To create high-performing teams, you need to invest in the people who lead them. Leadership teams embody company culture, set expectations and examples, and navigate employees through tough situations. Without a focus on leadership team development, you could start to see an increase in employee turnover due to poor leadership and miscommunication, leading to lower levels of job satisfaction.
Leadership team development isn’t just about existing leaders. You should always keep one eye on identifying and developing future leaders too. Building a leadership pipeline and developing a succession plan will keep your business moving even through unexpected changes at the top levels. In fact, organizations that spend time developing high-potential talent are 4.2 times more likely to financially outperform any competitors who haven’t committed to this objective.
A cohesive leadership team has a positive impact on employee experience, giving people a reason to work hard and remain loyal. The effect of strong leadership teams on engagement can’t be denied—companies with strong employee engagement have been found to generate 25% higher profits than organizations with a sub-standard employee experience.
What is Leadership Team Development?
Leadership team development goes beyond individual training or certifications. It’s not simply about each leader focusing on their own personal growth or acquiring specific skills for their role. Instead, leadership team development is about improving how leaders collaborate and function as a cohesive unit. It addresses the challenges they face when working together and provides strategies to enhance their collective effectiveness.
For this process to be successful, each leader must be fully committed to the team’s improvement. They need to understand that being part of an effective leadership team requires honing emotional intelligence, embracing honest and constructive feedback, and being adaptable when the team needs to pivot or change direction.
Ultimately, leaders must recognize that their success as a collective unit directly impacts the overall success of the organization. This often means reassessing personal goals and priorities in favour of the team’s objectives, ensuring that the whole team is aligned and focused on shared outcomes.
Why Leadership Team Development Matters
There are compelling reasons to spend time on leadership team development, including:
- Improved team collaboration and communication: Strong leadership teams are able to set an example to their employees, showing them what good collaboration looks like and how working together can help overcome problems quickly and effectively.
- Improved employee engagement and retention: Well-developed leadership teams who know from experience what it is to be part of an effective team are better able to develop their own teams by engaging with their needs, understanding individuals, and building trust. This all contributes to better employee morale and lower turnover rates.
- Increased organizational performance: A key element of leadership team development is aligning goals and expectations, resisting becoming too siloed by function. This alignment helps the team all pull together in one direction rather than fighting various priorities, which drives success and growth.
- Creating a strong workplace culture: Leaders who get along and work together well set the tone for their employees. They promote trust and inclusivity, including everyone in their shared vision for the organization.
- Development of future leaders: Existing leadership teams shouldn’t fear future leaders. They should invest in identifying the leaders of tomorrow and work to prepare them through training, mentorship and talent mobility strategies to create a pipeline of skilled leaders for long-term success even after the current leadership team moves on. Nearly 60% of all leaders have never had a formal mentor and had to figure things out on the job, which takes time and may lead to costly mistakes, so leader-successor mentorship is vital.
Key Challenges in Leadership Team Development
It’s motivating to think about the ways in which developing your leadership team can have a lasting impact on your organization, but you should also be aware of the challenges you could face when working on leadership team development.
These challenges include:
- Lack of alignment: Leaders with different priorities or leadership styles can create friction. It may be difficult for them to agree on what should be prioritized, especially when competing for budget, but decisions should always be made in the interest of the company and not personal gain.
- Poor communication: Miscommunication leads to inefficiency and team breakdowns. Mediators are useful in the event of conflict due to poor communication as they can listen to each side fairly and encourage each party to see where the communication problem stemmed from so the issue can be avoided in future.
- Resistance to change: Some leaders may struggle to adapt to new leadership development strategies. They may have held their position for a long time and feel threatened by the idea of change.
- Failure to invest in continuous development: Leadership growth should be an ongoing process, one that is monitored and addressed regularly by individuals and the leadership team.
How to Get Leadership Team Development Right
To avoid the challenges above, here are a few areas you can focus on to get leadership team development right:
- Promote open and honest communication: Encourage transparency and trust among the leadership team. No one should be afraid to speak their mind if it is constructive and will help push the team forward, and no one should withhold information from others. To keep secrets would signal a breakdown of trust, which could lead to spiralling problems around communication and collaboration.
- Create shared goals and a unified vision: The leadership team should agree on the company’s objectives and the role each person and department needs to play in order to meet these objectives.
- Provide ongoing training and development: Equip leaders with skills to adapt and grow as a team. This includes sharpening their role-relevant skills but also improving soft skills like empathy and problem-solving.
- Encourage collaboration and teamwork: Break down silos and promote cross-functional leadership co-operation. Have individual leaders shadow their fellow leaders to better understand their needs, challenges, and priorities. Shadowing is a great way to spot opportunities for cross-functional collaboration.
- Ensure accountability at all levels: Leaders must be accountable not only to their fellow leadership team members but also to their teams and employees at all levels. 360-degree feedback assessments can help with accountability, as employees with various different relationships to the leader can give anonymous feedback on strengths and areas for improvement.
- Leverage data-driven insights: Psychometric tests such as Thomas’s behavioral assessments, personality assessments and aptitude tests are invaluable guides when it comes to leadership team development. These scientific measures provide a well-rounded picture of each leader, including how they operate in a team, so you know what you’re starting with and can create a roadmap towards improvement.
The Role of Emotional Intelligence in Leadership Team Development
We’ve already mentioned soft skills being a vital part of leadership team development, but let’s take a moment to focus specifically on emotional intelligence in the workplace.
Emotionally intelligent leaders are able to empathize with those around them—whether that be their fellow leadership team members or their employees—and are self-aware enough to acknowledge and manage their own emotions. They’re able to observe the relationships between people in their team, which can be useful when it comes to seeing signs of conflict and addressing them before any disagreements bubble over. They can maintain a positive outlook and build trust within their team through good communication.
These skills are significant when it comes to maintaining employee engagement, motivating teams through challenging times, and preventing turnover rates from escalating. Adversely, leaders with low emotional intelligence aren’t adequately prepared to deal with the complex feelings of individuals, may struggle to understand the source of low satisfaction within their teams, and may even be prone to unsettling emotional outbursts. Low EQ in leaders has been proven to increase employee turnover and reduce productivity levels.
The favored model of measuring emotional intelligence, generating an emotional quotient (EQ) score, is made up of four components:
- Self-awareness: Understanding personal strengths and weaknesses.
- Self-management: Regulating emotions to lead effectively.
- Social awareness: Recognizing the needs of employees and peers.
- Relationship management: Building strong, positive relationships within teams.
All of these skills can be developed to increase EQ. This work starts by gathering a baseline measure of existing emotional intelligence through assessments like our Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire (TEIQue).
Steps to Develop a High-Performing Leadership Team
Here are 5 steps you can follow to start developing a high-performing leadership team:
- Assess current leadership strengths and gaps: Use tools like Thomas assessments to evaluate existing leadership skills and to discuss next steps about how to take them to the next level.
- Define leadership goals and development plans: Set measurable objectives for leadership growth as individuals and as a leadership team. These should align with company objectives and be agreed upon as a group, with priorities established.
- Encourage continuous learning and coaching: Implement mentorship, executive coaching, and skill-building programs, both for your existing leaders and for those you’ve identified as future leaders.
- Promote a feedback-driven culture: Use 360-degree feedback and performance reviews to enhance leadership effectiveness, gathering insights from those who work most closely with your leadership team.
- Monitor progress and adjust strategies – Leadership team development takes time. It’s an ongoing process that needs to be tracked so improvements can be made as needed.
How Thomas Can Help with Leadership Team Development
We’re experts in developing leaders. We use scientific assessments to gather accurate data on everything from behavior and personality to aptitude and emotional intelligence. Using this information about your leaders, we can tailor our tried-and-tested training programs to suit the needs of your organization and industry, supporting your leaders as they grow together.
We’ve had great success doing this for companies around the globe, including cloud-solutions provider Vena. Thanks to our assessments and bespoke leadership development program, Vena’s leaders gained a deeper understanding of themselves and how they could improve, resulting in increased productivity, improved employee engagement, and better collaboration.
Build Stronger Leadership Teams for Long-Term Success
We’ve seen how strong leadership teams can have a major positive impact on their organizations, improving everything from employee engagement and job satisfaction to more effective problem-solving and even a boost to profits. We know that we need to develop good leaders to tackle employee turnover caused by poor communication and a company culture that doesn’t resonate.
Give your organization the best chance of success and start building a stronger leadership team today. Before you start to encourage continuous learning and defining new leadership goals, start by understanding the strengths and challenges of your leadership team with Thomas’s psychometric assessments.
We’ll help you understand your leaders, identify future leaders, and put a development plan in place to strengthen your leaders as individuals and as an emotionally intelligent, collaborative team.
Get in touch with our experts today, and we’ll help you develop a leadership team that’s built to succeed.
