Leadership

Reinventing Your Leadership Team

Your organization’s future depends on getting this right.

by

and

Blair Sheppard

by

and

Blair Sheppard

From the Magazine (January–February 2022) · Long read

Alice Mann

Summary.

Digitization may be necessary for many businesses’ continued success, but in our increasingly complex world, what companies really need to do is build new forms of competitive advantage and transform themselves for the future. And that requires fundamental changes in their top leaders—not just in individuals’ capabilities but in the way they collectively steer the ship.

Drawing on their research at 12 prominent global firms, the authors note the contradictory-seeming skills that leaders are expected to have—being both great visionaries and expert executors, for example. But in this article they focus on the urgent imperative to improve leadership teams, arguing that CEOs should:

Identify the roles that are needed at the top to reimagine and then deliver on the company’s purpose
Fill those roles thoughtfully, assembling a diverse group of people who think boldly and work together harmoniously
Focus the team on driving transformation rather than managing the current business
Take ownership of the team’s behavior, fostering trust, collaboration, and a commitment to leading the company forward rather than dwelling on personal advancement

Idea in Brief

The Problem

To thrive in our increasingly complex world, companies must move beyond digitization and reimagine what they do to create value. But most leadership teams aren’t set up to transform their organizations and position them for success in the future.

The Way Forward

CEOs need to fundamentally rethink their leadership teams so that their top executives focus on advancing meaningful change rather than managing the current business.

The Steps to Follow

CEOs should identify the leadership roles needed to shape the future of the company, put the right people in those roles, emphasize the drive for transformation, and take ownership of their top team’s behavior.

As companies strive to build competitive advantage in a world obsessed with digitizing (which is often a must but rarely differentiating), they find that what they need from their leaders is changing. Their top people must be able to reimagine the company’s place in the world and transform the organization to live up to a more ambitious purpose. That will mean fundamental change not only in the executives themselves but also in how they collectively manage and lead the firm.

A version of this article appeared in the January–February 2022 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Paul Leinwand is a principal at PwC U.S., a global managing director at Strategy&, and an adjunct professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School. He is a coauthor, with Mahadeva Matt Mani, of Beyond Digital: How Great Leaders Transform Their Organizations and Shape the Future (HBR Press, 2022).
Mahadeva Matt Mani is a principal with PwC US. He leads the transformation platform for PwC and for its strategy consulting business, Strategy&, advising executives on business model transformations and operational value creation and productivity programs. He is a coauthor of Beyond Digital: How Great Leaders Transform Their Organizations and Shape the Future (Harvard Business Review Press, 2021).
BS

Blair Sheppard is the global leader of strategy and leadership for the PwC network. He directs the team that is responsible for articulating PwC’s global strategy across 156 countries and developing current and next-generation PwC leaders. He is also a professor emeritus and dean emeritus of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the author of Ten Years to Midnight: Four Urgent Global Crises and Their Strategic Solutions (Berrett-Koehler, 2020).

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Reinventing Your Leadership Team

Idea in Brief

The Problem

The Way Forward

The Steps to Follow

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