At a glance
Public company, energy · Executive committee, five members · Four off-site days
The challenge: Rapid growth, and an executive committee that worked like a set of experts side by side.
Our approach: The “Altitude” programme: four off-site days and Map & Match profiles, starting with the leadership team.
Result: A ten-commitment committee charter, a clarified decision framework and a conflict protocol. Next step: the team leaders.
Growth had outpaced the way the organisation was led
The organisation had a demanding mission, high public expectations and highly qualified teams. It had also grown in successive layers: new disciplines, new team leaders, several reorganisations. At the top, each person ran their own area with rigour. Together, the executive committee worked less like a team than like a set of experts sitting side by side.
The stake: to turn the executive committee into a trusted strategic core, able to decide together, speak with one voice and set the example for the whole management line.
What the leadership team observed:
- Silos between departments, each defending its own priorities and indicators.
- Unclear rules of the game in the committee: who decides, who is consulted, what is for information and what is for decision.
- Decisions reopened or reinterpreted outside the meeting, in the corridors or one to one.
- A feedback culture that was still timid: tensions were avoided rather than named.
- A reflex to retreat into technical expertise as soon as the relationship became uncomfortable.
The challenge was not to train experts in management. It was to learn to lead together.
“Altitude”: four steps from individual expertise to collective leadership
Working closely with the CEO and HR leadership, we designed a tailored executive leadership programme spread over two financial years. The principle: four off-site days, each focused on one theme, combining short inputs, simulations, work on real situations and concrete commitments. A senior Lead coach-consultant supports the whole journey and acts as a thinking partner for the leadership team.
Before: setting the frame
- Analysis of the context, the governance and the organisation chart.
- Individual interviews with each member of the executive committee.
- An individual Map & Match profile and a personal debrief for each member.
Day 1, Ignite: building trust
Intention: make psychological safety the foundation of collaboration.
- Trust broken down into observable behaviours: reliability, openness, acceptance, congruence.
- What happens inside us under pressure: stress reactions, triggers, default behaviours.
- The iceberg exercise: values, beliefs and patterns below the waterline.
- A mirror conversation in pairs: “What do you see in me that I don’t see?”
- A first individual commitment to trust.
Day 2, Flow: working across silos
Intention: make the silos visible and clarify how decisions are made.
- A strategic simulation with a 2030 horizon: each director starts from their own information and indicators, then the committee must build a cross-functional plan under shifting constraints.
- A workshop on feedback culture, based on real cases from the organisation.
- A scan of the committee’s decision-making and clarification of roles (RASCI, RAPID).
- A collective reading of the Map & Match profiles: the team’s talents, irritants and complementarities.
- A committee alignment canvas: what we stand for, what we expect from one another, what we will not tolerate.
Days 3 and 4, Own and Adapt: taking ownership and holding steady in complexity
- Ownership as a mindset, the dynamics of conflict and alignment with values.
- Transition leadership: navigating uncertainty and holding paradoxes.
- Individual and collective action plans, consolidated from one day to the next.
After: anchoring
- Drafting an executive committee charter based on the findings of the sessions.
- Debrief and strategic advice to the CEO and HR leadership after each day.
- Extension to the management line: a shared leadership framework and differentiated support for team leaders.
The signature tool: Map & Match, from individual profile to team profile
Each committee member receives their Map & Match profile and an individual debrief. In session, the profiles are brought together on the value-adding cycle: who initiates, who designs, who executes, who steps back. The team sees where it is strong, where its blind spots are and which irritations arise from different talents.
Tensions stop being clashes between people. They become complementarities to organise.
Rules of the game that are written, shared and verifiable
- An executive committee charter in ten commitments: the organisation’s interest comes first, no new priority without deciding what we stop, one decision and one message, tensions named directly and quickly.
- A three-step conflict protocol: pause, separate fact, interpretation and impact, then close with an agreement on substance, on method and, if needed, on the relationship.
- A clarified decision framework: who decides, who is consulted, with a decision sheet and a decision log.
- The Map & Match team profile and the debriefed individual profiles.
- Individual and collective action plans, and a quarterly ritual to check that the charter is being kept.
A leadership team that also judges itself on how it decides
The programme aims to establish an executive committee that judges itself not only on what it decides, but also on how it decides together. At the end of the four days, the organisation has:
- a shared language on trust, feedback and decision-making;
- explicit rules of the game for leadership meetings, written by the team itself;
- a shared reading of the team’s complementarities and blind spots;
- a foundation for extending the work to team leaders, with a leadership framework owned by the leadership team.
The work also brought to light what remains to be done: translating these commitments into the teams’ day-to-day reality and giving team leaders the means to play their role in full. That is the purpose of the next phase.
Long-term support, working closely with the leadership team
- A systemic approach: the leadership team’s behaviour shapes that of the whole management line, and that is where we start.
- Recognised profiling tools, Map & Match first among them, used for the benefit of the team and not only the individual.
- Sessions rooted in the organisation’s reality: simulations close to its challenges, real cases, real tensions.
- A thinking-partner role for the CEO and HR leadership, between sessions as well as during them.
Does your executive committee work as a team, or as a collection of experts?
If your organisation has grown faster than its way of leading, we can design a journey with you that strengthens trust, clarifies decision-making and gives the leadership team a single voice. Let’s talk.
