Leadership Team Facilitation: Getting a Leadership team to pull in the same direction can be surprisingly difficult.
For one thing, meetings can often be counter-productive, falling in to limiting patterns where one or two people dominate or where disagreement quickly becomes either aggressive or is avoided at all costs.
Acting as Chair and facilitator, I ensure that your Senior Team meetings are disciplined and constructive.
I ensure there is a clearly agreed purpose for the team with suitable goals as well as facilitating full contributions from the whole team with a clear “line of sight” for each Manager from their contribution to the team results. I then hold the team to account for both its behaviours and its actions.
Following a few simple “meeting rules” quickly changes meetings from a chore or a battle, to the hub of what you do.
For example:
Clamp down on people interrupting each other. As soon as you do, meetings will take up considerably less time, because people won’t battle to keep hold of the conversation until they’ve made all the points they can think of.
Move away from being adversarial. If you are a real team, working together, then it should never be about winning arguments, it should be about finding the best solutions. There is a big difference between these two.
Make sure everyone contributes at the start. Research shows that the most effective teams have roughly equal contributions from everyone at the table. Making sure everyone speaks up at the start means they are far more likely to participate fully as the meeting goes on.
Call me on 07730 700258 if you would like to discuss how Leadership Team Facilitation can transform the performance of your Senior Management Team and the business as a whole.