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“Team Building” is often seen as a very soft word – nice to do, but often not considered either pragmatic or impactful enough to warrant the time and investment to do, especially in this economy.  Recently the GSA was brought under scrutiny for a “team building” event in Las Vegas that reportedly featured a mind…

You know by now what it is like to be tested when your business runs into what seems like the perfect storm of operating difficulties, bad sales projections, and business uncertainties.  These issues, or others like them, conspire to create tough and uncertain times for even the best of teams who have the ongoing responsibility…

Over the past twenty years, the Levin Group has coached a lot of people across a wide range of industries. When we began, we tended to work with existing or promising executives, or those who were in trouble. One of the things we quickly learned is that unless you understand the unique business the executives are in,…

Coaching is becoming a commodity, and while still valuable, it is beginning to lose the power and impact of its ability to, as Marshall Goldsmith says, “Help successful people get even better.” Working at the top of the house is a different experience from simply debriefing a 360 and creating a development plan with little…

In our book Top Teaming: A Roadmap for Leadership Teams Navigating the Now, the New, and the Next, we talk about the importance of Collective Intelligence (CI) as one of the benefits of a real Top Team.  This is the practice of utilizing real diversity of thought, style, experience, personality, etc. in working together to address and…

Great teams have a looseness about them— a deep and implicit trust that they are in this together   One of the most essential yet difficult variables that distinguishes Top Teams from most executive teams is their ability to engage in honest, candid, and authentic dialogue. Dialogue (from the Greek dia-logos) literally means an exchange of…

I have had the honor of participating in really well done Strategic Talent Reviews.  These are the necessary conversations about current and emerging talent within an organization that have the following purposes: Identify/Track current and future leaders Calibrate/Align behind what we mean by “high-potential” Begin to seed “bench strength” and possible succession within the company…

I had a conversation last week with a very driven and successful CMO (who we’ll call John) who has been asked to make major changes in his company’s approach to new and existing markets.  To be sure, these changes represent major disruptions to his leadership team, their current and evolving roles, and their critical intersections…

In our work with Leadership Teams, we are constantly asking these questions: 1. Given the mission and purpose of your organization, what kind of team do you need to be to accomplish it? 2. How do you raise the bar of your leadership team(s)’ ability to really think and execute together to create the results you have…

“We are having conversations we would never have had a year ago. We’re forced to look at things differently. We’re forced to anticipate what we might do today that will be absolutely wrong for the future.”   I have yet to meet a leader who has not experienced off-sites or retreats in which strategy was…