How Aligned Leadership Teams Create Resilient Organisations

Unaligned leadership teams are the hallmark of low resilience organisations - their leaders are siloed, focused on their own goals, lack a broader perspective of the organisation’s environment, and possess a myopic view of operations and objectives.

Individual leaders have competing priorities which lead to tensions and are unable to solve problems collectively. This disconnect filters down the organisation, fostering disunity and fracturing. When business-wide challenges arise, the organisation lacks the resilience to overcome them.

Building a resilient organisation therefore begins at the top, and is achieved through three interlinked approaches - strategic resilience, organisational resilience, and talent resilience.

What does an organisation with low resilience look like?

Low resilience organisations are often plagued by disconnection, low productivity and high turnover. Senior leaders send their teams in the wrong direction, they operate in siloes and miss the bigger picture.

Often, there is strategic misalignment whereby teams pull in opposing directions, causing friction and negatively impacting productivity. The business fails to get products to market or when they do, there are mistakes or they have design flaws. Digital transformation programmes fail to get off the ground and systems remain archaic, leading to frustration and discontentment.

Creating strategic resilience by defining purpose

Viewing the organisation through the stakeholder lens, the leadership team should define the critical areas they need to focus on. This focus should meet both current and future stakeholder needs to be clear on the organisation’s ‘what’ and its ‘why.’

Alignment meetings are particularly helpful in assessing how well leadership team members relate to those stakeholders, and how well they can articulate the organisation’s overall purpose. These sessions also assess the dynamic within the team. For example, habitual patterns preventing members aligning on purpose and how they collaborate to achieve goals collectively.

Fostering organisational resilience through culture

Once the leadership team has defined the organisation’s ‘reason for being,’ it should define what the organisation stands for.

Part of this process is assessing how well the leadership team manages their internal team culture to create a dynamic that permeates through the organisation. This ensures the leadership team members are aligned and clear on the organisation’s goals.

Developing talent resilience by looking to the future

With a focused strategic direction and a set of values to align the organisation towards that goal, the organisation should assess whether it has the right leaders to meet these new criteria. This isn’t just about the here and now, boards should consider their future leadership skill needs and build a picture of what their leadership should look like in five to seven years’ time.

‘Future fit’ leaders possess a number of core traits, which our global Leadership Practice has defined following extensive psychometric testing. Talent resilience also means ensuring there is a comprehensive succession plan in place and leadership talent strategy that covers everything from employee reward systems to internal talent development.

Organisational and ecosystem challenges are increasing in both frequency and difficulty these include labour shortages, workplace stress, global inflation, increased political extremism and the need for ultra-fast reactions to new technologies. Only highly resilient organisations can successfully navigate this “perma-crisis,” and developing this resilience begins with the leadership team.

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