Building the collective decision-making and strategic capacity of the senior team.
When strategies underperform, the diagnosis usually points to execution — individuals who did not deliver, functions that did not collaborate, a culture that resisted change. That diagnosis is often wrong. The more accurate diagnosis is that the senior leadership team was not configured to govern the strategy it was asked to execute.
Unclear decision rights mean consequential choices escalate, stall, or get made by people who lack the authority and information to make them well. Suppressed conflict means disagreements that should surface in the boardroom surface instead in execution — as competing priorities, contradictory resource allocation, and political manoeuvring that consumes energy without producing outcomes. Insufficient cognitive diversity means the team systematically misses the signals that a more varied set of perspectives would have caught.
A leadership team configured for harmony rather than strategic clarity is not a team that supports its members. It is a team that fails them — by creating conditions in which difficult truths are not surfaced, consequential disagreements are not resolved, and the organisation eventually pays for what the team could not bring itself to discuss.
The diagnostic assesses team architecture and interaction patterns against the demands of the strategy. The design phase specifies team decision rights and governance structure, norms and mechanisms for productive conflict, and a development arc for the team as a collective system. Facilitated sessions build challenge capacity — the ability to disagree with rigour, surface uncomfortable data, and make decisions the team can commit to collectively.
A team effectiveness engagement: diagnostic assessment of team architecture and interaction patterns; design of team decision rights and governance structure; facilitated sessions to build challenge capacity and productive conflict norms; and a development arc for the team as a collective system.
Four to eight months. Often integrated with a Competitive Strategy engagement when the strategy refresh process itself is used as the developmental vehicle for the team — building collective capacity through the work of designing the strategy, not alongside it.
A new CEO is building or inheriting a leadership team; a strategic refresh requires the team to operate differently than it has previously; persistent decision-making dysfunction — escalation, avoidance, or unresolved conflict — exists at the senior level; or the board has concerns about the collective quality of the executive team.