Several governance structures, one team: building shared leadership where mandates intersect

One team of managers serves several entities at once. Each has its own board, its own priorities, its own cultural reflexes. Some managers report to two directors. The senior leaders, for their part, sit at different governance tables and yet have to decide together.

What was at stake: moving from goodwill collaboration to working as a leadership team, with clear mandates, trust and an owned way of making the call.

What the team was living day to day:

• Cross-cutting decisions that drag on, because no one knows who is ultimately accountable.
• A natural loyalty to one’s own entity, which takes precedence over the shared mandate.
• Structural tensions that end up being attributed to people.
• Managers with dual reporting lines, caught between two agendas.
• Rare talents in the team, called upon without anyone really having decided it.

The cost of inaction was known: wasted energy, frustration in execution, and an inconsistency that clubs and partners end up feeling.

Lead designed a tailored programme called TRAIL (Teamwork, Responsibility, Alignment, Impact, Leadership), built on a three-step logic: learn, lead, deliver. A senior Lead coach-consultant carried it from start to finish, alternating short input, exercises on real situations and concrete decisions.

Before: frame and profile

• Intake and context analysis with senior management.
• An individual Map & Match profile for each participant.
• A remote individual debrief, so that everyone arrives knowing their own energy levers.

Managers day 1: Impact

Intention: know yourself as a leader and understand where friction arises.

• A systemic reading across three spheres: individual, collective, organisational. A real team tension is analysed from these three angles.
• Neurocognitive leadership: what happens when pressure takes over, and how to regain control.
• The building blocks of trust, feedback given and received, communication with impact.
• A structured personal action plan: improve, keep, stop, start.

Managers day 2: Engage

Intention: move from the individual leader to an accountable, connected team.

• The team map: collective strengths, blind spots, the tension between those who explore and those who execute.
• Three levels of trust: daring to show yourself, trusting others’ competence, trusting the system.
• Role clarity: a recent decision put through a responsibility matrix, with one key question: who decides when several entities are involved?
• Handling resistance and leading difficult conversations, then a design thinking workshop to turn the diagnosis into action.

Senior leaders day: from several governance tables to one coherent voice

Intention: align the top with the language the managers had already acquired.

• The same systemic framework as the managers, to share a common vocabulary.
• Team dysfunctions seen as a pyramid to rebuild from the base: trust makes conflict possible, conflict makes commitment possible.
• The three faces of ownership: speed, cohesion, integration. None is wrong, all three at once are impossible.
• A cross-reading of the leadership team’s profiles, then a real decision reviewed with the TRACE method (target, reality, action, considerations, exit).
• What is not harmonised at the top is paid for by the middle layer: a full session devoted to the impact on managers.

After: embed

• A collective Map & Match analysis of the whole group of senior leaders and managers.
• Facilitation questions for a joint debrief.
• Personal and collective commitments, and a joint senior leaders and managers session prepared for the next step.

The signature tool: the collective Map & Match map

Each profile distinguishes three zones: the natural talents that give energy (T5), the learned comfort competencies (C5) and what costs energy (I5). Overlaid, the profiles draw the team’s map across five functions of the system: starting, steering, executing, deepening, regulating.

The map makes visible what nobody could name: a very strong execution capacity, an innovation capacity concentrated in only a few managers, and functions that no one carries naturally, such as mediation between entities or in-depth analysis. This is not a judgement on people. It is a reading of the system.

• A Map & Match profile and an individual debrief for each participant.
• A collective analysis: the team’s talent map, shared DNA, energy zones, blind spots.
• Concrete leads drawn from this reading: a regular ritual between entities, an explicitly activated innovation cell, an analysis function outsourced rather than endured, clear rules for managers with dual reporting lines.
• A team commitment charter, for example: naming structural tensions without going through people, appointing one person ultimately accountable for each cross-cutting decision, explicitly alternating between exploring and deciding.
• One personal commitment per participant, and the materials from the three days.

The programme aims to turn a well-meaning group into a leadership team able to decide and deliver together. It should make possible:

• a common language between senior leaders and managers for talking about roles, energy and accountability;
• tensions treated as questions of structure rather than as personal conflicts;
• greater clarity on who decides what when several entities are involved;
• better protection of rare talents, instead of their silent overload;
• a solid foundation for smoother shared governance.

• A systemic approach that looks for friction where it lives: often between the structure, the group and the individual.
• Map & Match, a profiling tool that sheds light on each person and on the whole team, without labelling.
• A programme that connects managers and senior leaders through the same language, to avoid a gap between levels.
• A direct, engaged style: we work on real decisions, and every day ends with written commitments.

If your senior leaders and managers want to clarify mandates, rebuild trust and speak with one voice, we can design a programme suited to your reality. Let’s talk.