Stories from our work · 5 min read
A different world
The first few months in a senior job have a kind of grace period. You are expected to listen and learn. Few people expect results yet. Then, quietly, the grace period ends.
Executive integration · CXO-Accelerate · CEO and CFO · Culture insight · Reward
For one business, that moment arrived twice at once.
A new chief executive and a new chief financial officer had joined the company at the same time. Both were experienced. Both had worked with strong teams before, in other organisations, and both arrived knowing exactly what good looked like.
What they walked into did not look like that. The team did not work the way their previous teams had worked. It did not respond the way they expected it to respond. Within a few months, both of them were frustrated, and if they were honest, a little confused. They could not work out why capable people were not doing what seemed obvious.
What neither of them had fully seen yet was that they had moved into a very different world.
Two maps
This is the moment when things can go wrong for good. The leaders start to see a team that will not step up. The team starts to see leaders who do not understand how things work here. Both stories feel true from the inside, and both can harden fast.
In our view, neither side was really the problem. The CEO and CFO were reading the business with maps drawn somewhere else. The team was reading them with a map of its own. Until someone laid the maps side by side, every conversation would keep missing.
Under the surface
That is where we came in. We brought the CEO, the CFO and the team into an accelerator programme with one aim: to help them understand each other a little better.
Using culture insight and Circles, we began to draw out what the team was really about. What challenges it was facing. What it valued, and what it believed in. How people understood the priorities. And the things that are almost never said out loud in a meeting with a new boss: the egos in the room, the personal objectives, each person's own view of how the work should be done.
As those pieces came out, the team began to make more sense to its new leaders, and the new leaders to the team. The world the CEO and CFO had walked into was starting to come into view.
A new way in
We brought all of that together using our own tools and methods, and worked with the CEO and CFO on three changes.
The first was how they influenced people. What had worked in their previous organisations was not going to work here, so they needed an influencing strategy built for this one.
The second was reward. If a team is recognised and rewarded for one thing while being asked for another, reward usually wins. So they took a new approach to reward, one that matched what they needed from the team.
The third was how they led the executive team, day to day.
What happened next
With a shared understanding and a clear plan, the CEO, the CFO and the team began to mobilise far more effectively. The frustration gave way to momentum, and the work delivered great results.
Why we tell this one
Capable leaders and a capable team can still fail to connect when they are working from different maps. Often, the fix is to lay the maps side by side, so each can see the other clearly.