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Coaching Corner

How to accelerate strategic capabilities  

Published 24 May 2024 in Coaching Corner • 5 min read

The challenge

Andie is the operations director of a large public organization undergoing a major restructuring of its products and services. The organization is simultaneously grappling with serious uncertainty around funding. Under pressure to design and build a set of new strategic roadmaps in this ambiguous context, Andie faces the additional challenge of managing a group of teams that have struggled to break free from silos in the past and that tend to jostle for influence within the organization. To break through deadlocks and better align these teams around strategy building, Andie has decided to go all in on “agility,” a solution that has worked well for Andie personally in the past. Andie believes that by insisting that team leaders be more agile in their processes and practices, the bulk of the issues they face will find their resolution. While Andie feels passionate about agile teamwork as a solution, team leaders, however, have failed to respond with enthusiasm, and the silos have remained.

Andie is struggling to find a better solution. Feeling stressed about the lack of enthusiasm and traction in team meetings and deeply worried about the continuing external uncertainties facing these teams and the organization, Andie requests support from an executive coach.

The coaching journey

Initially, exploratory conversations with the coach reveal that as a manager, Andie sometimes struggles to relinquish control. Adamant that a focus on agility training will provide the solution, Andie finds it genuinely hard to consider other approaches or perspectives. A deeper discussion with the coach points to a paradox this has created for the team. Andie’s need for control has, in fact, deepened the silos, as team leaders have learned to come to Andie with problems and concerns and wait for Andie to resolve them. Instead of working together or finding ways to collaborate, team leaders have come to see the solution as reporting issues to Andie and waiting for decisions. Andie has effectively become a bottleneck to agility.

Talking openly and in a safe space with the coach, Andie’s coach gives candid and important feedback about Andie’s (self-confessed) tendency to “maneuver” team leaders by encouraging (unhealthy) competition between teams, for instance, or setting financial targets without fully articulating the strategic objectives that underlie them. Andie now begins to see that a lack of clear communication — multilateral communication with and between the team leaders — is working against them and that success metrics need to extend beyond financial results to include things like enhanced collaboration and shared ownership for outcomes. Andie’s instinct for agility might be able to see that a lack of clear communication — and communicating with them more openly, makes them unlikely to make this a reality.

“If communication is permitted to flow openly across and between teams, new opportunities for collaboration, innovation, and greater consensus are also more likely to emerge.”

Key tactics and impact

Andie and the coach agree to set up a number of interviews so that team leaders can openly express their concerns and share their perspectives on the challenges they face in a space of psychological safety. These first meetings are individual, but business critical insights and ideas are captured and then shared, with permission, with the heads of other teams at a general meeting that Andie and the coach convene.

During this general meeting, Andie’s coach acts as a facilitator and external observer, using a flip chart to capture issues, problems, and potential solutions that emerge from the dialogue between Andie and the team leaders — and between team leaders themselves. A key discovery during this meeting is the critical importance of communication; if communication is permitted to flow openly across and between teams, new opportunities for collaboration, innovation, and greater consensus are also more likely to emerge. Team leaders report that they feel more empowered exchanging in this way; that by openly expressing their concerns and possible areas of conflict, they feel better equipped to work together to devise solutions — and that the agility that Andie has been lobbying for might now be within reach.

Following this general meeting, Andie and the team leaders create a shared action plan with support and input from the coach. This action plan details a new way of working together; they have agreed on an agenda and new formulae for capturing diverse input, suggestions, and ideas and collaborating; all of this is built on a multi-directional flow of communication. As a result, the different teams have gone on to create and are about to enact a set of ambitious new strategies. Andie feels optimistic that these strategies will take the organization forward even in times of change and uncertainty.

Questions to ask yourself

  1. How ready do you feel to let go of some of the control you currently have over outcomes?
  2. In your leadership practice, do you think it’s easy or difficult for team members to speak openly?
  3. Do you routinely adjust or refresh your perspectives, or a hypothesis based on other people’s input?

In the Coaching Corner series, we share real-world, practical coaching scenarios. Read on to discover the specific challenges highlighted in the cases and the insights that could help you navigate and find solutions to your own multifaceted challenges. How might these insights and questions apply to you? 

Authors

Ioana Parry

Ioana Parry is a lifelong learner and Registered Occupational-Organisational Psychologist with 15 years of experience in organizational psychology and development (OD). Her expertise sits at the intersection of socio-technical systems transformation (people, systems and digital) across several sectors: commercial, government, healthcare and higher education in the United Kingdom.

She works in the national healthcare service in the UK, where she has gained experience at local, London regional and national levels, working with multi-level, multi-functional and ethnically diverse stakeholder groups.

 

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