Why Capable Leaders Don’t Automatically Make a Capable Leadership Team

You can sit at the head of an impressive leadership team and still feel that something essential is missing.

Each person around you is a bona fide talent and, on their own terms, performing. And yet decisions take longer than they should, because every issue has to be re-hashed rather than resolved quickly against a shared intent.

The agreed strategy lands differently in different functions because nobody has aligned, in any meaningful way, on what it means.

And execution reveals fundamental misalignments that just weren’t apparent when the plan was signed off.

I’ve worked with CEOs who have put it to me like this:

My leadership team is full of capable people.
So why don’t we perform like one?

More often than not, the answer is that what you have is not a team. Not in any meaningful sense. It is a group of leaders who share a reporting line and a vague approximation of the same (but not interdependent) goal.

The distinction sounds semantic but is not. A group of capable individuals work locally. A team operates as an aligned, interdependent, collectively accountable unit. And in the context of complex change or rapid growth, the commercial difference between the two is enormous.

Consider this. The instinct, when a leadership team is underperforming, is to address a missing capability. New hires. Redraw the org chart. Coach individuals.

But more capable individuals don’t magically make a more capable team.

The shift from Working Group to Real Team is a deliberate choice. And it is a choice that the team must make together, as a cohesive unit.

Structurally, it isn’t complicated. But emotionally and relationally? That is some of the most demanding work most senior leaders will ever do.

Unsurprisingly, it is also the work with the highest commercial leverage available to most CEOs. And it is almost always the work that is deferred.

So,

• Is the team around your table operating as a team?
• Or as a group of capable individuals doing their best?

If this distinction has given you pause, that’s usually a signal that the group-to-team divide is real, pressing and worth addressing, well and soon.

If you’d find it useful to explore this in the context of your own leadership team, you can find out more about my team coaching work here.

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