65 Tips To Improve Your Leadership & Leadership Team Connection & Performance

Marketing Unfiltered 65 → Experience: Hints & Tips To Improve Your ELT / C-Suite

Happy Friday leaders, can you believe it is the end of January already?

This week: I offer 65 (yes 65!) hints and tips to improve your leadership skills and improve how you and your leadership operate and work together.

These tips and hints are from my experiences, coaching and consulting, so if you are experiencing any and want to chat in more detail hit reply or email me mu@dannydenhard.com

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The 65 Tips To Improve Your Leadership & Leadership Team Connection & Performance

I have broken down the 65 tips into 3 categories, (i) operations, (ii) executive leadership team (ELT) and (iii) communications. These are ideal for those in the C-Suite, in SLT and ELTs or ExCo’s and if you are about to join these levels this will be an operational way to onboard & hit the ground running & lead from the front.

Operations 🔧

1. Create a high operational skills level between the C-Suite, set the bar high - it will create the right standards, it will be noticed in the business and when partnering externally it will be accepted as the norm.

2. Roll out a Decision doc - highlight and identify what, how, why and when you made a decision as a leadership team. This is to be shared across the business

3. Have a “Sit Down” each week as a leadership team - debrief is critical when the business is doing well or doing badly (like a stand up but more debrief and more relaxed - this brought one of the leadership teams I sat on closer than any other team building or bonding)

4. Walk and talks always beats in office chats - remove the barriers of the office and remove the status updates

5. Remove status update requests (especially in 1-2-1s or department meetings) - async is best for status updates

6. Rehearse QBRs - QBRs are more than just numbers and commentary, they often are a performance needs practise and performing

7. Reduce down the number of unofficial apps and channels. The side WhatsApp groups, the numerous slack and team channels

8. Build collective scar tissue - leadership teams often don’t build muscle memory together, help to build tolerance and muscle together, togetherness and team spirit is critical at the top

9. MRS (meeting recovery syndrome) is real and can impact your day and week, reduce the meeting load and audit your calendar. Only by auditing and owning your time can you control MRS

10. Run management performance updates - allow Q&A, be the exec sponsors, allow department leads to own this and back up where required. Be engaged!

11. Team and department plans not strategies - strategies removes the importance of the company strategy - words matter especially between tactics and strategy

12. When goal setting and frameworks start to fail, look to centre everyone back to simple goals. Think big act small by when for simplicity works

13. Run 1-2-1s and check-ins away from the office - office environments often create low trust environments

14. Complete the 9 box exercise (you choose if you involve HR) - this is a hard point for many to control however identifying and sharing your high standards sends a signal to your leadership peers - expect questions and push for head count removal or reduction. You have to manage this

15. Have grievances with an executive colleague? Air it out in person first, not on chat apps or email - if you need to protect yourself move to email or chat apps

16. Embrace HR

    1. Into the leadership team meetings

    2. In regular updates and 1-2-1 style catch ups with them

    3. Reduce the fear of HR as a leadership team (and if you cannot embrace the fear factor)

17. Give interview practise internally - especially if you are not hiring, interview each other and allow those more junior to be the interviewer

18. Create a cross functional pairing will help you and your colleagues to collaborate and drive performance improvements. Review the pairing and match well, poor pairings lead to cross-functional issues

19. Coaching, training & reverse mentorship

    1. Pilot reverse mentorship - connecting you with cross-functional colleagues who can provide updates, insights and connect you to the pulse of the company is invaluable

    2. Actively coach and mentor management layers - you should be coaching each other and those layers below you. This doesn’t have to be weekly but regular mentoring and coaching will set standards and indicate how important development is

    3. Find an executive trainer away from the business who can facilitate and hold the room - this is a high trust role that needs the other fit

20. Bring in experts and specialists into ELTs - ensure there is a “exec translator” to help bring clarity (someone in the team who can explain between departments and department heads)

21. Remove vanity metrics when reporting up into the C-Suite, this is always overlooked and causes confusion and distrust

22. High potential & high performer

    1. Identify “high potential” and help to shape their development. Who you see in your team others might see others

    2. Identify “high performers” and connect with management and leadership levels - studies show high performers raise those up around them

23. Identify internal influencers - they will be great at sharing messages and insights, they also have outsized influence on decision making with their peers

24. Phase re-onboarding back to the business - people operate in 3 stages,
    (i) what the company used to,
    (ii) what it is today and
    (iii) what it’s going to be - most operate in phase 1, you should be operating in phase 3 and pushing the business into phase 3 at every given moment

25. Get around the camp fire - eat together, the connection and trust increases

26. Always align on cross functional requests - no alignment = no performance

27. Ensure your number 2s have a strong relationship together and with your leadership peers

28. Specific working relationships are closer than others - call these out and agree on these being normal

29. Call out the boundaries you have individually and collectively and have created (inside and outside of work)

30. Agree to onboard new leaders onto the leadership team - must be able to understand your relationships (most important), your rhythm, your flow & your comms cadences

31. Have a collective impact (like a hype file) Slack/Teams channel - share great feedback, great campaign and results

32. Culture means many different things to different people, some are happy to come in and do their job, some would like everything to change and others want a perfect environment - your job as a leader is to drive performance and create a safe environment, allow people to thrive in where they can. Always manage expectations

33. Have members of the leadership team who are Customer obsessed & those who are competitor obsessed (for their strengths and weakness) - but they have to meet in the middle, this has to be connected and cannot blindly copy competitors and ignore customer/consumer feedback

ELT 👩‍💼👨‍💼

34. Share your executive lessons - this can be small or large but sharing exec lessons help you all learn and develop together

35. Allow critical distance - allow others to step away and think through issues, critical distance is the difference between good and bad decisions especially when the stakes are high

36. Optimise meetings, optimise agenda’s, feedback loops, communication styles etc. Do not settle for a style - they stagnate and frustrate many and only comes out when someone has had enough or blows their top at a peer

37. Decide if you are a writing and document leadership team, a meeting team or something else. Writing is deliberate and challenges your thinking, without this rigorous approach many will talk and talk and become a low action organisation

38. Tiering happens in leadership in C-Suite team, be prepared to be tiered and if unhappy address head on - don’t let it bubble under the surface. This is one of the most unspoken areas

39. Set deadlines for feedback loops. Call it out and set reminders, this also ripples through the business, hold accountability

40. Agree to disagree - disagreement is healthy as long as action is taken

41. Leave the dispute in the board room, don’t take onto the floor and don’t burden this on your leadership peers or your own management team, this causes huge behavioural problems

42. Disagree and commit only works if all members of the leadership can actually disagree and commit - this approach takes a long time to mature

43. Remove I told you so and every variation of I told you so - and if it rears its ugly head, kill it as soon as it happens

44. Allow AMAs to happen in public - if you are confident in the C-Suite AMAs drive performance and create a deeper level of connection and high trust. If you or colleagues are not as good on your feet, expect this to be a work in progress and hard work to begin with. Be wary of the problematic employees attending

45. Set colleagues up for success - ask pre approved questions to set them up for success

46. Declare what type of meeting you’re going to host (a brainstorm, a decision making session, a performance review, problem solving etc)

47. No agenda no meeting rule at senior levels - and that goes with the CEO too

48. Create management pods - pods that can support each other and rotate if you have a large ELT

49. Have designated roles within the C-Suite - the approachable one, the direct one, the one who speaks in front of the business etc. The clearer the roles the easier it is for your company to have the right people at leadership levels

50. Reduce drinking cultures away from C-Suite but go for food or drinks together, drinking can be a real benefit but often leads to problems and causes distrust

51. Increase / decrease volume and presence of the leadership team in the business - too much volume = noise, lower volume = trust

52. There will be a time you have to remove a C-Suite peer when their and or their department’s performance isn’t good enough. Have the criteria set - often this won’t be completely agreed upon but then reduces any surprises

53. Combat vs conflict - understand there is a difference and call it out once becomes conflict

54. Play to your strengths as executives and work out if your weakness needing fixing or can hire / invite others in to address these

55. Have your executive roles - the ones who are approachable, the ones who are front facing, the others who are happy to be behind the scenes

56. Embrace cultural differences - this improves how you work together and removes exec group think and biases

57. Enable skip meetings - especially with number 2s with founders and CEOs. Increases bonds and trust levels throughout the business

58. Politics is going to be played. Either agree to play as a team or prepare to be played and manipulated - and even when its agreed political players play the game (PQ = political intelligence is a critical part of work)

Communications 🗣️

59. Agree on the leadership sub-culture you have and what is in and what is out of culture. Your leadership sub-culture leaks into the business and sets the tone and behaviours others mimic and copy

60. Kill jargon and your discipline buzzwords in important meetings - remove the need for translation and too much cognitive load

61. Remove over communication - you are short on time and energy, if people are over communicating it is taking time from everyone

62. Remove long emails and long threads. Have a rule of x length & if hits it arrange a call or call for clarity

63. Remove long docs - leverage tech with BLUF (bottom line upfront), use deliberate updates on the front page. Long docs are powerful providing there is a style and agreed working style with them

64. Create exec work with me docs - this is a way to understand how to communicate, collaborate and work with each other at a deeper level

65. Understand that everyone has their audience size they thrive with, whether that’s 1-2-1, 1-2-few, 1-2-group, 1-2-many - help colleagues to thrive and own where there are confident and comfortable

If there any you are struggling with and need some support, remember you can hit reply or drop me an email by hitting the button below

Audio Version 🎧

» If you prefer audio this is a great run down created by NotebookLM

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Thanks for reading again today and have a great day and we will see you on Monday with a special edition

Danny Denhard

PS if you missed last weeks newsletter take a read below