Designing work for senior management teams.

Managing at senior levels today involves four fundamental tasks:

- first, monitoring and influencing the company's external environment to develop new business opportunities,

- second, articulating, modeling and building ownership for a vision of what the company aims to accomplish in the future,

- third, attracting business leaders at all levels, developing their talents, matching them with the right assignments, and holding them accountable for results,

and

- fourth, investing, distributing and balancing resources across the organization’s portfolio of businesses.

Note that these are all collective rather than individual tasks. Managers accustomed to heading up a particular function often think that the output of the group they manage is their own output. The challenge here is to help them discover what the senior management team as a whole produces.

This voyage of discovery starts by developing a shared understanding of the business and by clarifying the contributions that the management team as a whole makes to the success of the business.

Tomorrow, we'll review the steps involved in bringing this about.