Hi Everyone…
I want to talk about something I see constantly and almost nobody names.
An executive team where every single person is good at their job. Real track records. Sound judgement. People you’d hire again tomorrow. And the team, collectively, doesn’t work.
Decisions get deferred. The same item comes back to the agenda for the third time. Nobody disagrees openly, and then three people say the same thing to each other in the car park afterwards. The CEO leaves wondering why a room full of capable adults can’t seem to land anything.
The instinct is to look for the problem person. There’s usually a candidate — the one who talks too much, the one who never commits, the one whose function always seems to be the blocker.
It’s almost never that.
Why capable people form incapable teams
After eighteen years doing this work, here’s what I’ve come to believe: executive team dysfunction is structural, not personal. It comes from how the team was formed, what it’s rewarded for, and what’s never been made explicit.
Four patterns come up again and again.
1. The team was assembled, not built.
Most exec teams are a collection of functional heads who happen to report to the same person. Nobody ever decided what the team is for. So each member optimises for their own function, because that’s what they’re actually measured on, and the meeting becomes a series of reports rather than a shared decision-making body.
Ask yourself: if your leadership team were disbanded tomorrow and everyone kept doing their individual jobs, what specifically would be lost? If the answer is vague, that’s your issue.
2. Disagreement has been made expensive.
Not banned — expensive. Somewhere along the line, someone pushed back and it cost them. Maybe they were talked over, maybe it was remembered against them, maybe the CEO’s face did something. Everyone learned. Now conflict goes underground, and what surfaces in the room is a performance of alignment.
Ask yourself: when was the last time someone changed their position in a meeting because of what a colleague said? If you can’t recall one, you don’t have debate. You have sequential monologues.
3. Accountability sits with individuals, never with the team.
Everyone has their own KPIs. Nobody has shared ones. So when something falls between functions — and the important things always fall between functions — there is genuinely nobody whose job it is to catch it. The gap isn’t anyone’s fault, which is precisely the problem.
Ask yourself: what is the one number this team owns together, that no individual member could move alone?
4. The real conversation happens elsewhere.
Pre-meetings. Corridor alignment. The two people who sort it out beforehand so the meeting goes smoothly. It feels efficient and it’s quietly corrosive, because it means the formal forum has become theatre and the actual decisions are made in rooms that not everyone is in.
Ask yourself: how much of your last leadership meeting was genuinely undecided when you walked in?
What actually helps
I want to be straight with you: none of this gets fixed by a workshop, a personality assessment or a values exercise. I’ve watched a lot of teams do all three and change nothing.
What does move it:
• Name the team’s purpose out loud, together. Not the organisation’s purpose. The team’s. Why does this group exist as a group?
• Make one thing shared. One metric, one outcome, one piece of work that no individual owns alone. Shared accountability is learned by doing, not by agreeing to it.
• Put the disagreement back in the room. That usually starts with the most senior person in it visibly changing their mind in public, once. It’s remarkable how much that single act unlocks.
• Kill the pre-meeting. Or at least notice when you’re having one, and ask why the real conversation can’t happen where everyone can hear it.
None of it is complicated. All of it is uncomfortable, which is why most teams don’t do it.
I’m running a workshop on this
The Leadership Team That Isn’t
30th October | 10 am-12 pm | Brisbane City | $147 (team rate: $497 for up to five)
Two hours on why capable executive teams underperform and how to see clearly what’s happening in your own.
We’ll go through the four patterns above in real depth, with examples. Then you’ll run a live diagnostic on your own team during the session — not a generic questionnaire, but a structured look at where your team actually sits. A few people will share what surfaced. That part tends to be the reason people remember the session.
I won’t pretend two hours fixes a leadership team. It doesn’t. But you’ll leave knowing exactly what you’re dealing with, which is more than most leaders have.
Capped at 40 people. Plus, you receive FREE membership to The Leadership Association for one year, valued at $97!
If you bring three or four of your own team, you’ll get considerably more out of it. That’s what the team rate is for.
The $147 comes off any engagement that follows if you decide you want help with what you find.
Warmly,
Sonia
Sonia McDonald | CEO, LeadershipHQ