Alright. Well, welcome everyone, to our session today. It is 11:10. So we are going to go ahead and get started with our session.Great leaders don't automatic automatically make great executive teams, six teaming factors for tech leaders to accelerate execution. So hopefully, you're in the session that you wanted to be in. So let's jump in. Raise your hands if you stacked your senior teams with mediocre leaders. Okay. No hands? Okay. How about you've put just alright outright bad leaders on your leadership teams? No hands. Right? Hopefully, there are no hands. I can't see you, but no hands. No. No one would raise their hands for this question because we typically invest in hiring and developing great leaders. Yet 65%, 65% of senior executives said their leadership team is ineffective.

That's like seven out of every 10 people in this room saying their leadership teams aren't performing well or producing well together. So wait. We have good leaders and only so so teams? There's a disconnect in that. You see, having good leaders doesn't automatically translate to having good senior teams. Great teams are the result of leaders working on how they team together just as much as on what they must produce. Companies with highly aligned leadership teams are two times two times more likely to outperform their peers. And in the race to deliver big AI initiatives, shore up data and security risk, while, by the way, transforming the entire workforce, Having strong senior teams who are aligned and working together is a critical part of the recipe for an organization's success. So how do we create highly effective senior leadership teams? That's what we're talking about today. Hi, everyone.

I'm Kimberly Lewis Parsons, CEO of Bamboo Teaming, joining you from Richmond, Virginia. We are team performance experts helping executive teams remove the friction, slowing their alignment and collaboration so they can accelerate execution and growth. Now in my twenty plus years experience leading from inside a Fortune 100 bank and working from the outside coaching leaders to uplevel their performance, I've found senior teams will tolerate friction and how they work together for a very long time. They'll work around it. They'll compensate. They become complacent with the drag in their team interactions, chalking it up to that's just our team dynamics. How many people have heard that? Well, this goes on until they hit some tipping point in the impact to their business results. And there are five signs that we often see that cause teams to stop the line and say, hey, maybe we need to work on how we're working together.

Let's take a look at those. So five signs we often see that cause teams to stop the line and say, hey. Maybe we need to work on how we're working together. These are sign number one. When a team gets a must do mandate, a must do mandate, and they can't agree on where to start or the top priorities, There's no alignment on the business cases they actually need to solve for. There's no agreement on the top priorities or the order they should work on them. That's a sign that, hey. Maybe we need to work on how we're actually working together. Sign number two. Interesting. We'll go without those. Okay. Sign number two is when one or more critical initiatives are stalled late or in danger, are going of going off track.

This looks like the team has missed KPIs for two cycles in a row, their yellow and red project statuses that aren't being discussed, or we hear we're not holding each other accountable. Have you heard that before? Well, that's a sign that perhaps the team needs to work on how they're working together. Sign number three is when the team leader needs to focus more externally on growth or bigger picture strategy. But as soon as they turn away to go more outward in their expansion, the team's flow slows down when the leader is looking away. The team wants the leader at the center of everything. People still come to the leader to referee attention or they're waiting for the leader to make the call or green light everything.

That's a sign that the team needs to work on how they're working together. Sign number four is that the team needs to work on their team performance when there is execution of functional priorities that are consistently outpacing the enterprise goals they're on the hook to deliver. So this is where senior leaders on a team are running conflicting priorities. They're working hard in their own lane while forward momentum on collective goals, it isn't there. Or cross functional dependencies are missed because senior leaders aren't discussing the impacts with one another or making collective decisions together. I like to say they're not masterminding as the executive team, as the senior leadership team. Or sign number five may be present. This is where one or more senior team members leave unexpectedly or threatens to due to the tension and unrest that's present in the team.

Team members are just not getting along. Meetings get hijacked with disputes or disagreements. There is unresolved tension, low trust, poor communication, and it's just become too much. These signs, they show up as operational problems, execution problems, talent problems. They're the tip of the iceberg that we see that's costing the business speed and results. But what's below the waterline underneath these is how the senior team is functioning together. And this is where the work for teams to grow their performance, this is where it lives so that they can execute results more effectively. It's not in let's make this leader better, these individual leaders better. The work is to put in how are we as a team actually working together. So based on our experience from the field and research on high performing teams and companies, we've identified six six factors that make or break a team's performance.

Six factors that make or break a team's performance. These six factors provide a roadmap of how to build effective senior teams, helping teams to pinpoint their strengths and the places they need to improve so they work better together. Let's take a look at these. And as I walk through them on a sheet of paper, grab a sticky note by either real or digital, jot down a one to 10 on how effective your team is in each of these factors with one being, oh, no. That's not even present on our team to 10. We've got that one on lock. We're amazing. They should be writing business books about us. Okay. So ready to go through? Six teaming factors the six factors of effective teaming. Factor number one.

This is where teams invest in invest in making sure they have shared purpose and goals. The team shared purpose, goals, priorities. The team is clear on why they exist as a team. The shared priorities they are accountable to drive forward together are clear. They have a way of managing those priorities. And when you ask each person, hey. What are we on the hook for? What's our purpose as a team? You get the same answer. So how effective is your team in having a shared purpose and clear collective priorities that they drive together? On a scale of one to 10, just jot it down. So factor number two is where teams really invest in ensuring they have best fit people and roles. This is where teams have right leaders they need to accomplish that shared purpose, those collective priorities.

They have the right people on the team who are able to deliver upon those. Roles and interactions are clear, and the members of the team have an enterprise mindset focused on driving results for the good of the entire enterprise and not just for their functions. So how's your team in this area on a scale of one to 10? So factor number three is ways of working principles. Now we really like this one. This one we find is highly correlated to high team performance, And this is where the team has agreed on how they will work together. What is inbounds in their interactions? What are the expected ways that we work together so that we can win together? And not just saying what's inbound, but being really clear about what is out of bounds and how we interact.

So on a scale of one to 10, how's your team in ways of working principles? Are they present? Do you have them on a team? Are you living according to them? Do you all, call each other out, call each other in, however you wanna say it, based on your ways of working principles? Factor number four, collaboration and cohesion practices. These are your team has practices in place that enables the team to get work done and relate to each other with productive challenge and support. So how we collaborate is clear, how we make decisions together is clear, that's a part of collaboration, how we relate to each other, our cohesion, our trust, how do we build that in a team? We have practices for all of those. So as a team, how was your team in this area on a scale of one to 10 in terms of effectiveness?

So factor number five is shared accountability processes, and this is where the team has processes in place that help them turn click first off, make clear commitments and then turn those commitments into action, into results together, and productively reset with one another when things go off track.

Often, this factor is the one where we start to hear we don't hold each other accountable or we all need to step up more in driving the results. Those are clues or signs that factor number five may need to be strengthened within the team. And factor number six is system perspective. This is where, you as a leadership team, you lead with the whole system in mind. You're not just so focused, with your head in the sand working on this is our team. Like, this is the this is our team's world, and this is what we're driving. But you are able to really hold the whole system in mind as you're working. You're staying connected to the broader strategy, to stakeholders, to the changes that are happening around you, not just within your company, but also within the industry.

So how is your team in holding a system perspective? So we worked with the executive team of a leading campaign tech firm. And after assessing their six factors, they identified the biggest leverage point in their team performance was in factor number four, how they made decisions together. As a team, their decisions were slow. They revisited them. We keep talking about it meeting after meeting, and they also worked quietly after the meeting to undermine decisions that they didn't like. Hopefully, that's not happening within your teams. But what we found with this executive team is that it was costing them speed to market in the critical fit in the critical features that they were trying to drive and deliver for their platform, and the board was noticing it too and calling them out on it. So when we came in to work with them, this became the focus of our team coaching work. And within months, the team reported that they doubled their decision velocity.

It took effort and energy on the team working together on how they were working as a team because having smart leaders around the table, it isn't enough. The team needs to develop themselves as a team to get to stronger performance that will lead to better results. So take a look at so take a look at the pulse check you did for your team. Your eights, your nines, your tens, in those factors, those are your team strengths. That's the foundation that you've already built within your senior teams. Notice them. Celebrate them. Build on them as you are working together as a team. Now those areas where you have lower numbers, those are your friction. Those are possible friction areas. Those are places where something in the team is maybe not working as well as it could work. Right?

Those are the places that have the potential to slow down your execution. And so we just did a quick pulse check here. There's a fuller check that you could go through with the full team together around this. But right now, let's say you're walking away with some awareness. Here are some of the factors that we have really worked on developing strength in our team, and here are some places where maybe we need to go and, take a look at. That's awareness. That's awareness, and that's a great thing. But awareness is not enough to sustain change. We often hear well, I mean, if you were to go around and ask anyone, do you wanna have high performing teams? Most people are going to say, yes. We wanna have high performing teams, but the gap is are you really working on it together as a team.

So for the teams that seriously invest in how the senior team is working together, it enables you to move from you will move from awareness to intentional practice that leads to change in your team interactions. This will help you to reach the next level of performance that your team needs, not just your individual leaders, but your team needs to perform together as a whole to drive those big juicy goals that you all are on hook leading within your