Mark Murphy surveyed over 1,000 executives and found their leadership teams are struggling. Only 17% say they hold each other accountable, 19% report decisions get full commitment without backstabbing, and 28% feel everyone participates willingly. These gaps at the top cascade through the whole organization.
Executive leadership teams are facing the same or even greater stress as everybody else is these days. It's incredibly tough to have deep, candid conversations, hold each other accountable, or be perfectly strategically aligned when everybody is basically just working to keep their heads above water. The problem is that right now, if your executive team is not operating at peak effectiveness, you could be missing a huge opportunity to leapfrog the competition to capture market share and all the rest. Hi, I'm Mark Murphy, CEO of LeadershipIQ, and let me break down this study in brief for you. LeadershipIQ is an executive team health survey. It's a tool for diagnosing and improving the functioning of top management teams. I use it, for example, when I'm coaching upper management teams so we can pinpoint the key challenges and fix them quickly and easily. In this study, We surveyed over 1,000 top executives with this tool. In one of the findings, we discovered that only 17% of executives strongly agree that their executive team hold each other accountable. That's a pretty big problem because the CEO needs to be able to hold the COO accountable. C-H-R-O needs to be able to hold the CFO accountable. The CFO needs to be able to hold the COO accountable and on and on and on. Of course, it can be incredibly tough for top executives to hold each other accountable when they're working remotely, or when they're stressed out, or when there's artificial harmony, or a fear of conflict, or whatever else may be going on. But when accountability is lacking at the top, when we can't hold each other accountable, it's virtually guaranteed that accountability is going to suffer throughout the rest of the organization. Relatedly, We learned that only 19% of top executives strongly agree that on their leadership team, when a decision is made, everybody is fully committed with no backstabbing or passive aggressiveness. Disagreement on an executive team can be wonderfully productive, but we've got to get all the executives to coalesce around and support the final decision. Otherwise, you get that passive aggressiveness, backstabbing, and the eventual undermining of whatever decision it was. Something that we've actually seen get worse during the pandemic is that only 28% of top management strongly agree that everyone participates and contributes willingly on their executive team. There are always going to be people who participate more than others, but when there are those who dominate discussions and others who disengage, the effectiveness of any executive team is going to be significantly undermined. It's absolutely critical that executive teams learn how to mind for disagreement, encourage active participation, and actually hear from everybody. Listen, those are just a small fraction of findings from this study. Hope you read the whole report here. And if you want some assistance enhancing the effectiveness of your executive team, just click the Talk to Us button up above and we can chat about how we might be of help.
