In each management team, there is a series of functional blockages and difficulties in creating relationships that, from the coaching point of view, hide really huge development and performance opportunities, which can overcome the usual results regarding the implementation of the company’s business strategy. Take a look at some of them:
1. Firstly, everyone in the organization (and not only) is paying a lot of attention to what is happening in the management team. Everybody is analyzing and waiting for ‘signs’ from it. Also, the competition. And this is one of the reasons why the management environment is not encouraging at all the creation and development of a climate coverage for strategic reflection and openness in sharing information and ideas.
2. The dynamic of politics and power is a central phenomenon in all of this group’s activities. Each choice, each decision is held in the light of the results but also in the perspective of the way it affects the influence and the future plans of each manager. The fact that the CEO is also the leader of the team and the chief of the organization contributes heavily to the complexity of the subject.
3. There are always tensions – more or less visible – regarding the collaboration between the management team members and the implicit competition between them. Simply said, this group gathers around the CEO position, both as status and skills. Once a manager reaches the level of being a member of the management team, the available career developments are either assuming the CEO position or leaving the company. Implicitly, the competitive stakes are high.
4. Usually, the managers from the management team are the ‘stars’ in their fields of activity. They have been known as ones and rewarded for their individual results. In most organizations, rewards are offered for the success in their functions, not for their contributions to the success of others. And also usually, these managers have overconfidence in their own abilities mixed with a poorly managed fear: they don’t really know how to treat other colleagues that are on the same level as them and especially how to manage the challenges they face together.