One management team, one voice: making collective leadership the engine of public services
In a municipal administration, the management team bridges the political executive and the services. At the start of the political term, it had already written down what it wanted to be: a team that jointly owns the delivery of the policy programme. Now it had to live that every day.
At a glance
Municipal administration · Management team, around ten people · Two-day TRAIL programme
The challenge: A management team of strong personalities has to carry the programme of the legislature together.
Our approach: The two-day TRAIL programme, with Map & Match profiles, a decision charter and an operating guide.
Objective: Decisions prepared together and carried with one voice to the council and the departments, with monthly follow-up of the priority work streams.
Strong individuals do not yet make a management team
The management team brings together the chief executive, the deputy, the finance director and the cluster managers. It meets every week, the day after the executive board. On paper, the remit is clear: translate political choices into delivery, coordinate the services and drive the organisation’s development.
An internal exercise had already defined the role: take ownership of a well-run organisation, be ambassadors for its values, share responsibility for the whole. The vision existed. The challenge was to turn it into behaviour, into decisions and into trust.
What the team experienced day to day:
- A constant tension between “pulling the operational load” and “leading strategically”.
- Pressure, fragmentation and mandates that were not always explicit.
- Speed taking precedence over alignment: decisions made, but not always owned.
- Conflicts staying below the surface, and silences that everyone reads in their own way.
- Connection and cooperation seen as “someone else’s job”.
One hypothesis guided the whole programme: when trust drops, the action engine speeds up. Decisions then feel pushed rather than owned, and action looks more like control than ownership.
The “TRAIL” programme: learning, leading and delivering together
Lead designed a tailor-made programme called TRAIL, for Teamwork, Responsibility, Alignment, Impact, Leadership. The name evokes a hiking trail: finding your way, obstacles, helping each other, progress. The rhythm follows three verbs: learn, lead, deliver. A senior coach-consultant from Lead ran it from start to finish, working on the team’s real situations.
Before: framing and profiling
- Intake and context analysis with the chief executive’s office.
- A Map & Match profile for each member of the management team.
- An individual debrief of about an hour and a half per person, and a first collective reading of the profiles.
Day 1: learn
Intention: understand how the team works, and build trust and direction.
- Why now: delivering the programme requires a team that leads, not a collection of individual managers.
- A systemic reading across three spheres (individual, collective, organisational) and the iceberg model: what is visible, and what plays out below the surface.
- An impact and effectiveness scan of the management team on five dimensions, followed by a climate radar: psychological safety, respect, role clarity, shared responsibility, everyone’s voice.
- The building blocks of trust, giving and receiving feedback, and a team exercise under constraint to observe one’s own reflexes.
- A personal action plan and a first team plan: improve, keep, drop, initiate.
In between: debriefing
- Each member discovers their profile one to one, before sharing it with the team.
Day 2: lead and deliver
Intention: turn the reading of the team into working agreements.
- A values compass: what the team wants to stand for in leadership, delivery and innovation, and what gives way when trust drops.
- The team’s four engines, their strengths and what happens when they run too hard.
- Micro-commitments per engine, with a mechanism to remind each other without escalation.
- A consent-based decision charter: listening round, impact check, objections integrated, commitment check, then one voice to the outside.
- A delivery lab: a real file examined with the TRACE method, then roles clarified with RASCI and RAPID.
After: embedding
- A rescan of the team at the end of the day to measure the ground covered.
- A proposed monthly rhythm: each workstream gets an owner and a buddy, and the team decides together whether to stop, adjust or scale up.
The signature tool: the team’s four engines (Map & Match)
The individual Map & Match profiles distinguish the talents that give energy (T5), the comfort competencies (C5) and what drains energy (I5). Overlaid, they reveal four engines: direction and choices, action and delivery, structure and quality, connection and development.
The map shows a team strong in pace, coordination and execution. It also shows the flip side: pushed too far, the action engine puts speed before buy-in, structure turns into control, and nobody carries connection any more. An engine is not a hierarchy. It is a shared responsibility.
The management team operating system
One rhythm, one language, one team. Every meeting follows the same structure: check-in, framing of the day, decisions, priorities and risks, close with one voice. Every decision is communicated in three points: what was decided, why, and the next step.
When trust drops, a simple protocol takes over: name the tension yourself within 48 hours, describe the fact, its impact and the request, then follow a one-to-one repair route.
A map of the team, decision rules and a rhythm to keep going
- A Map & Match profile and an individual debrief for each member of the management team.
- The collective map of the four engines: strengths, overheating zones, under-represented engines.
- A baseline score for the team and a climate radar, to track progress.
- A personal action plan per member and a team action plan (improve, keep, drop, initiate).
- A first “one voice” decision charter and an engine charter with micro-commitments.
- A management team operating guide: meeting structure, decision protocol, communication, handling tensions.
- A monthly rhythm to follow up priority workstreams, and the materials from both days.
Decisions that are owned, not just made
The programme aims to make the management team the lever for delivering the policy programme: a team that cooperates with trust, aligns its decisions with shared values and takes ownership across all services. It is designed to bring:
- decisions prepared together and carried with one voice to the executive board and the services;
- more clarity about who carries which engine and who decides what;
- tensions named early, on the facts, instead of staying below the surface;
- a restored balance between the pace of action and the time needed for buy-in;
- a common language to steer the organisation’s development throughout the political term.
A systemic reading, and rules of the game that stay after the programme
- An understanding of how public administrations work: the bridge between politics and services, mandates, the long horizon of a political term.
- Map & Match, a tool that sheds light on each person and on the whole team, without labelling anyone.
- A programme that starts from the vision the team had already written, and translates it into concrete behaviour.
- A direct, hands-on style: we work on real files, and every day ends with written commitments.
Does your management team know what it wants to be, but still struggle to decide with one voice?
If you want to turn a group of strong managers into a management team that jointly owns the delivery of its programme, we can design a programme tailored to your reality. Let’s talk.
