Executive Team Excellence: Is Your Team Ready?

By Siobhan Smith

Co-President of Catapult

When we work with Executive Teams, we meet the best and the brightest individuals with great strategies for moving the business forward. And, yet as a team, we find that something is often off. These highly skilled executives feel they are not:

  • Reaching their collective potential
  • Discussing the right topics
  • Obtaining their desired results

And they often do not understand why.

Our Executive Team Excellence program begins with asking detailed and probing questions. We start by meeting with the team leader to gain insight on where the team is and to get answers to critical questions such as:

  • Is the Executive Team an actual team?
  • Do they do any work together to obtain results?
  • Do they have a collective purpose?
  • What is the readiness of the team to take the time to do the work to be an excellent team—both to be cohesive and effective?

Once the team is ready to commit, we use individual assessments to gain deeper insight into each member of the team, as well as team assessments to understand how the team functions.

Individual Leadership Assessments & Discovery

We believe in gaining self-awareness of who each executive is as a member of the team. We have a host of assessments that we use depending on what works best for the team, including:

  • Myers Briggs Type Indicator to help understand personality preferences.
  • Six Types of Working Genius to understand their individual strengths and frustrations.
  • Emotional Intelligence Quotient to understand their level of EQ.
  • One-on-one interview questions to gain insights and points of view to provide a deeper understanding of the individual executive.

Team Assessments & Discovery

For teams, we want to understand the level of functionality of the team and its members’ perspectives of the team.

  • To understand the functionality of the team we conduct Team Assessments to understand how the team deals with trust, psychological safety, conflict, commitment, accountability, and team results.
  • We also believe it is important to gain context and hear the voice of the team through anonymous interviews which seek to understand how the team members feel about its functionality, purpose, and leadership.
  • We observe the team in action by joining team meetings to understand how they communicate with each other, how they resolve conflicts, how they set and achieve objectives, and so on.

Once we obtain the results of these important assessments, we prepare an Executive Summary to review with the team leader. This information acts as a roadmap of what the team needs to focus on to be more functional as a team. The interviews also add critical information on what work is important to prioritize as a collective team.

The assessments provide an essential roadmap for the Executive Team Excellence engagement. And then the real work begins.

If you want your Executive Team to work more effectively, Catapult can help. Contact us today for more information about our Executive Team Excellence programs and how they can help your business.

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