Every senior leadership team is a concentrated version of the organisation around it. If the business is in flux or out of line, the team will be under pressure, whatever the individuals are like. I’ve come to treat this as the starting point for any team work, because it changes where you look.
The signs a senior leadership team is under pressure
You can usually feel it before you can name it. Meetings have got harder: longer agendas, less decided. Two directors present numbers that don’t match, and both are right. Somebody’s gone quiet who didn’t used to be quiet. Decisions everyone agreed to are quietly not happening. You come out of the meeting more tired than you should be.
The tempting conclusion is that something’s wrong with the team, or with someone on it.
Why capable leadership teams pull in different directions
Look closely and you usually find something more ordinary: people operating with different objectives, different sets of data, different planks of the strategy, each trying to succeed in their own role because that is what they’ve been told to do. Each person, taken alone, is doing their job well. The trouble is the sum.
The hard piece, and I mean genuinely hard, not a mindset problem, is taking the wide view of the organisation and sacrificing your own agenda because you know it’s right for the business. It sounds noble when you write it down. In practice it means giving things up: control, or at least the feeling of it. Pet projects. Sometimes reward, if incentives were built for individual contribution. Identity, because “my function, my numbers” is often how someone earned the seat in the first place. And status in the eyes of their own teams, who are watching to see if their leader still wins the arguments upstairs.
Nobody concedes those things because a facilitator put “One Team” on a slide.
What a sale, merger or new chief executive does to the team
Turning points matter because they raise the price of all this at once. I learned that from the inside, as an HR director landing in a business straight after its sale. You arrive knowing nothing and need to operate at full pace from day one. The senior leadership team has one way of working, the acquirer has another. The earn-out is spread unevenly across the table, which quietly sets people’s incentives against each other. The founder is finding it hard to let go. And somehow the job is to hold on to clients, hold on to staff, and deliver the growth the deal was priced on, while everyone is exhausted, because the diligence process was gruelling and the emotional high of a successful sale fades faster than anyone admits.
The same mechanics run through a merger, a new chief executive, a succession or a change of strategy. The asks change overnight. The objectives, habits and pecking order were built for the business you used to be.
Where the work actually is
None of the people in that situation are the problem. The system is pulling through them. But it shows up where the leadership team meets, in what gets decided, what gets deferred and what never makes the agenda, so that’s where it has to be dealt with. In my experience that means three things: getting an honest, shared picture of what the business is actually asking of each person, naming the sacrifices the new context requires instead of pretending goodwill will cover them, and rebuilding objectives and agreements so the wide view stops being an act of personal heroism.
If your organisation is heading into a shift, in ownership, leadership or strategy, your senior leadership team will feel it first, in the decisions that stall, the agenda items that keep slipping, the meetings that end without anyone quite saying why. That’s not a people problem. It’s the system arriving at the top table.
If you’re interested in this topic, why not check out my team coaching offer.