Executive Team Coaching
Executive Team Coaching for Breakthrough Systemic Performance

• Executive team coaching to develop a comprehensive company management culture that favors innovation, initiative, responsibility and accountability.
• Coaching to keep your executive team meetings focused on making strategic decisions: better prepare them, obtain collective commitment, and then really follow them up.
• Executive team coaching to prepare and follow up with your major transitions, change of senior executives, mergers, acquisitions, and other organizational transformations.
• Systemic team coaching to make your executive meetings more effective: have them be the nucleus of your organization's drive, modeling breakthrough cteam behavior focused on success.
• Team coaching to develop a keener collective sense for quality and ethics, for implementing more measurements and controls, for displaying a higher level of expectations from each other, starting within your executive team..
• Executive team coaching to become more performing in preliminary analysis to developing organization-wide breakthrough strategies, in implementing internal consulting processes, powerful decision-making and follow up.
• Executive team coaching to transform the time management culture of your organization and implement a collective just-in-time deadline focus centered on respecting all internal and external engagements.
• Systemic team coaching to develop more positive peer reciprocity, a transversal collaborative attitude that will each executive team member more of a performing team player.
• Executive team coaching to develop a real transversal corporate culture that rests on high performance professional interfaces between divisions, departments, teams and people.
• Executive team coaching to develop operational results orientation   within complex, matrix, multicultural, delegative, network, international, project management, distributed organizations.
• Executive team coaching to develop a really active and innovative "learning organization" modeled by the corporate leaders and reproduced all the way to your line managers.
• Executive team coaching to develop authentic appreciation for international,  multy-cultural,  multy-racial, multy-gender, etc. diversity, and accompany your organization's global development.
• Executive team coaching to better manage your finances, focus on breakthrough results, regularly double your organization's performance.

"Systemic" team coaching is the art of coaching each executive team as a specific ensemble or as an original and totally coherent "whole".  Team coaching is therefore not equivalent to the individual coaching of each team member, in a group setting.   A "systemic" team coaching approach is centered on the team as an original, inseparable or undissociable "unit" whose performance and results totally depend on the systemic interactive operational responsibility of all of its members. 

EXECUTIVE TEAM COACHING FOCUSED ON BREAKTHROUGH RESULTS

The objective of a systemic team coaching process is to develop the team in its capacity to lead by collectively focusing on multiplying the organization's operational measurable results. This results-oriented focus will automatically help improve team relationships and will be instrumental in developing each executive team member, personally and professionally.

Systemic team coaching therefore helps the team focus on achieving extraordinary breakthrough  performance in a determined time frame and as measured by predefined and measurable criteria.

When first implemented within an executive team, systemic team coaching helps prepare and launch a company-wide cultural transformation which helps all management  focus on achieving exceptional growth and profitability.

Systemic  executive team coaching is primarily focused on achieving breakthrough perfomance results as measured by precise operational indicators. Executive team coaching is therefore resolutely different and complementary to more classical "team building" approaches that are generally more focused on improving team member relationships or on developing collective motivation.

EXECUTIVE TEAM COACHING IN "COMPLEX" SYSTEMS

Systemic executive team coaching helps implement performing transversal interfaces to better lead complex organizations in multinational and multicultural contexts, "distributed" systems spread out over large territories, matix organizations, flat "network" organizations, project management or simply very highly delegative organizations.

The nature of the work during a systemic executive team coaching process is the first step in a modeling process to develop company-wide awareness and acceptance of impermanent, flowing and emerging organizational structures.   The development of efficient transversality in complex systems permits much higher local responsabilities  and reactivities,  all focused on achieving global results.  This systemic approach favors the development of international growth and organization collective performance.

In this light, executive team coaching is a privileged means to prepare and pave the way for the systemic transformation of your whole company's corporate and managerial culture to accompany international and multicultural development.  Since 1976, our international and intercultural experience  in executive team coaching worldwide has prompted us to develop an affinity and a competency with specific tools and processes to accompany transcultural coaching.

Globally (see our list of clients on this website) and within really diversified executive teams, we have accompanied the implementation of methodologies that are adapted to intercultural contexts.

EXECUTIVE TEAM COACHING IN TRANSITIONING SYSTEMS

When moving, reconfiguring or re-engineering, merging or acquiring, changing senior leadership or revisionning company future, the whole executive team can litterally "leap" forward with a strategic and systemic "transitioning" team-coaching approach.  Our fifteen-year practice of systemic executive team coaching permits us to underline the usefulness of implementing this approach in transitioning teams and  organizations.

This executive team coaching process focused on successful "transitioning" permits a major change of focus from what is often perceived :

• as a crisis period often caracterized by a loss of marks, of focus or or faith into
• a period of exciting new opportunities with new horizons, emerging solutions, immediate or future potentials for exceptional performances.

Transitioning team coaching on executive levels therefore permits a strategic and systemic re-focusing of the whole organization towards developing its potential for personal growth and collective results. This is especially true in intercultural or transcultural communication in multicultural contexts.

EXECUTIVE TEAM COACHING FOR PROJECT MANAGEMENT TEAMS

Beyond executive teams, an executive team coaching process is particularly appropriate for developing performing strategic transversal project teams to help team members collectively achieve high performance and breakthrough results.

A Team coaching approach can help these transversal project management teams or less formal "networks" develop high quality interfaces between the team members and with all the other key people within and around their organization.  Team coaching processes and tools can help these non-local, non-hierarchic and often multicultural teams achieve high performance objectives in record time.  This approach is particularly recommended for teams that are responsible for implementing strategic  innovative breakthrough missions that ultimately prepare the future of their parent organizations, or aim to transform its structure and culture.

Ask about our experience coaching project teams missioned to prepare mergers, acquisitions, alliances and new partnerships in national and multicultural contexts.

EXECUTIVE TEAM COACHING PROCESSES IN RESEARCH AND INNOVATION ENVIRONMENTS

In all corporate settings and all public or private research institutes, innovation is a team issue.  The added-value potential brought about by innovation almost systematically originates from excellent professional interfaces between team member competencies.  This interface potential can be tapped when the team develops high performance co-designing, team work, transversality, and co-responsability focused on results. 

Innovation also rests on a specific collective frame of reference that permits the team to envision and implement "breakthrough" strategies rather than limit itself to  developing progressive  linear improvements.  The  development of innovation performance is not only measured by team operational results but also by quality breakthroughs, lightning reactivity, excellent time management, and of course, totally creative outputs.

Team "breakthrough innovation frame of reference" can rapidly  be developed with a systemic team coaching process.

INTERCULTURAL EXECUTIVE TEAM COACHING

One of the main issues in today's multinational corporations concerns their capacity to develop a worldwide authentic  multicultural corporate culture totally respectful of diversity in all its shapes, formas and colours.  This challenge will be met only through a real capacity to communicate and actively collaborate with international partners with a profound love of all humanity's multy-dimensional diferences.

The work to develop diversity naturally begins within the corporate executive team with visible authentic cross-cultural modeling centered on performance and results.  Only then can the process be distributed throughout the organization through a voluntarily implemented managerial culture based on cross-cultural, multinational, multi-racial, cross-gender, etc. diversity strategies.

Again, systemic executive team coaching is one of the best ways to achieve this goal by helping the top organizational team become a model for the rest of your organization. 

MARKETING AND SALES TEAM COACHING

Executive team coaching processes are particularly adapted to driving breakthrough objectives and measurable performance results within corporate and local marketing and sales divisions. 

This team-focused approach resolutely centred on collective development permits the unleashing of  unexpected results originating from unsuspectedly rich team member interfaces.  Indeed, the often highly competitive context of sales and marketing environments is often the main cause for very high losses of potential results. This "systemic" loss rests on poor transversal support, lack of peer cooperation and weak collaboration or focus on common objectives.  In this negatively "competitive" corporate context, a team coaching process can often permit very high short term returns, and performing long term transformations.

Generally, systemic team coaching can be implemented in all professional fields. It can help obtain breakthrough measurable results within functional or operational teams, indifferently centered on strategic visionning and planning or on business operational issues and day-to-day follow-up. It concerns top executive teams, as well as teams in operations, sales, marketing, finance, accounting, production, information technology, in all national and intercultural contexts.

When a systemic team coaching process is undertaken by an executive team, it can prepare for a strategic "organization coaching" process to accompany a much more comprehensive corporate culture transformation. (cf. the "Organization Coaching" page on this website).

MEANS

A systemic executive team coaching contract often begins with an in-depth full-day team "diagnosis" focused on elaborating a shared team self-evaluation. This allows:

• Each of the executive team members to better position themselves and their roles and functions within the team as a performance system.
• The executive team as such to make a complete professional inventory of its collective potentials (strengths and challenges) representing the nucleus of the organiszation and its D.N.A. (its active system culture).
• The executive team to define collective coaching goals and contractualize its main development focus.
  

This “just in time” systemic diagnosis process helps each person and the executive team “own” their issues and objectives and re-align their strategy. The esecutive team can then co-define the transformation and organization growth process they plan to implement.

The systemic diagnostic work is clearly meant to position the executive team as the main "breakthrough" vehicle for developing future organizational performance.

The subsequent executive team coaching process takes place during the "supervision" or mentoring of occasional real executive team meetings (every two or three meeting over a determined lapse of time). This process permits it to:

• Learn and practice collective and strategic means to develop its competencies as a powerful executive team or “leadership system”.
• Make the decisions and implement actions that will ensure its mission’s success and transform organization business results.
  

The executive team coaching process actually consists of “coached” team meetings that allow the leadership system to:

• Monitor their decision-making and implementing competency, measure progress, adjust objectives and reallocate means,
• Develop and practice new and more efficient systemic methodologies to ensure their organization's growth and effectiveness.
  

EXPERIENCE

Our systemic executive team coaching approach has been developed to accompany the cultural evolution of a number of client organizations in intercultural settings(short-list below on this website). It has been implemented worldwide within corporate executive teams, operational, functional and project teams, subsidiaries, departments, etc.

METHOD

The proposed co-learning and co-developement experience is principally participative, interactive, open and delegated. It would indeed seem contradictory to propose a predefined series of "expert solutions" or a predetermined program based on a preliminary study to a team of executive leaders, while attempting to develop organizational "performance" and "ownership".

The executive team systemic coaching process therefore includes co-designing tailor-made practical tools during a predetermined number of executive meeting sequences and during their debrief. These executive meeting sequences focused on operations and strategy allow for “real” collective decision making focused on immediately operational and strategic issues.

PREPARATION

The just-in-time nature of this emerging and participative executive team coaching approach needs no preliminary meetings, interviews or preparation. All that is needed is the active and professional availability of all the executive team members including the CEO.

MULTIPLICATION

Following a first coaching process with the executive team, subsequent systemic team coaching can be organized for other individual or pairs of teams within the organization, taking into account the size of groups and possible transversal issues between divisions and departments. Depending on objectives and availability, this can include large and small-group work in varying break-out configurations.

In such systemic organizational coaching processes, we recommend a maximum of twelve participants per coach and of fifty participants per intervention (four coaches).

DIFFFUSION

The proposed executive team coaching approach, tools and methods have proven to be somewhat “viral” in their nature in that they naturally spread within client organizations through "modeling behavior" and by word-of-mouth. Written English and French language texts are made available in books and on a website that can be referenced on the client organization intranet. The material can be translated into other languages and adapted to transcultural or multicultural contexts.

The effectiveness of a systemic executive team coaching approach helps a team reach measurable breakthrough goals in record time, especially when compared to more traditional coaching or training, usually focused on individual development.

Executive team coaching is focused on precise and predetermined measurable short and long-term results. The systemic process naturally "follows-up" a team so the co-learning and co-developing is automatically reinforced by the team who regularly evaluates results.

Executive team coaching result measures are practical, for example: accrued meeting effectiveness, an increase in the quality and quantity of strategic decisions, better follow-up of executive team decisions and business in general, better teamwork and team spirit, better corporate and intercultural communication and respect for diversity, increased individual and collective motivation and ownership, increase in financial performance, etc.

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