By Shakeel Dar, partner at Unite Consulting. Advisor within strategy, leadership, team development and process optimisation.
In brief
Most leadership teams consist of strong individual leaders, yet many underperform as a team.
The usual causes are divided loyalty, unclear decision rules and a missing shared way of leading. Talent is not the problem.
Research consistently points to purpose, structure and honest dialogue, not personality, as what separates strong leadership teams from weak ones.
Lasting change requires a structured development process. A workshop can start the journey, but it cannot carry it alone.
Strong leaders, underperforming team
The pattern is familiar to most organisations. Each member of the leadership team is capable, experienced and respected. Individually, they deliver. Yet when they sit together, something is lost. Meetings are polite but heavy. Decisions are made, then reopened afterwards ‘under the radar’. Discussions drift into status updates instead of the conversations that actually shape the organisation.
It is tempting to explain this with personalities or chemistry. The evidence points elsewhere. In one of the largest studies of senior teams to date, Ruth Wageman, Richard Hackman and their colleagues followed more than 120 leadership teams across industries and found that only about one in five could be called high performing. What separated the best from the rest was not the talent of the members. It was whether the team had a clear and compelling purpose, the right composition and a sound structure for how it worked together.
In other words: a leadership team is not something you appoint. It is something you build.
The first team problem
The deepest reason leadership teams underperform is loyalty, and it is usually pointing in the wrong direction. Every member of a leadership team belongs to two teams at once: the leadership team they sit in, and the function or department they lead. Patrick Lencioni calls this the question of the first team. When the department wins that contest, the leadership team becomes a negotiation forum where each member represents their own area, protects their own resources and keeps their real opinions for the corridor.
Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith drew a distinction in Harvard Business Review that most leadership groups still fail: the difference between a real team and a working group. A working group shares information and coordinates. A real team holds itself mutually accountable for a common purpose. There is nothing wrong with being a working group, but strategy execution and culture change demand mutual accountability at the top. An organisation can read very quickly whether it has one.
What healthy leadership teams do differently
Some of the most useful research on this comes from Scandinavia. Henning Bang and Thomas Nesset Midelfart studied Norwegian leadership teams over many years and found that the strongest predictors of leadership team effectiveness are surprisingly practical: a clear purpose for every discussion the team takes on, focused communication where members build on each other rather than talk past each other, and the ability to reflect openly on how the team itself is working.
That last point depends on trust. Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety shows that teams learn and perform better when members can disagree openly and admit mistakes without fear. At the top of an organisation the stakes are higher, because silence in the leadership team gets amplified through everything below it. If the leadership team cannot challenge each other, nobody else in the organisation will believe it is safe to speak up either. We have written more about this in our article on psychological safety.
What actually works: a structured journey
If weak leadership teams were a knowledge problem, a good presentation would fix them. It does not, because the problem lives in habits: how decisions are made, how disagreement is handled, how commitments are followed up. Habits change through practice and reinforcement over time, which is why we structure leadership team development as a journey in three phases rather than an event.
Phase 1 establishes the leadership context and priorities. Through interviews, feedback and personality preferences, for example with Insights Discovery, the team builds an honest picture of its strengths, blind spots and patterns, and agrees on the few leadership shifts that will matter most.
Phase 2 turns insight into practice. The team works on its real situations: which decisions belong to the team and which do not, how disagreement is surfaced before a decision rather than after it, and how commitments are delegated and followed through. Between sessions, members run small behavioural experiments in their everyday leadership.
Phase 3 makes it last. Progress is reviewed against the agreed priorities, and the routines that support the new behaviour are anchored: meeting discipline, decision logs, follow up rhythms and honest evaluation of how the team is working.
From our experience
The turning point is not the workshop day itself. It usually comes a few weeks later, when the team makes its first hard decision under the new rules and nobody reopens it afterwards.
Two things make that moment possible: agreeing explicitly which decisions belong to the team, and building a small set of routines that are easy to keep.
Grand ambitions fade. Small routines compound.
Where a leadership team workshop fits
A well designed leadership team workshop is often the right way to start. One or two focused days create shared language, surface the undiscussed topics and produce the first agreements about how the team wants to lead together. What a workshop cannot do is carry the change alone. The teams that improve are the ones that treat the workshop as phase one of a journey, with follow up built in from the start.
If you are considering how to strengthen your own leadership team, our leadership development approach describes how we structure such a journey, and we are always open to discussion with you about where your team stands today.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between team development and leadership team development?
The tools overlap, but the stakes and dynamics differ. A leadership team carries shared responsibility for the whole organisation, not just for its own delivery. That raises questions ordinary team development rarely faces: which decisions belong to the team, how members balance loyalty between their function and the leadership team, and how the team’s behaviour is read and copied by the rest of the organisation.
Is a single leadership team workshop enough?
A workshop is a strong starting point: it creates shared language and the first agreements. Research on training transfer is clear, however, that behaviour only changes with practice and follow up over time. Plan for a journey where the workshop is the beginning, not the intervention itself.
How long does it take to develop a leadership team?
Most journeys run over three to nine months with a rhythm of working sessions, practice periods and follow up. The right length depends on the team’s starting point and ambition. Meaningful shifts in meeting quality and decision discipline are often visible within the first two to three months.
How do you measure whether a leadership team is improving?
Agree the indicators up front, in phase one. Useful signals include whether decisions stick or get reopened, how much meeting time is spent on the topics that matter most, whether disagreement is voiced in the room rather than after it, and how consistently commitments are followed through. Many teams also use a short recurring self evaluation.
Sources
- Wageman, R., Nunes, D. A., Burruss, J. A. and Hackman, J. R. (2008). Senior Leadership Teams: What It Takes to Make Them Great. Harvard Business School Press.
- Bang, H. and Midelfart, T. N. (2017). Effective Management Teams and Organizational Behavior. Routledge. Originally published in Norwegian as Effektive ledergrupper.
- Katzenbach, J. R. and Smith, D. K. (1993). The Discipline of Teams. Harvard Business Review.
- Lencioni, P. (2012). The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business. Jossey Bass.
- Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The Fearless Organization. Wiley.