Our department heads are brilliant technical experts but struggle to make decisions for the good of the entire company. How does your facilitation style help us transition these specialists into true enterprise leaders?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This is a classic challenge for growing companies. Your leaders were likely promoted because they were the best technical specialists in their departments, not because they knew how to run an enterprise. To help them make this shift, we use the Accountability Chart during our session days to redefine their roles. We strip away their departmental biases and focus on the health of the entire organization.

I facilitate these conversations by forcing your team to look at the business as an autonomous entity rather than a collection of silos. When we run our IDS® sessions, I challenge your leaders to solve problems from an enterprise-wide perspective. If a department head is defending their personal turf at the expense of the company's strategic goals, we call it out.

We work on shifting their identity. They must stop seeing themselves as a sales manager or a lead developer and start seeing themselves as a member of the leadership team first. We use the GWC™ tool to ensure they have the cognitive capacity and the desire to lead at this level. This process is often uncomfortable, but it is necessary to build a leadership team that can scale the business without the owner's constant intervention.