Executive teams
Most executive teams do not need to be built. They need to stop deferring four decisions, and to say the thing they say in the corridor in the room instead.
- Six half-days over five months
- Shape
- The intact team, 5 to 11 people
- Who is in the room
- From £24,000
- Indicative fee
An executive team is not a group of high performers who need bonding. It is a decision-making body that usually knows exactly what it is avoiding, and the work is to make the avoided conversation possible rather than to improve trust in the abstract.
We start with a diagnostic: individual interviews with every member, an observed meeting, and a short survey on decision clarity. In fourteen of the last twenty engagements the same pattern appeared — the team believed its problem was communication, and the interviews showed it was an unresolved disagreement about strategy that nobody would name.
The six sessions are then built on what we found, not on a curriculum. There is a standard shape — surface, contract, decide, practise, embed, review — but the content is your material. We do not bring a case study about an airline.
What we will tell you before you commit: this does not work if the chief executive is the problem and is not in the room. We have declined four engagements on that basis, and in two of them the sponsor came back a year later with the CEO participating.
What is actually delivered
- The avoided decision named and taken, or explicitly deferred with a date
- A written decision protocol: who decides what, alone or together
- Meeting time reallocated — typically 30% off status, onto choices
- A ninety-day review with the same diagnostic, so the change is measured
Other programmes
Four things we do. We will tell you which one your problem actually is, and sometimes the answer is none of them.
Leadership development
Cohort programmes for first-time and senior leaders, with the manager in the room at the start and the end.
Read more →Coaching
One-to-one work with senior leaders. Chemistry sessions are free, and about one in five does not proceed.
Read more →Culture & change
Diagnostic first, and sometimes the finding is that the culture is fine and the operating model is not.
Read more →Start with the diagnostic, not the programme
Six weeks of interviews and a baseline measure, and a written finding — including the finding that the problem is structural and a development programme will not touch it. We have delivered that one twice.