Blueprint for Sustained Performance Issue 13: From Functional Leaders to Collective Leadership
Source: Deb Bailey Ltd
Blueprint for Sustained Performance
Issue 13: From Functional Leaders to Collective Leadership
Blueprint Lens: A strong leadership system doesn't simply produce capable individual leaders. It creates collective leadership. The Shift Every Senior Leadership Team Must Make.
As businesses grow, sustained performance depends less on how well individual leaders perform within their own functions and more on how effectively the senior leadership team leads the business together.
That requires every senior leader to wear two leadership hats.
Every Senior Leader Wears Two Hats
One of the simplest ways I think about collective leadership is an orchestra. Every musician is exceptionally skilled.
The string section knows its craft. The brass section knows theirs. The percussion section understands exactly what they're there to do.
If every section simply tried to be the loudest or most impressive, the audience wouldn't experience great music. They would experience competing performances.
The quality of the performance comes from every musician understanding when to lead, when to support and when to play as part of something much bigger than themselves.
Senior leadership teams are no different. Every member of the senior leadership team wears two leadership hats.
The first is their Functional Leadership Hat.
This is where they lead Operations, Finance, Commercial or People. Their responsibility is to build capability, make good decisions and deliver results within their own area.
The second is their Collective Leadership Hat.
When the senior leadership team comes together, each leader has a different responsibility. They are no longer there simply to represent their function. They are there to help lead the business.
Knowing which hat the situation requires is one of the clearest signs of leadership maturity and it requires leaders to continually shift perspective.
The Two Leadership Hats
(Source: Deb Bailey Ltd: The Two Leadership Hats)
Functional excellence gets you to the senior leadership table. Collective leadership determines what that table achieves.
From Functional Leaders to Collective Leadership
Many senior leadership teams are made up of highly capable people who are doing an excellent job leading their own function.
Operations is focused on delivery
Commercial is focused on pipeline and margin
Finance is focused on cash flow and risk
People leaders are focused on attracting, developing and retaining great people
Every one of these perspectives matters.
The challenge begins when leaders naturally start viewing priorities and decisions primarily through the lens of their own function rather than through the needs of the business as a whole.
Collective leadership doesn't ask leaders to stop leading their function, it asks them to broaden their perspective.
Why This Matters
When senior leadership teams operate collectively, execution becomes more consistent. Decisions are made once and reinforced consistently across the business.
Messages become clearer because leaders are communicating the same priorities. Standards become more consistent because leaders reinforce them together.
People experience one leadership team, even though they interact with different leaders who each will have their own style.
Collective leadership doesn't remove disagreement. In fact, strong leadership teams often have robust discussions.
The difference is that once a decision has been made, every leader leaves the room committed to making it successful, regardless of their original position.
That is one of the clearest signs that a senior leadership team is operating collectively.
Research Insight
A few years ago I had the pleasure of meeting and talking with leadership researcher and author Gordon Curphy who has long highlighted the importance of the senior leadership teams modelling effective teamwork. Because the way the top team works almost always cascades throughout the organisation.
When the senior leadership team operates collectively, collaboration and alignment are far more likely to spread throughout the business. When leaders begin operating primarily through their own functional lens, those same patterns often spread just as quickly.
A Leadership Question
Think about the last senior leadership meeting you attended.
When everyone left the room, which hat did they put back on?
Did they immediately return to championing the interests of their own function?
Or did they leave committed to making the collective decision successful across the whole business?
The answer often says more about the maturity of the leadership team than the quality of the decision itself.
A Final Thought
Collective leadership isn't about asking leaders to care less about their own function.
It's about asking them to care just as deeply about the success of every other function as they do their own.
That's the shift.
When senior leaders consistently know which hat the situation requires, something changes. Alignment strengthens and execution becomes more consistent.
The business experiences one leadership team.
And sustained performance becomes much easier to achieve.
Need Some Help?
One of the patterns I often see in senior leadership teams is that they simply haven't taken the time to understand how effectively they're leading together.
Research tells us that the way the senior leadership team works almost always cascades throughout the organisation. That's why measuring team performance can be one of the highest leverage investments a leadership team makes.
Through my Decoding Team Performance programme, I help senior leadership teams measure how they're functioning against the characteristics of high performing teams. The process creates objective insight into where collaboration is strong, where leadership drift may be occurring and where attention will have the greatest impact. It also creates a common language that helps leadership teams have more productive conversations about the way they work together.
If your senior leadership team is made up of capable people but you're not yet getting the full benefit of that capability, I'd love to have a conversation. Sometimes the greatest opportunity isn't developing better individual leaders. It's helping capable leaders learn how to lead the business together.
If the ideas in this issue have resonated with you, you can download the Blueprint for Sustained Performance Whitepaper to explore the five leadership pillars that underpin sustained performance and profit in growing construction businesses.
See you in two weeks with the next instalment of Blueprint for Sustained Performance.