Your C-Level team should be the driving force of your business; a group of individually talented leaders working together and pushing their teams towards common goals.
Many believe that this means finding like-minded people with similar skill sets and asking them to work together because they have similar qualities… But isn’t this just doubling up? Doubling up on strengths also means doubling up in areas of weakness and, with no one there to fill potential gaps, issues can soon arise.
Here we’ll be explaining the importance of complementary strengths and collaboration when it comes to your C-Level leadership team, as well as how MadeYou can help if your team could do with a refresher on working together as a team.
Collaboration for Wellbeing
Whatever happened to our instincts? Humans have worked in teams since the dawn of time, with safety in numbers being paramount to survival. But now we seem more than obsessed with doing it alone, each on a quest to be the star of our own show.
As a society, we celebrate the soloist, the star player, and the top salesman- does it come down to selfishness and not wanting to share potential glory? Are our collaborative instincts outweighed by our competitive ones? Sometimes when we’re matched with a colleague, we find it hard to trust that it could be an equal partnership. No one wants to be taken advantage of or to have their work passed off as anything less than their own.
However, humans ultimately need humans (a fact widely embraced when it comes to family and friends), so accepting the possibility of harmonious teamwork in the workplace is vitally important- for our success and for our general well-being.
Effective collaboration promotes happiness and satisfaction at work, so it’s definitely worth dropping your guard and opening your mind if you fancy yourself as something of a lone ranger. In fact, according to Gallup,
“compared with their isolated co-workers, those with just one collaborative relationship are 29% more likely to say they will stay with their company for the next year and 42% more likely to intend to remain with their current employer for their entire career.”
Not bad for talent retention, either!
Knowing Your Teammates
For your business to thrive, you need your C-level staff to be fully aware of who they are, what they bring to the business and (importantly) what their limitations are. They also need the same understanding as their teammates so they can complete the puzzle through their collaborations, slotting together and pulling in one direction for the good of the business.
Right now, you may have a team of great individuals, but if they’re not working together as well as they could be, results can be frustratingly slow to achieve, and mixed messages can trickle down to their reports.
It can be hard to scrutinize our own strengths and limitations, but often our strengths are far stronger than we imagine, and our weaknesses can be easily combatted via the strengths of our teammates. The key is to partner up purposefully and intentionally- thinking beyond the usual constraints of teams, geographical locations or responsibilities and trying to avoid the natural tendency to find similar creatures. Gallup puts it brilliantly:
“You don’t need an identical twin as much as you need an opposite- a relative stranger who shares the common mission and the same sense of fair play, but whose approach to the challenge may seem quite foreign.”
Of course, partnering up with intention and purpose is much easier if you know yourself and your teammates- that’s where we come in.
How MadeYou Can Help
We offer a C-Level Evolution programme that aims to reinvigorate, refocus and energise your C-level managers by arming them with the information they need to collaborate effectively.
Here’s how it works:
Your C-Level Evolution starts with our 360° Feedback solution. The CliftonStrengths questionnaire gives each delegate a list of their top strengths which we will review with each individual as well as provide an assessment of how the results come together to provide a picture of all delegates as a team.
You’ll then be taken through 4 modules: I Am, I Do, We Are, and We Deliver. Each module consists of an off-site, full-team experience, bookended with 1:1 coaching sessions and a little bit of homework. We have check-ins with the CEO at various points throughout the programme to keep you firmly in the loop.
I Am: This session focuses on improving delegates’ understanding of themselves and how they come together as a team regarding their strengths, limitations, drivers and characteristics. You’ll come away with a better perspective of each other, personally and professionally.
I Do: Our second session takes things one step further. Here we’ll focus on the two responsibilities that each delegate has:
a) to drive their area of the business forward
b) to drive the business forward as a whole
Delegates will come away with a better understanding of where their counterparts are with respect to each responsibility, what makes them an SME and how they can build strong business relationships and build on their leadership skills to improve outcomes across the board.
We Are: Our third session focuses on how you all come together as a unit. Delegates will better understand the group dynamic, including areas of strength, any gaps or limitations and how they affect each other, their direct reports and the business as a whole.
We Deliver: In our fourth and final off-site session, we will go over everything learned so far and re-focus the team on their second responsibility: driving the business forward as a whole.
We’ll concentrate on what each individual is doing and what they can do to bring more to this responsibility while also getting down to the nitty-gritty of how to leverage the strengths of the team for strategic advantage.
A Word from Luke
Our co-founder and CEO, Luke promotes the idea of active collaboration between opposite teammates for both his staff at MadeYou and their clients. He had this to say on the subject:
”Different perspectives, opinions and ideas enhance outcomes. So, while other tools may celebrate where individuals are similar and get them to work on things that they are good at together, ClifftonStrengths differs.
CliftonStrengths focuses on how individuals differ from each other; allowing them to celebrate each other’s strengths while understanding how they can complement each other to support any weaknesses. This makes for powerful partnerships; combing strengths to maximise results.
Constant open communication, celebrating together and sharing recognition will all help to keep individuals feeling appreciated and seen. And people also support what they help to create, so powerful partnerships facilitate buy-in from the start.
Luke ToddMadeYou Co-Founder
Feel free to contact our friendly team if you need help getting your C-Level team back on track or give them the turbo boost they need to keep you pushing onwards.
