This blog series helps small and medium business leaders answer one simple question: “How can I best ensure I meet my business goals?” To review, the three key elements are:

1. Having a clear strategic direction
2. Fostering a culture of execution 
3. Creating a trusting and aligned leadership team

Having a strategic direction and a clear plan to execute is a great start. Ensure that there is a strong leadership team that can steer the ship and make adjustments for plans to stay on track. While there are many aspects to cultivating a strong leadership team, there are three that have proven critical:

• Trust
• Ability to engage in productive conflict
• Clear and aligned communication

When we at M-Power Coaching mention trust in a high-performing team, it goes beyond knowing and liking one another. A skill that’s necessary to drive true success within a leadership team is the ability to be transparent, honest, and vulnerable with each other. It is rare to find this among leadership teams, as it requires members to set aside their fear and egos for the greater good. This only works when all members are committed. There are many ways to go about this, but a good start is leveraging an assessment for the team, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Ultimately, it’s about maximizing the performance of the group by providing frameworks and tools to build trust in a quick and authentic way.

Most people do not like conflict and even go out of their way to avoid it. The ability to engage in productive conflict requires a precise level of trust. When my partners and I disagree on something, we actually look forward to the discussion to sort it out. We have experienced time and time again that we end up with a much better solution when we approach conflict as an opportunity to find the best outcome. In organizations that do not have genuine trust, conflict becomes a political game and can be damaging to the company.

The third factor, communication, is a broad topic. What is important in this context is that the leadership team has a clear set of processes surrounding what and how they communicate to the rest of the organization. How many times have you left a meeting, seemingly clear on the decisions that were made, only to find out your colleague is telling his team something completely different? The simple practice of taking two minutes at the end of each meeting to summarize what decisions were made, and who owns what actions, can ensure this is not an issue. Equally important is to have an agreement on what timeframe information will be communicated after decisions are made. For example, a standard policy that all decisions will be communicated to the entire team within 24 hours. These small but impactful actions can help assure the alignment that employees desire from their leaders.

While there is a lot to say on the topic of leadership teams and its importance to business success, I have observed that the three factors discussed here provide a strong foundation for any leadership team to grow and prosper from.