Executive Team Development Programs

Executive teams tend to comprise high calibre people yet often the effectiveness of the team is less than might be expected, given the capabilities of individual members.

Unhelpful behaviour patterns, such as avoiding sensitive or potentially threatening issues, dominance by the CEO or another member, or individuals publicly agreeing while privately suppressing disagreement, often undercut the effectiveness of senior teams.

As well as impeding a team's ability to achieve its goals, such dynamics also sap the energy of a team and diminish its credibility among stakeholders.

New Futures' Director, Don Dunoon, works with senior teams using action learning methods to enable them to tap more of their potential and to improve their performance. Don assists the team to improve its ability to raise, explore and make decisions about issues in ways that encourage diversity of thinking, surfacing and testing of assumptions, reflection, and disclosure of thoughts and feelings that otherwise might remain unexpressed.

Typically, Don works with the team over a number of sessions as it deals with major issues. The sessions commonly involve skills practice, e.g. in raising threatening issues while minimising defensive responses, in dealing with conflict or in building a collective understanding on a complex issue. The practice is strongly grounded in the real work of the team; these are not simply training programs but rather strategic thinking and action sessions.

Don balances teaching, coaching and facilitation roles to help the team become more aware of how it currently operates and more adept at utilising different approaches according to the situation at hand.

Specific outcomes an executive team, or other senior or professional team, can expect to achieve include:

• Strengthened capacity to 'break through' to the heart of strategic and other difficult issues
• Achievement of a better balance between attending to strategic and operational aspects
• More open conversations, making greater use of the contributions of individual members
• Greater capability in dealing with conflict both within the team and with other stakeholders beyond it
• Faster progress made in dealing with strategic and business issues
• Stronger identification with the team by individual members
• Increased satisfaction for individuals with the way the team is working
• Effective modelling of collaborative leadership to others in the organisation.

Here's what one member of an executive team said about New Futures' work with his team:

From Robert Cockerell, Executive Director Corporate Services, Tasmanian Department of Treasury and Finance.

"I participated in the New Futures' Executive Team Development Program and the benefit to me was that through the programs that Don Dunoon developed for my organisation's Executive I learned how the staff perceived the Executive Team and what their expectations were of the team. With Don's assistance the Executive clearly defined its role in relation to meeting its external stakeholder and staff needs. With Don's help we addressed that issue that faces every organisation - the staff perception of "The Hidden Agenda!""

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