If you’ve attended many executive meetings, you will see a common pattern. Each person appears to be in complete agreement with the proposed vision. The CEO proposes a vision; the CFO agrees; the CIO offers a comment about systems; and the CHRO supports this with a comment about culture. So, it looks like there is support for this vision.
Several weeks later, the implementation and outcome do not support this initial impression of an agreement.
Integrating C-Suite collaboration is meant to close this gap by not adding additional meetings, but by changing how leaders work together. They should be working toward alignment through out the entire process, which is continuing and can at times be messy.
A good example to illustrate this is a digital transformation initiative. A technology roadmap may be created and look solid; however, if finance is only looking at the short-term ROI of the project, tension will start to build. If HR is not working with finance to develop a talent model to support the technology roadmap, then the adoption of the digital transformation initiative will lag. Each department has done a great job of supporting their own departments, but they have not made any attempt to work together.
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For integrated C-Suite collaboration to be successful, this process requires that each department leader starts to become comfortable operating in the domain of other leaders. CFOs need to start asking questions regarding customer experience and CIOs should work with the CFO on revenue generation models along with developed strategies involving technology. This requires that departmental boundaries be crossed.
As with any new process, there can be a risk associated with this change. If these domains are too closely aligned and are overly-integrated, there could be confusion regarding responsibility for project delivery. If boundaries are again created, then decisions will become stalled due to a lack of responsible individuals to make the decision.
Additionally, challenges that arise from a result of improving C-Suite cooperation will often be associated with increased disagreement or discussion where individuals will need to work through or develop new ideas. Executive teams typically do not like this type of discussion because it can at times appear like a waste of time or may fail to provide sufficient support for the implementation. Without having individuals work through this type of collaborative discussion, the final result of alignment will only be surface level.
In practice, the majority of effective executive teams have one key trait in common. They consider enterprise priorities to be true joint problems between everyone in the organization to be worked as a team. Enterprise priorities are not to be considered as projects for C-Suite executives to coordinate around and implement independently but instead should be viewed as projects to be collaboratively developed and implemented by all members of the C-Suite.
While this seems to make sense, in actuality, this is not the case.
