Senior executives typically struggle with rapid growth, controlling their financials, selecting and building their teams while remaining fully engaged in their work, managing diversity and every other complex business challenge imaginable. They also have personal issues affecting their lives that make it difficult to stay focused in a world that imposes stress daily. The ability to take these concerns to a trusted Executive Forum Group allows senior executives them to share ideas and challenges in an effort to receive sage advice to make better decisions and become more productive leaders.
Effective training and development of executives is essential for any organization looking to groom the next generation of leaders. An Executive Forum Group brings together like-minded senior leaders to work on tough challenges and achieve high aspirations. They can help improve communication skills, build better alignment within an organization, and help develop and execute action plans and new strategies. Here are five ways an Executive Forum Group Can Help You Meet Professional Challenges Head-on.
Many groups provide a formal written policy that is signed by members, while others verbally acknowledge confidentiality at the start of each meeting, to ensure the trust to share information freely, without fear of compromising proprietary business data or ideas. This display of trust creates an environment in which senior leaders can be honest, vulnerable and be open to learning and growing. Confidentiality creates an environment where each member feels comfortable sharing openly, which leads to better ideation and more trusted support.
2. Executive Forum Groups Provide Real Feedback from a diverse group of peers with similar experiences
Most Executive Forums are comprised of members who come from non-competing industries and completely unique backgrounds, which generates various perspectives. Senior executives are under a constant state of pressure, so an Executive Forum can act as an informal advisory board, offering creative problem solving, issue resolution and innovation from different, real-life experiences.
Sharing ideas, personal triumphs and failures across industries, conflicting stages of growth, and various business challenges enhances the learning experience. Executive Forum members provide unfiltered, real-life feedback, allowing fellow executives to face challenges with knowledge from past experiences across many disciplines. And while the truth can hurt sometimes, it is quite valuable for senior executives to have their ideas challenged from time to time. An Executive Forum supports senior-level executives with empathetic feedback and advice from associates that face the same obstacles. Transparent and trusting peer-to-peer interaction most often leads to extremely valuable encouragement to help fellow members remain competitive in an ever-changing business landscape.
3. Executive Forum Groups Offer Guidance
Senior Executives must become skilled at creating alignment between the actions of their subordinates and the vision of the company. An Executive Forum allows senior leaders to create their own personal guidance systems, backed by a committee of seasoned professionals, that helps navigate through comparable obstacles towards high aspirations.
Because executive leaders are instrumental in implementing the corporate vision, it’s vital that they gain the skills to develop strategies that are aligned, and to empower their teams to adopt and implement the vision at all levels of the company.
An Executive Forum Group harbors an environment rich with diverse dialogue about implementing and executing strategic plans and corporate agendas. Executive Forums are designed to incorporate a cross-functional group dynamic – ranging from operations and IT, to marketing, finance and business development – offering different perspectives that will help with collaboration and communication throughout all parts of an organization.
While members of an Executive Forum Group challenge one another, they also help guide strategies and implement programs. Receiving feedback and recommendations from fellow senior leaders across the myriad industries they represent, enriches conversations about proven practices for effective leadership.
4. Executive Forum Groups Motivate through Accountability
Successful Executive Forum Groups are masters of accountability. Forum members help one another articulate a plan of action and see to it that each member executes their plan accordingly. Members hold each other liable for things like business opportunities and financial improvements, to changes in health and fitness, and even personal relationship advice. And everyone, from time to time, can benefit from having a peer network hold their feet to the fire.
Executive Forum members often feel compelled to be honest and culpable at each meeting because the feel like a valuable part of the team. Members experience the pride of accomplishment and praise from valued peers and other members success, cultivating positive reinforcement, while creating a team environment.
An Executive Forum demands it’s members report to fellow group associates on a routine basis, fostering an effective environment for growth in accountability. Held accountable by peers, the majority of executives find that they allocate time better, stop doing other people’s work, and improve their work/life balance.
5. Executive Forum Groups help you learn from different successes and failures
While the executives in peer groups may serve entirely different types of customers in widely varying industries, they share common challenges regarding employees, growth, profitability, executive development, technology, and uncertainty, to name just a few. In fact, member diversity enhances each group’s learning by the breadth and depth of each member’s background and experience. The longer the dialogue continues, the more members realize how much they have in common and how much they can learn from their fellow forum members.
An Executive Forum exposes members to different solutions for similar challenges from fellow senior executives at high performing companies in various industries. Technology executives can receive advice from finance or manufacturing, and vice-versa. An Executive Forum is like a personal board of advisors, offering knowledge gained through practiced solutions to like experiences and similar obstacles. Most often within each Executive Forum, there’s a member who has been through a similar process or been faced with a comparable challenge who offers guidance that can significantly improve business.
Conclusion
An Executive Forum Group gives senior leaders a monthly brain trust and personal board of advisors that provides advice on how to do your job, better, faster, stronger. Working with a group of senior executives from diverse industries who can empathize with the complexities of similar obstacles and provide different perspectives to shared challenges and opportunities provides executives with opportunities to increase their overall value by learning to work across departments more collaboratively. This culture of interdependence, communication and accountability inspires professional and personal growth and enhan
