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Working as an executive board or management team means collaborating on complex decisions, engaging in a productive dialogue (in which different and opposing opinions are solicited), and then executing change as a cohesive group across multiple business divisions or functions. This can be difficult in organizations where leaders have deep functional or regional strengths and personal histories of success that predispose them to think in terms of the parts rather than the whole.
Many managers complain of being in meetings that consist of executives updating one another with their different perspectives rather than thinking as an aligned group. Each participant has learned from his/her career to view situations in terms of the impact on their turf, or their turf's potential for having an impact, rather than considering the business as a whole.
Management teams that avoid this trap reap significant rewards:
Management and executive teams can take these actions to enhance performance:
Fifty percent of the companies that were on the Fortune 500 10 years ago are no longer there. Senior management's capacity to use new skills to build a high performance team and operate effectively as a team can make the difference between mere survival (or actual failure) and success.