Most medium and large organisations have senior management teams. They meet regularly to oversee the organisation, review performance reports against the business and strategic plans, and approve innovations and future actions.
Traditionally, senior management teams, sometimes known as the C-Suite or Executive Management Team among other names, consist of the CEO and the senior people in finance, HR, marketing/sales, business development and operations, by whatever titles these people hold.
These same people are expected to lead the organisation in strategy, planning, implementation, operations, reporting, direction, staff and individual performance, financial control and resource allocation.
Are these people the right people to form a senior management team for every organisation, despite the varying leadership areas that have to be covered? In any other respect, would we expect construction companies, book publishers, architects, car manufacturers, food producers and toy companies to have the same structures and make-up as each other?
My brother is an engineer, and a very good one, but to progress in his profession he had to move to management. This means that his company automatically loses a substantial proportion of the value of his engineering experience which had been developed over 25 years. Regardless of his capacity as a manager, it doesn’t make sense for engineering companies lose this experience, but they do it the world over.
I worked for a food service company. There were no chefs on the senior management team, yet chefs are creative thinkers with experience of dealing with customers and staff, stock and budget control, safety procedures and trends in tastes and styles, all good attributes for a leadership team for a food service company.
Generally when I undertake major planning sessions in companies, all members of the senior management team are expected to take part in each step of the process. Major planning processes usually have three stages, strategic thinking, strategic planning and operations/action plans. Most people are good at one of these skills, and some may overlap into two (the number good at all three can generally be counted on less than one hand).
The insistence that all are fully involved in all stages usually comes from a desire not to be excluded from major decisions, the opportunity for development, a need for unity or just because that’s the way it is done.
Yet it is inefficient and usually results in a strategy that is a mish-mash of watered down long term goals, and actions plans with too much detail and no room for innovation or process improvement. There are better ways of ensuring inclusion, developing leaders and continuing a consistent vision.
There are options for the structure and make-up of senior management teams, which include:
- Alignment to the strategic plan
- Multiple teams to cover varying leadership areas, with some consistent members on each
- Selection based on leadership skills and alignment to corporate values, not just departmental management
- Including external people on your management team
Senior management teams need to be high performance teams. This may mean that you look closely at your people and work out who is best placed to contribute to the requirements of the team, not who holds particular skill based positions in your organisation.
Geoff,
Fully agree about senior teams in general and that at certain stages things are much more efficient if the team can put only the right people in the room.
However, for strategy formulation I’ve also come to the conclusion that there needs to be a stage where a very wide net is cast, because so much knowledge in the organisation resides outside of management. It’s only by having a stage where you tap resources far from the board room that you have a chance of picking up on any of the weak signals that the organisation may need to respond to in the new strategy.
G’day Indy,
generally I agree with you. In particular, I agree when it comes to the strategy thinking/foresight elements of strategy development.
One option is to create multiple senior management teams eg a broader team for strategy, a smaller team for operations and a third for administration/Board liaison.
Another option is to apply a strategy thinking process throughout the organisation (and I would add externals, especially customers in an ideal situation) where the strategy planning team becomes observers and analysers, rather than drivers and deciders.
In fact, there are many options available. So why do the overwhelming majority of Senior Management Teams (SMT) insist on managing everything themselves? And why do so many look fundamentally the same?
I’ve realised as I’ve read your comment that one point in this post is capable of being misread. When I conduct strategy sessions, I prefer to bring in as many people as possble and recommend along those lines. It is the SMT, CEO or MD who have insisted that all members of the SMT be involved, and often only those people. It is my experience that there are usually SMT members who are actually unsuited to strategy thinking and planning roles, but it seems once you have a title, there are certain expectations.
Thanks for contributing. Geoff
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