UMass Donahue Institute

Every senior leadership team can benefit from some form of renewal as a team, whether focused on aligning goals & priorities; increasing team effectiveness; specific competency development, or techniques for better engaging the people they lead.

Here are our top 10 tips for ways to help renew your senior team:

1. Team Building: Have your senior team go through a good old fashioned team building exercise designed to help them appreciate the power of a team that works together!
2. Strategic Alignment Session: This is not meant to be the once-a-year session where goals and budgets are put together. Rather, this type of alignment session can be delivered any time a senior team needs to get re-aligned on their priorities and support of the larger organizational strategy.
3. 360 Assessment: A well developed and administered 360 assessment can deliver valuable behavioral feedback to not only the individual leaders, but can also produce a team profile. This type of competency-based team profile can highlight your senior team's strengths, development opportunities and blind spots and can help them determine how to be more effective as a team.
4. Leadership Profile(s): Leadership profiles differ from traditional 360 assessments in that they are typically based on pre-determined leadership traits and specifically focus on individuals in leadership roles. The Hogan Assessment suite is our favorite!
5. Focused Competency Development - Systems Thinking: Systems Thinking is a common focus for the development of a senior team due to the natural inter-dependencies among the business units that the team members lead. Having your senior team go through a Systems Thinking program together will allow for them to discover natural links between their groups and define how to increase efficiencies across the business.
6. Focused Competency Development - Problem Solving: Everyone can benefit by attending a skill building session on problem solving. However, a senior team can be challenged with not only identifying problems and looking for solutions, but also categorizing problems by criticality and impact on the business.
7. Focused Competency Development - Emotional Intelligence: Enough said - right? The culture of the organization stems from your senior leadership team. The more your senior leaders are aware of their own Emotional Intelligence strengths and derailers, the better they will be equipped to build a culture that attracts and retains talent!
8. Establishing Peer Mentoring Relationships: We all know the benefits of establishing mentoring relationships for both the Mentee and the Mentor. But this technique is specifically establishing Peer Mentoring relationships on your senior team. Ensure your senior leaders choose peer mentoring relationships that are with other senior leaders that they do not typically work with.
9. Leading & Engaging Others through Storytelling: This is a trending focus in the Leadership Development field. It is literally teaching your leaders how to tell a story as a technique to engage others. Our favorite vendor that specializes in this is The Moth. If that name sounds familiar, it is because they host The Moth on NPR.
10. Our last tip for renewing your senior team? Ask them what would be helpful! 

There are many ways to help renew and develop your senior leadership teams; these are just some of our favorites that have had an impact on senior teams we've worked with. Share your experience so we can learn collectively on how to renew our senior teams. (dhenry@donahue.umassp.edu)

The Organizational Development & Learning Solutions group of UMass Donahue Institute advances organizational learning and productivity by bringing together needed expertise to work collaboratively with our clients to build solutions. We apply our expertise in the corporate and public sectors; consulting to community organizations, government offices and global corporations. Using technology as a tool for delivering interactive instruction, ongoing collaboration, and insightful conversation we’re able to engage with clients and partners in a way that inspires learning and provides creative and customized solutions.

May 30, 2018