FOR CEOs: HOW TO SET UP YOUR EXECUTIVE TEAM FOR 2025
How does your executive team measure up to the challenges and opportunities ahead?
2025 could be a blockbuster. Upturns follow downturns, and that means foundations need to be solid, strong, and agile to pursue the opportunities. Is your team ready?
This is a conversation you need to have. At the very minimum with yourself.
Be honest about where you and your team are right now, so that you know what your right next move is to set your executive team and yourself up to successfully lead your business or organisation into the next decade.
Maybe you are a new CEO, or in a new CEO role and have inherited an executive team. Or perhaps there has been some change in the structure, the strategy, or the shape of your organisation. Perhaps you are looking to take advantage of the great opportunities that you see for your organisation, and that means that your executive team needs to step up to the next level. Maybe there has been change that needs something different or more from the executive team. Or possible a bit of complacency has set in.
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If you don’t have an evolving growth strategy, then you and your team are just driving around the block. You may be doing well, but you’re not going anywhere.
~ Shannon Byrne Susko, Canadian Entrepreneur and Author
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Whatever your situation, 2025 is fast approaching and now is the time to really check in with what is working, and not, and what you need for the future for it to keep working.
There are three key questions for you to consider in order to get your executive team in the right place, and ready to take advantage of the options and opportunities ahead.
1. How would you like it to be?
This considers things like how the executive team operates and delivers. What might necessitate a change. You might also consider how you need it to be?
2. How is it now?
This is about being honest about the current state of your executive team. Both the individuals in the team and the team as a collective.
3. What are you doing about it?
This is your look in the mirror moment.
So consider, firstly, what you need from your executive team? And this covers areas including delivery and execution, strategy and visioning, culture and performance, collaboration, the whole concept of team A and team B, learning and growing, leading, growing other leaders.
Now that you have a sense of where you are and where you want to be in terms of your executive team, next is to consider the gap? Consider this both at the individual executive level and consider this as a team in terms of the way the team operates, the performance and the culture of the team.
When you consider all of these key foundation elements of high performance teaming, what do you need to focus on first to accelerate your executive team to becoming an even better team?
The next phase is to consider how you as the CEO and team leader are contributing to the current state of the executive team, versus the future state that you need it to be.
- How are you using your mentor, model and coach approaches as a leader?
- What and how have you set expectations?
- What kind of consequences are there when people do not contribute to the executive team, but stay focused only on their particular function?
And,
- What specifically and deliberately are you doing as the leader of the team to create and form the executive team out of the group of individual executives?
There is a lot to think about here, with many moving parts. My suggestion is to get a really good sense of where you are now, where you would like to be, what are the key differentials or areas of opportunity that you can see, and then start to prioritise them. Then simply take the first step.
Anything you can do now to begin to elevate your executive team, your group of executives into a team, by:
- Developing them individually in terms of their capability and accountability and their contribution. And,
- Developing them as part of the executive team, recognising the executive team as their primary team in which they have a shared responsibility for the entire organisation, and not simply responsibility for the functional team they lead.
Anything you can do to elevate your individual executives and also bring your executive team together as a team now is going to put you in a much better place, ready for what I think is going to be a massive 2025.
I’d love to know your thoughts.
CEOs say to me ‘What I need is ….’
I developed this program to help you get the WIN. ‘What I Need’, right now.
So if you’d like to explore how to take yourself and your executive team to the next level, let’s talk.
I share simple, practical & actionable ideas for developing Big Leadership, helping CEOs (and their teams) future proof their leadership, their people, and their organisations.
Helping leaders move from reactive to strategic leadership by developing their competence, confidence and credibility.
Book me to speak at your 2025 event, click below.
Are you in the middle of leadership development planning for 2025?
I’ll be in:
- Adelaide, 12th — 13th November
- Gold Coast, 20th November
- Brisbane, 21st November
- Sunshine Coast, 22nd November
- Sydney, 27th November
If you’re interested in catching up, let’s book it in.
