Executive Team Dynamics and Behaviors
Organizational success requires a cohesive executive team. A cohesive team sets the tone for the rest of the organization, modeling the importance of collaborative behavior. Yet despite its importance, many teams underinvest in developing a productive working dynamic tailored to their specific work. The set of dynamics below can help get you started. They support productive engagement for an executive team.
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The six key dynamics for executive teams
Shared ownership: Joint responsibility for agency-level trade-offs and decisions beyond the work of an individual's department
Constructive conflict: Comfort with and encouragement of diverse perspectives and productive disagreement as necessary ingredients to innovation and good decisions
Trust: Psychological safety that enables interpersonal risk taking and confidence that the team will not embarrass or punish someone for speaking up
Accountability: Commitment to team processes, the decisions of the team, and holding each other accountable for expected performance
Collaboration: Active listening, building on and connecting the ideas of others to solve each other's problems
Equity & Inclusion: Prioritization of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the team's work; identifying and mitigating bias in team discussion; and seeking out underrepresented perspectives when gathering input
Tools for Executive Team Dynamics and Behaviors
The steps outlined in this tool will help you prioritize a set of team behavioral norms that will support executive team effectiveness.
Download team behavioral norms template, instructions, & example | PDF >>
Download behavioral norms example from YWCA Metropolitan Chicago | PDF >>
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No two executive teams are alike when it comes to team dynamics and behaviors. Each team comprises a set of unique individuals, all of whom have their own approaches to work and personalities. Yet the effectiveness of the team relies on collaboration and alignment. One key lever a CEO can pull to ensure time together is well spent is to establish clear behavioral norms of how the team will work together.
Decision making
Five Ways that Nonprofits Can Make Decision Making More Inclusive—and More Effective
This article, based on The Bridgespan Group’s work with scores of local, national, and global nonprofits and NGOs around decision making, looks at five promising approaches for making decisions in ways that are both inclusive and effective, leading to more equitable outcomes.
Structuring Leadership: Alternative Models for Distributing Power and Decision-Making in Nonprofit Organizations
This article from the Building Movement Project highlights distributed leadership structures, including elements and practices that must be in place for alternative models to work and common indicators of success.
Team dynamics
Building a Better Executive Team
The River Group shares the indicators of success for an effective executive team, particularly around assessing the quality of team dialogue.
High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety. Here’s How to Create It
Author Laura Delizonna, executive coach and Stanford University instructor, discusses the importance of trust for high-performing teams and how teams can increase their level of psychological safety in this
Harvard Business Review article.
How to Support Effective Dynamics in Nonprofit Executive Teams
Peter Thies, president of Boston-based consultancy The River Group, offers a glimpse inside his playbook for developing effective nonprofit executive teams, highlighting the team dynamics that support collaboration.
Personal Histories Exercise
Developed by the Table Group, this exercise helps improve trust by giving team members an opportunity to demonstrate vulnerability in a low-risk way and to help team members understand one another at a fundamental level so that they can avoid making false attributions about behaviors and intentions.
Team Effectiveness Exercise
Another exercise from the Table Group, this team effectiveness exercise gives team members a forum for providing one another with focused, direct, actionable feedback about how their individual behavior can improve the performance of the team.