Senior Team Effectiveness

Getting a senior team working well together is one of the most impactful things we can achieve. Not every leadership group functions well, or even at all, as a team. That’s a missed opportunity we can do something about in a systematic way

Please get in touch to explore what working with your team could achieve for you

Benefits

Working with you and your team can greatly strengthen your business or organisation through securing these benefits for your leadership group:

More effective dialogue

Better decisions

Robust governance

More enterprising behaviour

Agility and resilience

Developing successors

Please get in touch to explore what working with your team could achieve for you

Book a call

Who I work with

I work with senior leaders who have ultimate responsibility for an organisation or part of an organisation, mainly in engineering and manufacturing industry, scientific research and universities and academia.

Please get in touch to explore what working with your team could achieve for you

Get in touch

How we can work together

Specific programmes to improve results and solve problems through strengthened leadership and strategic alignment throughout your organisation

Leadership consultancy

Development of your team as leaders, individually and collectively, including facilitation of small and large groups

Team coaching

Support for you personally in your senior leadership role, as a sounding board and trusted adviser

Personalised support

Accessible opportunities to participate in through-time development of leadership and professional relationship skills and influence

Online workshops

Results

I have transformed the collective effectiveness of a number of senior teams, commonly taking them from truly a group of individual managers to a genuine team of interdependent leaders. Frequently, these leaders will be in competition with each other in some aspects of their jobs (for budget, for example) but they also need to co-operate with each other to optimise the whole enterprise.

Frequently, part of what’s needed is a bit more structure and process, for example, to handle the team’s portfolio of change-work systematically.

Changes of this type have often transformed the financial results of organisations. For example, an industrial manufacturer was brought up from significantly loss-making to break-even and onwards to profitability. An engineering school at a university raised its research grant income by around £10-15m in a year, a significant uplift, given its scale.

Testimonials

“Addressing our problems, within a framework, from an alongside position, rather than imposing some abstract thinking from a different context”

Professor Dame Muffy Calder FREng FRSE, Head of College and Vice Principal, University of Glasgow

“Helped bring a discipline to the meeting, as well as help and facilitation. Made tremendous interjections at the right time, helped people reconnect with what they personally needed to do to make the project successful.”

John Louden, Alliance Manager, Jacobs Engineering Ltd

“David has channelled the experiences of the participants and his own expertise very well to form a valuable conversation for all.”

David Equi, Managing Director, Equi’s Ice Cream

“David combines broadly based and well-informed thinking with a practical approach. This is highly relevant both locally and internationally.”

Andrew Fulton, President, Scottish North American Business Council

“Having just read David’s book I now understand why he was so successful and I would highly recommend his work to anyone looking to improve business efficiency and effectiveness through improving relationships.”

John Hanlon, Director of Estates, Naval Base Clyde

Resources

Strategic Leaders online workshop group

Join your fellow senior leaders for mutual interaction and insight in a monthly, 1.5-hour online group focusing on aligning your organisation around a settled sense of direction and strategy

More info

Business Leaders’ online workshop group

Join a group of managing directors and CEOs meeting monthly to share experiences, discuss issues and learn new insights relating to a wide range of business issues (1.5 hours, once a month)

More info

The Mastery of Leadership book

Being a great leader of other people starts with being a great leader of yourself. This book sets out my approach to that important starting point

More info

FAQs

Your Title Goes Here

Your content goes here. Edit or remove this text inline or in the module Content settings. You can also style every aspect of this content in the module Design settings and even apply custom CSS to this text in the module Advanced settings.

What defines a team – senior or otherwise?

Generally, a team has a defined membership that is reasonably stable over time and those members understand and accept their interdependence in delivering a shared task or outcome. They also need to be clear about the extent of their authority. If there isn’t a shared task, we have a group rather than a team. It can be more helpful to ask what are the tasks that require a team than to ask whether we are a team or not. It’s quite common for a group of managers in a hierarchy to be referred as a team, but don’t be misled: They may well not act as a team, nor even be expected to sometimes.

How big can a team be and still be a team?

There are a limits to how big a team can be without lapsing into being a group instead. We can debate the number but it’s certainly not much more than 10, quite likely fewer.