How effective is your executive team? Are your senior leaders seen as proactive champions and role models of your purposeful, positive, productive work culture, as leaders making respect as important as results — every day?
Just as you measure progress towards desired results regularly, you must measure the effectiveness of your executive team regularly.
When you measure your executive team’s operation in a structured and disciplined way, you can leverage senior leaders’ strengths, improve communications and clarity, and build employee confidence in the executive team’s leadership of your company.
The challenge is that very few C-suite leaders have been asked to measure the effectiveness of their executive team. Most don’t know how.
Here is an assessment that my company developed to provide executive teams with actionable feedback. Our Executive Team Effectiveness Survey is a 10-question assessment based upon proven practices from effective executive teams that sustain purposeful, positive, productive work cultures.
This survey is customized for your company and is administered once a year.
Survey questions cover topics that include effective communication from the team, validation of contributions and values, accountability for results and for values, strategic direction and members’ ability to serve as positive role models. Responses are gathered from every employee, from front-line staff to senior executives.
These 10 items are rated on a six-point scale. Ratings at the 5-6 level are desirable. Those ratings indicate respondents “agree” or “strongly agree” with the questions.
Ratings of 4 or less indicate respondents disagree that the executive team is demonstrating that desired behavior. Those ratings are opportunities for improvement for the team.
Here is an example of one client’s first-ever survey of their executive team’s effectiveness using this assessment.
The visual nature of these results show that this executive team exceeds the standard (ratings at the 5-6 level) in two of the ten questions (the green columns). The team is seen as less than effective in eight of 10 questions (the red columns).
While these scores are not overly positive — what we want are ten green bars indicating 5-6 ratings across all respondents for every question — this range of scores are quite typical for the first run of this assessment at a company. These executives admit that they previously saw their job as “managing results,” and they realize they have much work to do to lead effectively as a team.
As this executive team continues to work towards leading and sustaining a purposeful, positive, productive work culture, they know they must do more to validate, communicate, connect, reflect and more – every day.
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