Leadership Team Development: How to Build a High-Performing Team

A leadership team can be full of capable executives and still make slow decisions, revisit them a week later, and pull the organization in different directions. Leadership team development works on that group as a whole: how it sets direction, decides, and follows through together. Before budgeting for team development, understanding what executive coaching costs at each credential level helps calibrate the investment.A structured leadership team development process is essential for transforming your team’s dynamics, enhancing performance, and driving organizational growth. For organizations building the ROI case for that investment, whether the investment in executive coaching is worth it examines the evidence across satisfaction, behavioral, and organizational outcome categories. This guide covers what makes a leadership team effective, the benefits and activities of leadership team development, the steps of a development plan, and how to tell whether it worked.

TL;DR - How to Develop a Leadership Team

Here’s a quick overview of how to develop a leadership team. We’ll discuss it in more detail below.The four essential elements of leadership team development are:

1. Assess Team Needs
2. Design Development Activities
3. Implement and Monitor
4. Evaluate and Refine

We have covered all of these in detail below.At Tandem Coaching, we are here to help. Reach out to us so we can unify and elevate your team’s performance with better synergy, conflict resolution, adaptability, and agility.

What is Leadership Team Development?

Leadership team development is a strategic approach to enhancing the capabilities and performance of an organization's leadership group. When the team itself is the client rather than its individual members, executive team coaching provides the distinct engagement model for that work. It involves identifying leadership challenges and skill gaps, providing targeted training, fostering collaboration, and promoting continuous learning. The ultimate goal is to create a cohesive and high-performing leadership team to drive the organization toward its strategic objectives.

Leadership Team Development vs. Leadership Development vs. Team Building

These three terms get used interchangeably, but they solve different problems:

• Leadership development grows individuals – one leader’s skills, one career at a time.
• Team building improves morale and relationships, usually through one-off events or offsites.
• Leadership team development treats the leadership team itself as the unit of change. The goal isn’t five stronger individuals who still pull in five directions – it’s one aligned team that makes faster decisions, surfaces conflict in the open, and moves in the same direction under pressure.

That distinction matters because a leadership team can be full of capable people and still underperform as a group. Broader team coaching applies the same principle to any intact team; leadership team development focuses it on the senior group whose decisions set the tone for everyone else. When that senior group needs a coach who works with it as one client, the engagement is leadership team coaching, which is different from developing its members one by one.

A custom leadership development plan for the team turns that focus into action. Once the plan is running, the next question is whether it is working: how to measure leadership development covers the metrics and evaluation approaches that answer that question.

Benefits of Leadership Team Development

Why should you develop your leadership team? Here are some benefits to consider:

• Enhanced Collaboration: A structured development process fosters better communication and collaboration among team members, leading to more effective decision-making.
• Improved Performance: Targeted training and development activities enhance the skills and competencies of the leadership team, resulting in improved overall performance.
• Increased Innovation: A well-developed leadership team is better equipped to drive innovation and adapt to changing market conditions.
• Stronger Organizational Culture: Leadership and team development promotes a positive and supportive organizational culture, which can improve employee engagement and retention. For where to begin at the top, see these strategies to elevate leadership and executive teams.
• Better Succession Planning: Developing your leadership team ensures a pipeline of capable leaders ready to step into key roles as the organization grows.

Leadership Team Development Activities

Let’s have a look at some activities you can undertake to develop your leadership team:

1. Workshops and Seminars: Provide foundational knowledge and skills on key leadership topics.
2. Team-Building Exercises: Strengthen relationships and build trust among team members.
3. Coaching and Mentoring: Offer personalized guidance and feedback from experienced leaders and highly qualified coaches, including executive team coaching engagements that develop the group as a whole.
4. Experiential Learning: Implement real-world projects and assignments to apply leadership skills in practical settings, including the hybrid leadership skills a dispersed team needs.
5. Peer Learning Groups: Facilitate peer-to-peer learning and knowledge sharing as we do with our Masterminds at Tandem Coaching.

What Makes a Leadership Team Effective?

A leadership team is effective when it works as one team: its members know who is on it, share a purpose that needs all of them, and make decisions together that hold after the meeting ends. Research on senior leadership teams names six conditions that make that more likely, and a leader can put each of them in place on purpose.

The six conditions come from Senior Leadership Teams: What It Takes to Make Them Great (2008), in which Ruth Wageman, Debra Nunes, James Burruss and J. Richard Hackman drew on a study of more than 100 top teams from around the world. They split the conditions into three essentials and three enablers.

Three Essential Conditions

A real team. Membership is clear, members need each other to do the work, and the group stays together long enough to accomplish something. A leadership team whose meetings are mostly functional updates is a team in name only.

A compelling purpose. A shared direction, or vision, that engages every member’s commitment and names the work only this group can do for the enterprise: setting strategy, allocating resources, and making the trade-offs that no single function can make alone.

The right people. The range of perspectives the work needs, and the skills to bring those perspectives into the room, including teamwork skills. Cognitive diversity belongs here too; neurodivergent team leadership shows how different thinking styles can strengthen a team.

A team in name only meets, trades updates and leaves. A real team decides together and owns the result.

Three Enabling Conditions

Sound structure. A team small enough to decide, tasks that genuinely need the whole group, and a few explicit norms about how members communicate, disagree and follow through.

A supportive context. Rewards, information and resources that make teamwork possible. If every executive is paid and judged only on their own function, the organization is asking the team to work against its own incentives.

Team coaching. Help, at the right moments, for the team to make good use of its members’ knowledge and skills. This is coaching the team as a unit, which is a different job from coaching each leader one-on-one.

There is good evidence that teamwork can be developed on purpose. A 2018 review in American Psychologist by Christina Lacerenza, Shannon Marlow, Scott Tannenbaum and Eduardo Salas describes four types of team development interventions with research behind them: team training, leadership training, team building and team debriefing. A 2017 meta-analysis of controlled teamwork training studies in PLOS ONE (51 articles covering 72 interventions) found positive, medium-sized effects on both teamwork and team performance. Neither study looked only at senior teams, so treat them as evidence about teams in general.

Team Leadership Strategies That Build Those Conditions

1. Name the team. Decide who is on the leadership team and which decisions belong to the group.
2. Write the purpose down. Use one or two sentences that describe what only the team as a whole can deliver.
3. Close skill and perspective gaps before adding development activities.
4. Agree on a few explicit norms for how the team decides, disagrees and follows through.
5. Check the incentives. Ask whether rewards and information flows support collective results or only functional ones.
6. Debrief together after major decisions; team debriefing is one of the four interventions in the 2018 review.

Leaders who want to bring the same habits into the teams they run can start with these coaching strategies for leaders.

Steps to Create a Leadership Team Development Plan

Ready to create your leadership team development plan? Here are the steps to take. If the team will also work with a coach or facilitator, plan that work alongside it with an engagement plan for leadership teams.

1. Assess Organizational Needs: Start by identifying the leadership skills and competencies critical for achieving your business goals.
2. Identify Team Strengths and Weaknesses: Conduct assessments to determine your leadership team's current capabilities and identify areas for improvement.
3. Set Development Goals: Establish clear and measurable goals for your leadership development and team-building initiatives. Include at least one organizational outcome, such as promotion or retention, alongside the individual goals.

Measure progress in the following areas:

• Employee Engagement
• Retention, Turnover, & Promotion
• Manager Effectiveness
• Behavior Change

4. Design a Development Program: Create a comprehensive development program that includes a mix of training activities, coaching, and experiential learning opportunities.
5. Implement the Plan: Execute the development plan and ensure all team members are engaged and committed to the process.
6. Monitor Progress: Continuously monitor the progress of your development initiatives and gather feedback from participants. Remember to focus on employee engagement, retention, turnover, promotion, manager effectiveness, and behavior change, and keep tracking the organizational outcomes after the program ends.
7. Evaluate and Adjust: Regularly evaluate the effectiveness of your development activities and make necessary adjustments to improve outcomes.

Measure Organizational Outcomes, Not Just Individual Gains

Track at least one organizational outcome, such as promotion, retention or internal appointments, from the start, and keep tracking it after the program ends. Participant surveys show whether leaders feel more capable. They cannot show whether the organization changed, and that is the question a leadership team development plan has to answer.

A 2026 systematic review in eClinicalMedicine shows how often that question goes unanswered. Daisy Morris and colleagues examined 57 studies of 52 women’s leadership development programs in 23 countries, most of them in academic medicine, healthcare and higher education. All 57 studies reported individual gains such as confidence, knowledge and leadership capability. Only 32 reported any organizational outcome, usually promotion or retention. Subjective measures outnumbered objective ones, four studies used a comparison group, and none were randomized.

If nobody tracks promotion and retention, nobody will know whether the program changed the organization.

The programs that did show organizational results had something in common. In the authors’ words, those outcomes “were associated with institutional investment”: executive sponsorship, protected time, dedicated funding and supporting infrastructure. They were concentrated in mature programs and in settings whose data systems tracked appointments, promotions and retention. Program content did not set them apart.

The review covered women’s leadership programs, not leadership teams, and its findings are associations. The planning lesson still carries over. Before your leadership team development plan starts:

• Name an executive sponsor who owns the outcomes as well as the budget.
• Protect time for the work on the team’s calendar.
• Fund the evaluation as well as the delivery.
• Decide which organizational outcomes you will track, such as promotion, retention, internal appointments or the business results the team owns, and for how long.

How to Develop a Leadership Team in an Organization

After you finish your plan, it’s time to take action! Developing a leadership team within an organization should be done using various development tools. These typically include workshops, masterminds, coaching, and mentoring.

Workshops are used to teach technical skills, whereas masterminds are an opportunity for leaders to exchange experiences and build their networks. Coaching is usually done one-on-one and aims to develop the leader’s soft skills, and the different types of coaching for leaders vary in focus, length and format. Mentoring is different from coaching in that it is more directive. The mentor usually has more experience working in the same field as the mentee. They advise the mentee on industry-specific points, give them access to useful resources, and introduce them to the right people.

The success of leadership team development depends largely on the team's engagement and enthusiasm. They have to drive their development. For this reason, it is helpful to encourage continuous learning and development by promoting a culture that values personal and professional growth.

Lastly, decide how you will know it worked. Track the organizational outcomes you chose in the plan alongside participant feedback, and review them often enough to adjust course.

Our Leadership Team Development Process

Our Leadership Team Development process at Tandem Coaching is designed to transform your leadership group into a high-performing team capable of driving organizational success.Our process includes the following steps:

1. Initial Assessment

We begin with a thorough assessment of your leadership team’s current capabilities and identify areas for improvement using a 360-degree leadership assessment. We then interview each leader in the team and several of the stakeholders they work most closely with—direct reports, peers, and line managers—to determine congruency. How aware is each leader of the image they project?

2. Customized Development Plan

Based on the 360 assessment results, we create a customized development plan tailored to the specific needs and goals of each member of your team. This plan guides the progress of each cohort member over the next five months as we lay out an individual growth journey for each.

3. Development Journey

In this stage, selected leaders commence their structured development journey. Over the course of five months, participants take part in executive coaching sessions and mastermind group meetings. These activities are designed to enhance strategic leadership abilities and foster a collaborative atmosphere conducive to personal and professional growth. The objective is to develop crucial leadership skills and prepare individuals for greater responsibilities.

4. Review and Refine

As leaders advance, the emphasis transitions to honing and perfecting their skills. This phase involves reassessing their leadership abilities, allowing participants to reflect on their experiences, evaluate their growth, and refine their goals with practical insights. Leaders are encouraged to learn from both their successes and failures, continuously striving for improvement. Reflective mastery helps leaders gain a deeper understanding of their leadership style and adapt it to various situations.

5. Consolidating Growth

In the final phase, the accomplishments of each of the leaders are acknowledged and celebrated through a graduation event. Recognizing these achievements shows the organization that development matters and inspires others to start their own leadership journeys. It also reinforces the leaders' dedication to their roles and the organization. Leaders review their progress and measurable outcomes, then solidify their future plans for continuing to apply their learnings into effective leadership actions.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Here are some questions we frequently get about Leadership Team Development:

Conclusion

Creating a structured leadership team development process is essential for transforming your team’s performance and driving organizational success.

By assessing needs, designing targeted development activities, and continuously monitoring progress, you can build a high-performing leadership team capable of navigating challenges and seizing opportunities.

Investing in leadership team development builds individual capability and strengthens the culture the rest of the organization takes its cues from, starting with trust and psychological safety in the team. Start with the conditions, track the outcomes that matter to the organization, and give the team time to grow into the work.

We are looking forward to hearing from you. Start your leadership team development journey at Tandem Coaching now! Get in touch.