Set Up Your C-Suite to Execute Your Strategy
Summary: Designing the executive team is one of the most consequential choices a CEO can make. It determines how the enterprise allocates resources, resolves trade-offs, pivots in the face of unforeseen challenges, and moves at speed. Yet its composition is often one of the least deliberate. Vanity titles, reporting lines, and inherited structures may shape the team you have, but they can’t define the team you need. Just as you should design your organization to fit your strategy, so too must you design your executive team with the same thinking. To do it: 1) Design, don’t arrange; 2) let strategy dictate the design; and 3) clarify who’s in and why.
When a client of ours, “Sarah,” became CEO of a fast-growing tech company, she did what many first-time CEOs do: She gathered everyone with a “chief” title and called them her executive team. Soon, her weekly meetings looked like a high school lunch table with 18 people all pretending to update each other while quietly jockeying for turf. Decisions dragged. Priorities blurred. Sarah left each meeting wondering why a room of brilliant individuals turned into sludge the moment she put them together.
Sarah ran into a problem we’ve seen frequently in our work with executives: Like many leaders, she had treated the C-suite as a list of direct reports rather than a mechanism for executing strategy.
Executive teams often comprise inherited collections of roles, titles, and personalities that have grown by accretion. CEOs add to them, argue with them, and even defend them without ever asking, What is this team actually for?
Poorly designed executive teams slow decisions, confuse accountability, and sap energy. They become forums for status updates and political positioning rather than mechanisms of execution. And they leave CEOs wondering why brilliant individual leaders fail to perform as a collective. In this article, we’ll debunk the myths that keep CEOs from approaching executive team design with intent, then present a few ways to align your executive team with your strategy.
The Erosion of the C-suite into a Club
Here are several myths that underpin the erosion of the C-suite into a club instead of a thoughtfully designed, effective executive team:
