing perspectives, but it needs to be while they are getting results for the business. This is a key differentiator between episodic team interventions or short off-sites.
Real team coaching should be embedded and it should ensure that the team is learning new skills together, having interventions and call outs in the moment and really delivering on results. And honestly, right now, execs simply do not have time to be offline for extended periods of time. So they need to be in the work and feel like their hours of investment delivered something for the business and that they weren’t just sitting around talking about their feelings about the team.
There is time and space for that, but for the most part, execs simply cannot be doing that on a regular basis. The coaching needs to happen in the field. When we work with teams who’ve been in conflict for a while, this approach is essential.
Coaching Teams Through Conflict
So not every team we meet is unhealthy for sure. Lots of teams are trying to tend to their relationships and when we meet them, they’re doing okay. But a good percentage that we come across and that when we’re engaged by the company have been in conflict for a while.
And so coaching them to their work and coaching them in alignment to the work is essential because by the time we get to them, they may not like each other that much. And the safest place for them to begin their team coaching journey is in the work. The delivery of work product or delivery of value for the enterprise is the safety they have if their relationships are no longer safe.
So we will then work with them, of course, to clean all of that up and heal all of that as they deliver the work. Probably the greatest power of team coaching, though, as I said earlier, is that reflecting back to us from many perspectives. So if we can really be open while we’re being coached as a team, open our hearts and minds, we can really gain some interesting perspective about how we’re being received by an entire group of people at any given moment.
And that is hugely catalyzing both for the individual and the team’s development. So the power of leadership team coaching really lies in its ability to create that collaboration among executives. And think about this. There are no light topics in a senior leadership team. Everything is high pressure. Everything has huge impacts and connectivity points.
And so even the most talented, healthy leaders can struggle with conflict and communication under those conditions. So if a team’s not really working on its dynamics, if it doesn’t have an outside partner, at least occasionally, to come in and reflect back to them what they’re seeing, they are naturally going to disintegrate a little bit over time. And so ideally, there’s a team coach who is in the moment with them, but also teaching them things as they go so that the team can become self-coaching.
Coaching Unique to Each Team
The other thing a team’s coach is doing in the room is helping each leader better understand how their own leadership style impacts the team dynamics. There is nothing wrong with any single leader’s style in the room, but it does create impacts. And so having an executive team coach in the room to help call some of that out and draw the best of each leader’s style forward is part of how you really get the value out of the executive team’s time together.
As I mentioned earlier, we really tailor our approach to team coaching for every team. So I want to talk about why for a minute. Number one, every team is different.
We have never coached the same two teams here at Bright Arrow. So most team challenges will fall into similar buckets, but the makeup of every team is always different. How the personalities vibe is always different.
The baggage and the stories that each team carries around, always different. How the team leader impacts the team, very nuanced. So with that said, every team coaching intervention needs to be tailored to the team.
Don’t get me wrong. The qualities of a healthy team are the same for every team. What we aspire to deliver in terms of how we behave is the same for every team.
There’s six key conditions that we know lead to effective teams. That won’t change. But there’s a lot between those conditions that is different for every team, as I just said.
So what we don’t want to do with senior leaders is waste their time by putting them through exercises that don’t create immediate value for them as a unit because we’ve given them something generic that we use for every single team. So that’s part of the benefit of a really tailored team coaching program. We also want to make sure that team coaching achieves tangible results.
And let’s again go back first to one-on-one executive coaching. One-on-one executive coaching should also have goals. Our ability to always measure all of the outcomes of one-on-one coaching, very difficult.
One-on-one coaching, there will be specific goals an exec wants to deliver. Like they may be increasing ROI by a percentage or increasing revenue by a percentage. They may have a goal to reduce attrition or you name one of the measurables.
We can track those. What we can’t track is for an individual executive is how much more frequently they acted with courage or if they have grown their vulnerability muscle when they’re interacting with their own team leaders or if they’re leading more effective one-on-ones. We can’t measure all that stuff, but we trust the value that’s coming out of that and our executives report back the value of those things for themselves.
Now with team coaching, we are a lot more stringent about making sure there are really tangible goals. Coaching teams without measurable goals upfront is a lost cause. Teams need very specific, clear measures to work towards.
Otherwise, their development as a team is completely unmanageable. So what I love most about our work with teams is that for even the best teams we’ve worked with, we help them level up to create those measurable outcomes together and we model how they would measure their performance by setting those coaching goals in the framework that we use. So frankly, one of the most common struggles most exec teams have is that they have not set measurable targets for themselves as a team.
Have they set enterprise goals? Heck yes. Have they set department goals for the leaders that report to them? Absolutely. Have they set goals for their own performance? Probably so as individuals. But have they set goals for their executive or leadership team? What is it they deliver on together? Very seldom.
So before I ask a CEO to tell me how aligned their team is, I first ask them to tell me what goals they align the team to. What is it they expect the team to deliver on that differs from the enterprise and departmental goals that are largely owned by the rest of their employees to deliver? It’s a hugely expansive coupling of questions and our CEOs end up discovering that there’s more value for an aligned executive team to deliver than they ever really thought of before.
And it is a different way to lead. And frankly, not every CEO wants to lead that way. A lot of CEOs still appreciate leading the executives as a group and having each function just report into them on what’s going up on in their world.
But as the team they’ve created becomes more sophisticated in their work and as they foster their relationships there as a team, there is more value for them to deliver for the organization. And it is a really mind bending and fun intellectual exercise to get them all in the room and have them really think through what else they might deliver for the organization when they work together as an aligned team. Some of our case studies for team coaching are just humbling and exciting.
Successful Teams – Previous Clients
So we know from one of our clients was a technology company. It was going through rapid expansion and growth. They saw, well, they quantified this themselves, a 30% increase in team productivity after they engaged in leadership team coaching.
And so they identify that by improving their communication, not just the quality of it, but the mechanisms and the rituals for communicating, that they created a resolution for their longstanding conflicts and that created huge efficiencies. Because of that, they were also able to focus more on their strategic goals and less on the minutiae and they were making faster decisions. And so they really associated their improvement as a team with part of that accelerated growth for the entire company.
Another company we worked with, a healthcare organization, was struggling with their leadership transition. So through leadership team coaching, the executives were able to create a shared vision. Clarify the roles within the executive team, who has the D, as we like to say, who has the decision-making authority in different areas. Really foster their own agreements about their decision-making processes. So the entire organization saw significant improvements in employee engagement and retention after they cleaned up their own behaviors on the team.
And that was the single change that they made prior to those employee engagement scores being rerun. They associated those improved scores with how they were operating as a team with their alignment and what they were able to make clear to the business. So the business could go faster, people felt more connected to their work and just generally happier in their workplace and collaborating across departments.
So these studies demonstrate some of the measurable results that come from leadership team coaching. It’s important that we set some of those goals up front as the targets of what we’re trying to deliver through the coaching work.
So with that, I hope we’ve expanded your mind about what could be possible with executive coaching.
I would always love to hear back from you. If you have challenges to this information, if you have more questions about how to find a great coach. Otherwise, keep doing your great work out there and we’ll see you in the next episode.
