Why talented senior leaders don't always make effective leadership teams and what it takes to change that.
Six senior executives. One boardroom. An impressive collection of experience, qualifications and leadership development certificates.
They've assembled to discuss the organisation's strategic priorities. Unfortunately, each appears to be representing a different organisation. The remarkable thing is that they all work for the same one.
Finance wants tighter cost control. Sales wants greater investment. Operations wants stability. HR wants stronger leadership capability. Technology wants modernisation. And the CEO would quite like everyone to agree on something before lunch.
All six may be intelligent, committed and entirely reasonable. But there's a seventh agenda that hasn't received nearly enough attention: what's actually best for the organisation as a whole?
A leadership team or merely leaders in the same room?
We use the term leadership team rather generously. Sometimes it describes executives who share responsibility for the organisation's success. Sometimes it describes functional directors who meet regularly, exchange updates, defend their budgets and agree to meet again. The distinction is more than semantics.
In Senior Leadership Teams: What It Takes to Make Them Great, Ruth Wageman and her fellow authors examine what distinguishes effective senior teams from groups of executives who happen to occupy the same organisational level. A central challenge is ensuring that leaders undertake genuinely collective work, rather than simply bringing their individual responsibilities into the same room.
It's an important distinction because being individually successful is not the same as being collectively effective.
Indeed, the qualities that helped executives rise through an organisation - determination, specialist expertise, ownership and a relentless focus on results, can become obstacles when directed primarily towards defending their own territory.
The departmental loyalty trap
Every executive agrees that the interests of the organisation must come first. This commitment is generally unwavering until the discussion turns to their own department's budget, headcount or strategic importance. At which point, the greater good becomes a surprisingly flexible concept.
Consider a business facing declining profitability. Finance proposes reducing expenditure. Sales argues that cutting investment will damage future revenue. Operations warns that further efficiencies could undermine service quality. HR points out that employees are already overstretched.
Each argument may be perfectly legitimate. The problem begins when executives approach the discussion as departmental representatives negotiating for their own interests, rather than organisational leaders making a collective decision.
Different perspectives are valuable. Territorial behaviour is not.
The purpose of an executive team isn't to ensure that every department wins. It's to make the decisions that give the organisation the best chance of succeeding. Sometimes that means supporting a decision that makes life harder for your own function. That's where collective leadership becomes rather less theoretical.
The leadership team has achieved alignment. Unfortunately, only in the minutes taken.
Some executive teams struggle because they argue too much. Paradoxically, others struggle because they don't argue enough!
Meetings are polite, presentations are well received and decisions appear unanimous. Then the real conversations begin. Within an hour, executives are privately explaining why the decision won't work, reassuring their departments that little will change or preparing to demonstrate that the eventual problems were entirely foreseeable.
The minutes record alignment. The organisation experiences something else.
This is where psychological safety matters. The CIPD's evidence review of high-performing teams discusses the importance of interpersonal relationships, trust and the conditions that support effective teamwork. Google's research into team effectiveness also identified psychological safety and clarity as important characteristics of effective teams within its organisation.
These findings don't mean leaders should avoid difficult conversations. Quite the opposite. Psychological safety should make constructive disagreement possible - not make disagreement disappear.
If an executive believes a proposal is flawed, they should be able to say so, preferably before the organisation spends a considerable sum of money discovering they were right.
When misalignment leaves the boardroom
Executive dysfunction rarely remains conveniently contained within executive meetings. It travels downwards.
Sales instructs its teams to accelerate growth. Finance demands expenditure reductions. Operations insists on maintaining service standards with fewer resources. Employees are then encouraged to demonstrate agility, collaboration and ownership — which, in this context, appears to mean satisfying mutually contradictory instructions while maintaining a positive attitude.
When that proves difficult, the leadership team may conclude that the organisation has a communication problem. Which is certainly one interpretation.
The more serious issue is that unresolved executive disagreements can create competing priorities, slower decisions, duplicated effort and confusion about accountability. People further down the organisation are left negotiating conflicts their leaders should have resolved.
That's not empowerment. It's delegation of the problem.
Five things effective executive teams do differently
There are plenty of leadership frameworks available. Most organisations could probably wallpaper their boardrooms with them. What matters is what executives actually do.
1. Agree on the work that genuinely requires a team. Not every departmental update needs collective discussion. Identify the decisions, trade-offs and outcomes that require executives to work together.
2. Make organisational priorities explicit. When departmental interests compete, establish the criteria for deciding what matters most. Don't confuse compromise with strategy.
3. Encourage challenge before commitment. Invite disagreement while decisions are being developed. Once a decision is reached, clarify what collective commitment means and how concerns will be addressed.
4. Create shared accountability. Individual objectives matter, but they shouldn't be the only measure of success. Review outcomes that depend on executives collaborating across departmental boundaries.
5. Examine the team's own behaviour. Regularly ask whether the team is making good decisions, what it is avoiding, where it is creating confusion and how effectively its members are working together.
These aren't especially complicated questions. Answering them candidly is another matter.
And what about the CEO?
CEOs sometimes express genuine frustration that their executives continue to operate in silos. This can be particularly puzzling when those same executives have individual objectives, individual bonuses, individual budgets and individual performance reviews.
Apparently, the expectation is that they will spend the year being rewarded for individual achievement and then, through some unexplained act of corporate magic, become a perfectly aligned team whenever they enter the boardroom.
If we reward people for protecting their own territory, we shouldn't be astonished when they arrive at meetings waving their own flag.
The CEO has a particular responsibility to create the conditions for collective leadership: a clear shared purpose, honest debate, coherent priorities and accountability for the organisation's performance.
That includes being willing to examine their own behaviour. Does the CEO welcome challenge, resolve difficult trade-offs and reward collaboration? Or unintentionally encourage the very territorialism they complain about?
An executive team rarely becomes more effective simply because its members attend another away day. Sometimes the most useful intervention is a candid discussion about how the team is functioning and what each person, including the CEO, needs to change.
The seventh agenda
Six capable executives can manage six departments. But managing six departments isn't necessarily the same as leading one organisation.
The real test of an executive team isn't the quality of its presentations, the harmony of its meetings or the impressive credentials around the table. It's whether the organisation performs better because those people are leading it together.
The seventh agenda - the organisation's collective success, should never have been seventh. It should have been first.
The Valeo Coaching Challenge
Before your next executive team meeting, consider three questions:
When did you last support a decision that was right for the organisation but inconvenient for your own department?
What important disagreement is your leadership team currently avoiding and what is that avoidance costing the business?
If your executive team disappeared for a fortnight, would the organisation miss the collective leadership or simply enjoy having fewer meetings?
That final question may be uncomfortable. It's also worth answering.
Serious about performance. Not always serious about corporate behaviour.