The Executive Structure – Unnamed

Accountability is always already rooted in the structures that gives your organisation its identity – there are leadership and performance related behaviours that cannot change until those structures are addressed.

This pattern in executive teams has eventually come up in Team Developmental Journeys too many times to ignore, and it is surprising how, every time, the leaders knew that this structure should probably be addressed – and somehow agrees to keep it in place.

What do I mean? Shareholder agreements around performance and consequences Distinctions between director roles, shareholder roles, executive roles and expert roles in the decision making and accountability conversations of the team How consequence may hold no privilege for some, but do for others and what that means for authority and dissent in getting to commitment

These are not easy things to talk about, and it is understandable why leaders avoid it if they are aware of it; and sometimes cannot name it distinctly when it arises if the team lacked awareness of it.

The impact I have seen repeatedly is that high-stakes conversations happen on shifting ground because the conversations, agreements and decisions lack clarity, boundaries and consequence. The other dimension to this is where the original agreements around these distinctions are not revisited when the team changes, or the role structures mature or adjust. Those that were part of the original creation of the structure assume both clarity and agreement exists – while others quietly assume that this agreement is a condition for their belonging.

This has far reaching consequence in the performance and culture of the organisation because it creates or removes the guidance system of the system in three meaningful ways – it can constrain, attract or incentivise, reinforce existing patterns and lastly, the one that surrounds all three, enable awareness or seeing of the connections.

Most leaders lack this sight because they are focused on delivery and efficiency of the system, not looking at how their dynamic and the setup of their relational and contractual system echoes patterns into the organisation.

Here are some explicit examples I sometimes come across:

• Measures and incentives create silo’s and competing concerns – that fracture collaboration throughout the organisation
• Decisions are ill-considered because the highest ranking role pulls privilege in high stakes leading to sub-optimisations and oversimplification of complex problems that require different types of conversations across the various roles of the senior team
• Executive performance is not addressed because they are also owners * Defensive posturing between the team members and role distinctions echo between the reporting lines and product delivery suffers
• Lack of commitment, Lack of trust and lack of dissent is usually then also found in senior and middle leader systems leading to brittle leadership needing force to maintain control

And yet, when the team start to become deliberate about having these difficult conversations, creating boundaries around which types of decisions can be made with which roles or stakes, and which need to be deferred to different conversations – the system starts to respond, at first, usually, with chaos and confusion, and later with alignment that echoes the clarity in the executive room.

Yes, that process takes work from the leadership team to establish because the culture needs space and direction to align to a structure that is mostly invisible to them – but when this does happen, in my experience, the organisation has less brittleness and space to start developing resilience.