Determines a team’s culture and drives its performance. It is the behavior, expectation, and guidance on a team that combine to set the tone and amplify performance.
It makes a CEO’s (or any leader’s) lift significantly easier. There is less monitoring, less double-checking, and more and better execution, nimbleness, and anticipation.
It’s a powerful force.
You can enhance the lateral leadership of your team in several ways:
One is to support, develop, and coach your superstars so that they can optimize their performance and then do the same for their people, thereby creating a two-fold cascade: modeling performance and also actively coaching and eliciting it in others.
Another is to bring your SLT together to create a team-designed plan to identify, address, and remedy gaps and determine future focus, performance standards, and goals. This is an intense process that requires an outside coach to lead the sessions and is highly effective, creating massive accountability, problem-solving, and collaboration, with team members all leading one another. When paired with the development of key superstars, above, results are supercharged.
Yet a third is to bring your team together as a leadership learning cohort to meet on a regular cadence with a coach and a curriculum for specific development. Examples might be improving strategic focus and execution while getting out of the weeds and delegating, removing barriers to execution speed, effective coaching of team members, managing and leading up, etc. The cohort gives peers the chance to learn with and from one another while focusing on real-time challenges, and the opportunity for impact across an organization is significant. Similar to the above, when paired with the development of key superstars, results are accelerated.
No matter which approach you take, if you build greater lateral leadership on your teams, you also build more accountability, nimbleness, anticipation, collaboration, execution speed, and performance among them.
And everyone they lead.
For more on working with me directly, contact me here.
My next openings for working with teams are in late April. My next coaching openings begin April 10th.