Given the leverage that an effective executive leadership team can generate in a growing company – to say nothing of the friction that an ineffective team can create – I’m surprised so many teams seem un-intentional about team development, performance, and operations. It’s as if team performance is just supposed to happen because of the titles of the individuals on the team.
Executive team retreats can certainly generate “mountain-top experiences,” goodwill, and intention among the team, and can be especially helpful in onboarding new team members. But in many cases, there is little connection to ongoing leadership responsibilities or follow-through once the team returns to the real world.
This is why I believe it’s important to develop (and follow) a Leadership Operating Plan every year, based on the team’s charter, its state of development, its performance objectives, and its role in formulating, communicating, and executing corporate strategy. Such a plan becomes increasingly important as a company moves away from a CEO-hero model that is typical of smaller businesses. The absence of such a plan becomes a clear liability in mid-size businesses.
A Leadership Operating Plan (LOP) accounts for several critical dimensions of executive leadership:
- Managing multiple time horizons with particular attention to medium- and long-term focus to ward off the tyranny of the urgent
- Formulating strategy and attending to its evolution, including times when a full clean-slate refresh is appropriate/necessary
- Driving the annual planning cycles that result in annual performance goals and associated resource allocation and budgets
- Collaborating and communicating with key stakeholders, i.e. board/investors, middle management, employees, customers, and partners
- Distinguishing between the team’s enterprise perspective and the more functional responsibilities of individual team members.
The LOP should be driven by the team’s general role in the organization and by specific performance objectives for the period in question. It should account for the maturity of the team and include intentional work to advance team dynamics and performance. If the team hasn’t traditionally defined its role through a charter or other mechanism, and/or if the team has not previously defined its annual performance objectives, these should be defined before developing the LOP.
So what’s in a Leadership Operating Plan?
- Known periodic events such as Quarterly Business Review meetings, town hall meetings, leadership retreats, board meetings, etc. – including preparatory meetings leading up to these events.
- Cyclical events within the annual operating cycle, such as completing a strategic business review prior to the development of annual performance goals and budgets.
- Key leadership engagement points such as middle management interactions, milestone celebrations, customer and partner relationship development, etc.
- Team developmental opportunities
- The LOP should identify specific individuals who are responsible for driving each activity and ensuring outcomes/objectives are met. It is useful to use a SIPOC (Supplier-Input-Process-Output-Customer) or similar model to ensure shared understanding of the activities on the LOP.
In its entirety, the LOP should be an expression of what leadership will look like in the organization. In fact, a helpful exercise in developing the LOP is a team discussion about what they want their constituents to see in them throughout the year, and how they see themselves changing as a leadership body. The observations developed here can serve as a “quality check” against the LOP that emerges. Will this body of work deliver on the leadership needs of our stakeholders?
If the executive team holds regularly scheduled meetings that are primarily dedicated to information sharing around current operations, I do not include them in the LOP – creating a distinction between management and leadership. Philosophically, the executive team should be involving itself less and less in established operations, turning this area over to middle management and focusing itself on defining future direction and leading change initiatives.
Some readers might see the idea of an Operating Plan for Executive Leadership as a bit granular or mechanical, and I certainly appreciate that leadership is an elusive quality. But I think it is so important to be intentional about the authority and responsibility that come with leadership roles, especially when they are shared among team members. In the end it does come down to actions taken, words spoken, and relationships deepened in service to the organization’s mission.
How does the executive team at your firm conduct the business of leadership? Is there an opportunity to accelerate the company’s progress by clarifying the intent, direction, and operating activities of its leadership team? There are lots of ways to get started, or build on where the team sits today. Let me know your thoughts!
Strategy, Creativity, and Leadership 