Top Team Alignment
Top Team and Organizational Culture
Peter Drucker famously wrote that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” This means that having a top team that demonstrates the organization’s “next stage” culture is critical. For any organization, the culture of the top team either inspires or limits the entire organization.
Being able to thrive in today’s Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous [VUCA] context requires not only hiring the top talent for each executive function but to leverage and amplify that talent is equally important. This requires your top team having a larger purpose that each team member can embrace as their own. Purpose as such imbues each individual’s work with a sense of meaning and transforms career into calling. A shared purpose transforms a group into a team.
Optimizing for Collective Intelligence
Collective intelligence refers to the capability of a group or team to collaborate and achieve goals that an individual, even the most gifted, would not be able to accomplish alone. Collective Intelligence is a core organizational capacity needed to thrive in the VUCA conditions of today’s business environment.
Collective Intelligence in Action is a team that…
– is inclusive, embracing people and coordinating diverse perspectives, including those that we tend to be allergic to.
– is proficient at “safe-to-fail” experiments and being able to reflect and learn from each experiment.
– can move seamlessly between action and reflection, such that creative insight emerges in real time.
– embraces conflict as a pathway to unleash the trapped energy and open new strategic possibilities for the organization.
From Dana:
In my more than thirty years of experience I have been privileged to work with many excellent teams and organizations. In that time I have worked with approximately a dozen teams that were faced with making choices that would have compromised their principles. They declined to do so and evolved into their “next stage” as a result.
What made these groups extraordinary was their capacity to stay with the conflict and tension until there was a breakthrough in thinking amongst the collective. These are notable moments of collective intelligence coming online, in which organizational purpose becomes palpable and key insights emerge that were formerly unavailable.
Most of the men and women I have worked with during such times look back on these experiences as among the most valuable of their career. They regard this transformational teamwork as the most growth-filled and meaningful time in their often decades of being an executive. Many of these executives have gone on to CEO positions or positions at larger organizations and the fruits of our work together they brought to the next stage of their career.
For example, after one of these breakthrough sessions Dana and a client named and mapped the “attunement and alignment process” (see graph below). This process consistently resulted in breakthrough innovation for the client and she was able to replicate it in future work settings.
Top Team Alignment Matters
Over the decades DCIC has refined the skills and tools to facilitate harnessing collective intelligence amongst teams. We excel in helping new team formation or supporting more mature teams to break through blockages and unleash next level capacities and creativity.
Top teams that have developed the reliable capacity to attune and align in action are always a magnet for attracting and retaining extraordinary talent and provide lasting, profound value to their stakeholders.
This requires a CEO who feels as if they were born to develop individual leaders, teams and cultures. When these aims are coupled as the CEO’s top priorities, then the essential conditions are in place for a breakthrough in Top Team Alignment. These transformational breakthroughs ripple and radiate out through the organization’s culture and beyond.
We invite you to contact us to explore working together.