Senior Team Alignment

Creating a Shared Agenda
for Organizational Change

Top-level managers are faced with a complex challenge: they achieve their positions based on their outstanding performance in a functional role, then are asked to move beyond that functional perspective to focus on the good of the entire organization. In many cases, nothing in their educational or professional backgrounds has prepared them for this enterprise-wide responsibility.

As a result, many senior teams are characterized by competing agendas and disagreement about the overall direction for the business. Given this lack of alignment, it is difficult—if not impossible—to create commitment among lower-level employees.

GMT has helped many senior teams to overcome their differing perspectives and achieve agreement on the most critical obstacles and opportunities confronting the business. Based on this close alignment, top executives can then create a shared agenda for growth, as well as an agreed-upon set of cultural values.

Achieving Consensus Within the Senior Team
The Power of Managing by Facts
Enterprise Insight: Creating Conviction at the Top
Increasing Leadership Effectiveness

Achieving Consensus Within
the Senior Team

GMT creates the forum in which senior teams can assess their performance in a candid, constructive environment—addressing such questions as:

	Is our management team committed to the same vision, values, and performance targets?
	Do our managers work with a "good for the company" mindset—and exemplify leadership principles?
	Does the senior team have access to facts—about the market, costs, competitors, etc.—needed to create meaningful strategies and make daily decisions?
	Are executives providing clear focus—while also creating an open forum for feedback?
	Have we created management roles that reflect the strengths and limitations of individual executives?

The Power of Managing by Facts

Too often, executives fail to manage based on factual information about performance, market needs, industry trends, and growth expectations. Instead, critical decisions are made according to:

	Organizational politics that focus on who is right, instead of what is right
	Historical performance or traditional practices—defining targets and strategies based on the past, when business conditions may have changed dramatically
	Executives' intuition about internal challenges and external growth opportunities
	Limited customer feedback, anecdotal information, or conventional wisdom

Given the obvious limitations of these inputs, many senior teams are characterized by disagreement and conflict. What is needed is a fact-based approach that focuses attention on real-world information.

Enterprise Insight: Creating Conviction
at the Top

The first step is ensuring that executives have the facts they need to fully understand the current position of the business, the most promising strategic opportunities, and the senior team issues that may obstruct growth.

GMT helps clients to form teams that assemble the information that already exists within the business, as well as collecting data on the competitive landscape and market trends.

This information-gathering phase is most effective when it includes feedback from customers, end users, suppliers, and lower-level managers. By soliciting contributions from functional managers, the senior team can increase these managers' understanding—while also ensuring their buy-in.

Increasing Leadership Effectiveness

As the senior team establishes an overall vision and values, GMT helps to ensure that executives reinforce these priorities through effective leadership.

GMT's comprehensive leadership assessment helps executives to increase their effectiveness in such areas as:

	Acting as a visionary
	Balancing control and empowerment
	Deploying the strategy
	Achieving bottom-line results
	Creating energy and momentum
	Fostering teamwork

By providing a quantitative assessment, GMT offers a perspective on the strengths and limitations of every executive. Not only can this help individuals to identify areas in which they need to improve, but it can also help to create new roles which leverage each manager's strengths. By tailoring executives' roles to their capabilities, GMT can help to build a far more effective senior team.