It's time for leaders to stop expecting change to come from the bottom of the organization.
To make change happen, companies must adopt a top-down approach. The responsibility for making a shift to high performance rests solely on the current board and C-suite's shoulders, the same people who are responsible for creating the high-performing organization. In defining the roles and responsibilities involved in making this shift, we need to get a handle on the key players who can make this vitally important change happen.
Roles for Leaders at the Top to Make the Shift
| Board | Executive Team |
| Strategic direction | Execute strategic direction |
| High-level goals | Responsible for profits and shareholder value |
| Hire CEO | Awareness of the competition |
| Hire key C-suite positions | Manage the firm's resources |
| Guidance and accountability | Make decisions on talent |
Boards set the strategic direction for the organization. They are typically comprised of high-level leaders from a variety of industries who are paid to provide oversight and diversity of thought and experiences. Boards establish talent and succession planning, set the business strategy, and ensure appropriate capital deployment. They recruit the CEO and are typically involved in the hiring of key positions, including the C-suite, those corporate officers, whose titles begin with C (e.g., CFO, COO, CIO, or CTO). They are the guiding force of the organization. Accountability for the success of the company starts with them.
The executive leadership team executes the strategic direction. C-suite executives have highly impactful and coveted positions in their organizations. They are responsible for their company's profitability and are ultimately accountable for shareholder value. They lead other executives internally while keeping a watchful eye on the competition and ensure that their company goals and ultimate strategy are being fully executed. They manage the firm's resources and make decisions on talent management. These leaders are typically compensated well for their role in the organization. Great leaders are visionary, are ethical, maximize resources (both dollars and talent), are fair, create inspired teams, and are strategic.
The number-one problem with today's organizations is this: too many people in leadership positions are imposters who disenfranchise the true high performers, mitigate the organization's existing talent, and undermine anyone perceived as a threat.
To make a fundamental shift to high performance, the board needs to establish the company's vision, goals, and direction, while the executive leadership needs to be held accountable to make the shift happen. That is how it works with every other goal within an organization, and a goal around high performance that maximizes a company's most important asset should be no different.
If boards and leadership want to achieve high performance, outpace their competition, and lead their respective industries, the one thing that I uncovered (and, remarkably, experienced) is the need to start with an intentional integration of high-performing, gender-balanced talent in an organization's leadership. Specifically, teams comprised of a balance of men and women are tomorrow's Holy Grail for high-performing teams. Here's why: Men, who have traditionally held leadership roles, can be confident risk takers and negotiators. Women, on the other hand, can be great leaders who empower teams, develop high-performing talent, and think through competitive or industry-leading options and permutations. I often refer to this healthier integrated culture as “right balanced” because that indicates an intentional shift and integration from simply including a token female voice, which is often muted and mitigated, to ensuring that a critical mass of female leaders contribute to shaping the culture and standards that drive high performance. Today, only 8% of senior executives are both strategic and have the ability to effectively execute through their teams, putting an exclamation point on the need for right-balanced teams.
Comparing Right-Balanced and Off-Balance Teams
| Off-Balance Teams | Right-Balanced Teams |
| Token female voice, if any | Balances an equal number of female and male perspectives as well as their skills |
| Mutes and mitigates female perspectives | Values male and female perspectives equally |
| Leads with old-world assumptions: Only the strong survive | Works toward high performance: Only the team survives |
| Struggles to balance execution and strategy | Implements more diverse and far-reaching skillsets that improve execution and strategy |
| Creates less revenue when only one gender is present | Creates more revenue with gender balance |
| Unsustainable and difficult to predict outcomes | Results are sustainable and more likely to match goals |
Right-balanced teams also have the data on their side. As opposed to teams comprised of all women or all men, an MIT study found that one right-balanced team could create 41% more revenue than all-male or all-female teams.3 Michel Landel of Sodexo reports that an effort to build more gender-balanced teams regularly achieved better outcomes. “We analyzed data from 50,000 managers across 90 entities around the world and the results are compelling. They clearly show that teams with a male–female ratio between 40 and 60 percent produce results that are more sustained and predictable than those of unbalanced teams.”4 When it comes to impacting the bottom line at the executive level, a series of studies conducted by McKinsey & Company found:
“Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on their executive teams were 21% more likely to experience above-average profitability.”
“Executive teams that were high-performing had more women in revenue-generating roles.”
“Companies with low representation of women and other diverse groups were 29% more likely to underperform on profitability.”5
In addition, a study conducted over long spans of time found that women are essential for incorporating more innovation and higher profit margins. A 2012 study of 1,500 companies conducted over 15 years found that “the presence of a woman in top management amounts to creating extra market value for each firm of approximately US $44 million.”6 The conclusion is beyond dispute: Organizations that courageously commit to creating high-performance cultures led by right-balanced teams with great leaders will outpace, outmaneuver, and outperform their competition.
If making the shift to right-balanced, high-performing teams with great leaders is good for the long-term growth of employees, keeps companies on the cutting edge of innovation,