(Teams at the Top: Their Unique Mandate... page 2 of 3)

We find that executive teams can have exponentially greater impact when they see themselves this way. The architect model helps define the role of the executive team by focusing attention on the team’s unique responsibilities. Teams tend to want to use the traditional tools of effective leadership – personal influence, face time, delegation, and power. However, those tools, while still important for the top team, are far less relevant than knowing how to put into place the roadways and sub-surface infrastructure – the systems that will determine how the entire business operates and behaves.

When we apply the urban architect role to the business setting, we see three dynamic and interrelated responsibilities that are unique to the executive suite:

• Igniting possibility
• Ensuring business viability
• Creating alignment

Let’s examine each of these responsibilities in detail to better understand the uniqueness of their mandate.

Igniting Possibility
It is imperative that the executive team plays an inspirational role. The team must conceive and design an environment that will ignite a sense of possibility and provide deeper meaning to the people who join together to create it. The top team has the scope and impact that can spark possibility and inspire the whole organization.

Executive teams that focus on operational and tactical issues miss this key piece. Such teams tend to stay in the comfort zone of putting out fires and solving operational problems using capabilities that served them well in prior roles. True executive teams leave most of those tasks to lower-level groups. True executive teams must be about more than quarterly results and sales and profits. They must possess and manifest a higher purpose. They must spark innovation, creativity, commitment, and passion.

These teams will find different ways to express their higher purpose, e.g., significant contributions in social responsibility or community involvement. But, for all teams, igniting possibility requires a willingness to listen and learn. They must be open to feedback from all stakeholders, from the environment, from the market, and from the competition.

The fully-realized executive team also inspires employees by designing talent systems that reinforce the message that every employee is valued and that the organization is willing to invest in individuals’ personal discovery of possibility for themselves.

The leader’s role as architect is sustained by a perpetual creative spark, ever-igniting the possibility of what is to come.

Ensuring Business Viability
Executive team architects must also design a structure that supports short- and long-term business viability. They have access to, and can integrate information from, the most complete data, and they can lift their heads above the day-to-day activities to look out to the business horizon. Then, they design systems and processes to ensure that the organization and its products maintain market relevance. They ensure the right market intelligence and competitive data are available in a timely way to foster effective decision-making. This requires them to ensure the organization maintains a deep understanding of its customers and how its products serve their needs. They must leverage costs of going to and serving the market in a way that is aligned with the economic logic of the business and its strategy. They must instill in all managers a functional understanding of how the organization will realize a profit. They must make certain the sources of future growth are known and the organization has a long-range plan for capitalizing on those sources. This, in turn, requires that thoughtful investments are made and managed to carry the business towards its intended future. They must ensure that the right people are in the right jobs; that they are supported, empowered, and rewarded; that decisions are made by the right people with the right input; and that they are communicated to the right parties.

As architects, the executive team designs and manages the engineering and physics of all these systems to ensure their staying power, integrity, and efficiency.

<< go to page 1   |   go to page 3  >>