The Client:

A Fortune 500 global software development company

The Challenge:

A senior management team unable to collaborate – or even communicate – effectively.

Background:

The software company’s CEO knew she needed to have a tough conversation with her senior management team about how they were working together – or, more precisely, how they were not working together. Communication on the team had broken down because different team members had varying perspectives on important issues and were not finding productive ways to address them. Some were angry but silent, while others were fighting openly – and loudly. The team knew they needed to discuss how to communicate across departments, how to make decisions together as a team, and how to manage the hand-off from the Sales department to Engagement Management once a new client had been signed on, a process that had been historically unclear and was getting more and more fraught with confusion over time.

Assessment:

I conducted an initial round of diagnostic interviews with each member of the 6-person senior management team. I discovered a long-running history of miscommunications and turnover on the leadership team that contributed to the current difficult team dynamics. In particular, two members of the team represented opposite views on a series of topics facing the team. These two team members, the Chief Marketing Officer and the Chief Technology Officer, had very different perspectives on how certain decisions had been made, and how those should now change. The CEO was unsure how to manage the quickly deteriorating relationship between the CMO and CTO, but she knew something needed to be done.

Team Consulting:

The approach encompassed two components: 3-way Guided Conversations and Team Meetings.

3-way Guided Conversations: After the initial interviews, I helped the CMO and the CTO explore the nature of their relationship, their different roles in the company, as well as their different management styles and personalities. Specifically with regard to the issues they disagreed on, I enabled them to listen to one another, and to share their own perspectives, reasoning and interests. While they still disagreed on some topics, they discovered that some of their initial disagreements had been the result of misinterpretations and stylistic communication differences. This helped them give one another the benefit of the doubt more readily than before, and to agree on two major decisions that had previously been deadlocked and that had been holding up the team. They recommended those decisions to the CEO.

Team Meetings: As the relationship between the CMO and CTO improved, I facilitated a series of team-wide meetings. The CEO and I together put the thorny issues facing the team on the table for discussion, one by one. The team discussed its communication and decision-making processes and the hand-off from Sales to Engagement Management: how did these happen at the company today? What worked, and what didn’t? How did this team want these to work going forward?

Results:

At the team-wide meetings, each of the officers made a series of commitments to follow up on the solutions the team had generated during the next three quarters. The CEO committed to being more proactive when disagreements on the team arose, and to holding each officer accountable to their specific commitments.

Over the next few months, the senior management team identified how best to make decisions going forward, how to communicate in good times as well as under stress, and they resolved the Sales/Engagement Management hand-off.

Through this experience, each team member also learned how to closely listen to other people’s viewpoints and how to calmly and more effectively express their own. They learned that sometimes what drives other people’s behavior is not what it seems on the surface. The CMO and CTO learned that people’s viewpoints are impacted as much by the role they play in the organization as by their personality. They used this knowledge to minimize jumping to conclusions before trying to understand the other person’s motivations and perspective.

The Bottom Line:

Over a 12-month period, the company’s net profitability improved by 27% and the working relationships and satisfaction of the senior management team members increased significantly.