Creating a leadership team that owns results

By Sandra Oliver, Impact Founder

In our last insight, The CEO trap: Operating below your level, we uncovered how CEOs can get stuck in leadership patterns that don’t serve them or the business. What steps CEOs can take to shift certain operational and management responsibilities to where they should be – with their leadership teams. And how CEOs can empower their people to level up and contribute more substantially to the organization, so they can focus on what they do best as CEOs.

This week, I want to look more closely at how CEOs can create a new way of working with their leadership teams including creating space for their people to evolve their own leadership skills and expertise, and ensure their boards understand the change and are onside.

Make a new contract with the leadership team

CEOs, need to explicitly tell their teams what’s changing, for example, “I’m going to change my behaviour. I’ve been stepping into operational accountability too often, and that’s helped us in some ways, but it’s now holding us back. I need this team to operate at a different level. I’m going to coach and challenge more, and fix and rescue less.”

Then the team needs to work through what that actually means:

• What will they stop bringing to the CEO?
• What decisions will they make without escalation?
• How will they handle conflict with each other?
• Who truly owns the operational scorecard?
• What happens when something slips?
• What information does the CEO still need?
• What does the CEO need to stop doing so the team can grow?

And it needs to happen often. In one-on-ones and team sessions, and in how CEOs run meetings, make decisions, and handle consequences.

Ensure the board understands the shift, too

And CEOs need to spend time making this shift clear to their boards, as well. Because when a CEO starts letting go, their people will make mistakes. A commitment will slip, report will not be good enough, conflict will take too long to resolve, or a leader will make a decision the CEO wouldn’t have made. And unless the board fully understands and supports the CEO’s change in strategy, when these mistakes happen, they’ll still hold the CEO responsible.

Instead, CEOs need to prepare and align the board with their new strategy. The board must understand that when issues surface as a result of the CEO intentionally moving accountability back to the leadership team, it’s a sign of the leadership team’s development, not a deterioration in the CEO’s performance.

CEOs can’t make this shift if the first missed item causes everyone to panic and pull the CEO back into fixing mode. The CEO needs a contract with the board that says the organization is building stronger leadership capacity, which will require the team to carry more real accountability. The CEO needs to communicate regularly with the Board during the shift including how the leadership team is responding, and what impacts it’s having for everyone – positive and negative.

And at the same time, the board must give the CEO feedback on the shift in their role to ensure the CEO elevates and becomes the leader the organization needs.

Create a safe space for people to grow and learn

Letting people live with consequences doesn’t mean creating fear, shaming people, setting them up to fail, or refusing to help. People need to be able to ask for help, discuss mistakes, seek feedback, and take interpersonal risks without being punished for it.

The goal is to make people honest, responsible, and capable of learning quickly, which means the CEO is still present, coaching, observing, and asking the questions that help people think more clearly.

When CEOs make this shift, they usually see the impacts very quickly. Some leaders love it – they’ve been waiting for more authority and room to run. Some leaders are uncomfortable at first, but they grow. And some leaders don’t level up.

If a leader can’t own their function, work through conflict, make decisions, manage their scorecard, develop their people, and contribute at the enterprise level, the CEO eventually has to make a change. It’s hard, but continuing to compensate for leaders who can’t grow isn’t kindness – it frustrates the CEO, slows down the team, and blocks the organization from becoming what it needs to become.

CEOs need to get back to the right level

This matters more now than it did even a few years ago. Many businesses are facing major shifts in AI, markets, talent, customer expectations, regulation, technology, and business models. The organizations that thrive will need more innovation and enterprise thinking, and stronger leadership teams. CEOs can’t do that work if they’re stuck solving problems their teams should be solving.

CEOs need to ask themselves what they’re still carrying that their teams should own? Where are they solving instead of coaching? Nagging instead of creating accountability? What conversations do they need to have with their leadership teams? And what agreement  do they need to make with their boards so they can actually follow through?

CEOs are not meant to hold the bag for everyone. The CEO’s job is to build a team strong enough to carry what’s theirs — so the CEO can get back to leading the future of the business.