Executive Team Acceleration (ETA)
Rapidly strengthen how your top team leads, collaborates, and delivers results.
Rapidly strengthen how your top team leads, collaborates, and delivers results.
Today’s executive teams operate under more complexity, speed, and scrutiny than ever. Strong individual leaders don’t automatically add up to a high-performing enterprise team — and the gap between the two quietly erodes strategy, speed, and results. In our work with hundreds of leadership teams, the same five patterns surface again and again:
Teams Falling Short of Potential: Five Patterns

Unlocking performance starts with two questions: Where are the biggest opportunities to improve? And how do you reliably improve performance? ETA answers both — with a data-driven, highly bespoke approach built for the C-suite.
ETA is built on ghSMART’s proprietary POWER framework — the research-backed model for how the highest-performing executive teams decide, align, execute, and grow as a single unit. No two ETAs are alike.
Every engagement is designed around your team’s specific context, across five dimensions:

ETA delivers a clear, bespoke arc from diagnosis to durable change. Each phase is designed around your specific business situation, culture, and team dynamics.
Structured three-phase approach:
Phase 1: Alignment & Diagnostic
Goal: Establish a data-based baseline and aligned focus.
We align on the goals and intended outcomes for the session, unpack and test the key stakeholders’ hypotheses, and run a diagnostic tailored to the POWER framework through structured one-on-one interviews.
Outcome: Novel, synthesized insights about team effectiveness — and an agenda explicitly tied to where the team can unlock the most value.
Phase 2 — ETA Performance Session(s)
Goal: Facilitate live executive-team sessions tackling the most important topics.
We build connection, energy, and trust at the start; share the diagnostic to create a common language and shared baseline; facilitate modules at the nexus of the team’s goals and diagnostic results; and run case studies tied to the specifics of the business — “running water through the pipes” to bring the work to life.
Outcome (examples, depending on team needs): Alignment on core enterprise priorities · clarity on decision rights · increased trust, candor, and collaboration · tactical fixes and norms to lift productivity · new capabilities such as innovation and storytelling.
Phase 3 — Accountability & Reinforcement
Goal: Drive lasting, sticky impact.
We cement takeaways with a codified recap and shared commitments, advise individual executives directly on how they’re role-modeling new behaviors, and measure change and follow-through via surveys and pulse checks.
Outcome: Sustained momentum, executives held accountable to their commitments, and follow-through on the actions that drive results.
Every phase is led by a ghSMART team with the business depth of a strategy firm and the relationship insight of an executive coach.
The public markets leadership team at a large global investment firm was misaligned on core investment principles and top-down financial metrics. Strong individual leaders weren’t operating as a cohesive unit; divergent investment philosophies were slowing decisions, and the team lacked a shared framework for making strategic tradeoffs. The extended leadership team also needed a structured forum to surface and prioritize innovation opportunities.
ghSMART conducted structured one-on-one interviews with stakeholders across the team and the broader enterprise to establish a data-based baseline and surface the “elephants in the room.” Diagnostic insights were shared with the Executive Managing Director to align on focus areas before the session. The ETA itself cemented shared financial metrics, facilitated resolution on differing investment philosophies, and included a dedicated innovation session; yielding dozens of actionable ideas across the public markets business.
Months later, the financial metrics the team aligned on were featured in the enterprise investment strategy and highlighted in year-end firm communications. Core investment principles were codified as a shared decision-making framework for leadership tradeoffs. Improved storytelling around team impact shifted sentiment among fellow investment executives, and the MD leading innovation maintained momentum, driving prioritized initiatives forward.
"I could not have imagined today's offsite going any better."
Managing Director