Why Leadership Team Problems Quickly Become Organisational Problems

We know that the senior leadership team shapes the clarity and priorities that everyone else will adopt. So why does what starts in that room, with those senior leaders, travel so quickly across the organisation? Why do problems at the top rarely stay at the top? And what should you do about that?

In this article and the video that accompanies it, I explore why problems in the senior leadership team tend to spread so quickly, why senior teams are often surprised by that, and what leaders can do to spot the effects earlier.

Why don’t problems in the leadership team stay contained at the top?

The senior leadership team has such a disproportionate influence. People take their cues from their leaders: what they see them doing, and what they hear them saying.

Any small top team issues then get amplified as they move through the system. Uncertainty at the top creates a lot of uncertainty as it spreads below.

How do leadership team problems spread through the organisation?

This is very interesting. Boston Consulting Group did a survey a few years back called When Leaders Say They Are Aligned, but They Aren’t. They looked at 3,000 senior leaders. What they found was that those leaders often leave having made a decision, but with very different takes on what was actually agreed.

When Leaders Say They Are Aligned—But Aren’t

https://www.bcg.com/publications/2021/when-leadership-say-they-are-aligned-but-company-leaders-are-not

So the messages to their teams become inconsistent.

What feels settled in the room often turns out not to be settled at all.

Why are senior leadership teams often surprised by how quickly those problems grow?

I think the surprise comes from the fact that the spread of those problems is indirect at first. People below the senior leadership team are responding to that lack of clarity, or that uncertainty about what was actually agreed. And they compensate for that. They fill in the gaps with their own priorities, or their own views of what should have been agreed.

By the time the effect of all of this becomes obvious, it is already embedded more widely across the organisation.

Another reason senior leadership teams are often surprised by how quickly those problems have grown is that they continually underestimate just how visible they are. Everybody else’s eyes are on that senior leadership team.

So what can leaders do about this?

Take one real, live project or priority, and go and listen a bit to what people around the organisation are saying about it.

Explore questions like these:

  • Do people seem to know what the priority is?
  • Do they know what success would look like?
  • How well do they feel able to lean into that priority?

If the answers you are getting back are vague, mixed, or hesitant, that tells you something about how well aligned your senior leadership team is. It may be that they have left the room thinking they agreed on something, but as that BCG survey suggests, it was not that clear after all.

About me

I’m Nick Robinson. I work with senior leadership teams who sense they’re not yet working well enough together.

My programme The Shift is a development experience that helps leadership teams strengthen trust, alignment and how they function together, so the organisation benefits from clearer decisions, stronger collective leadership and better overall performance.

What Happens When the Senior Leadership Team Isn’t Aligned?

We’ve already looked at how a lack of alignment in the senior team rarely stays contained at the top. Even when the disagreements amongst that senior team are subtle, the effects tend to spread very quickly through the organisation.

In this article and the video that accompanies it, I explore what tends to happen when the senior leadership team is not well aligned, and what leaders can do to spot the effects before they spread more widely.

So what does happen? And more importantly, what should you do about it?

What are the first signs that a senior leadership team isn’t well aligned?

One of the first signs is that those leaders appear to agree when they’re together in the room, but then pull in different directions afterwards. Mixed messages begin to appear. The priorities that the rest of the organisation thought had been agreed start to feel much less clear.

Those unresolved differences sit underneath what, on the surface, look like very polite conversations. You may start to see a return to silo working. And the tension all of this creates is often visible in very small ways, before anybody names it directly.

How does a lack of alignment in the leadership team show up across the organisation?

Different parts of the organisation start getting different messages, so they begin to pull against each other. People become much less sure about what really matters.

And the decisions that flow from the big priorities get slower. They get revisited again and again. People’s uncertainty and caution increase.

Why can even small misalignments at the top create big problems elsewhere?

Those small differences at the top tend to become amplified as they move through the organisation. People fill in gaps with assumptions when they know their leaders are not really aligned, or when they are simply not clear about what the priorities are.

So that uncertainty at the top often turns into friction, duplication, and silo behaviour elsewhere. What looks minor in the senior leadership team can mean slower execution, weaker decisions elsewhere in the organisation, and missed opportunities too, because people are just not moving fast enough.

It starts to affect performance pretty quickly.

What should leaders do to check whether those negative impacts are happening in their business?

One practical step you can take is this.

Experiment with a real, live priority. Take a little time to explore how aligned your senior leadership team is around that priority. Ask yourselves questions like:

  • What will this priority look like when it is successful?
  • Are we all working towards the same kind of outcome?
  • What are each of us concerned about here?

If those questions reveal any gaps in your alignment, that is useful information. It gives you a chance to deal with those gaps before they widen outside the room, so that you are not papering over the cracks.

About me

I’m Nick Robinson. I work with senior leadership teams who sense they’re not yet working well enough together.

My programme The Shift is a development experience that helps leadership teams strengthen trust, alignment and how they function together, so the organisation benefits from clearer decisions, stronger collective leadership and better overall performance.

Why the Condition of the Leadership Team Affects the Whole Organisation

How well the leadership team is functioning, and how tightly aligned those people are as a team, matters far beyond the team itself. Senior leaders are often much more visible than they realise, and the way they work together really sets the tone across the whole organisation.

In the article and video in this post, I explore how that has big impacts on how people feel about their work, and on the outcomes they can produce for the business.

Why does the way a leadership team works together matter so much for the rest of the organisation?

People take their cues from leadership behaviour. We know this from common sense, and we also know it from research. For example, the Culture 500 survey analysed around a million and a half employee reviews. The overwhelming finding was this:

Culture is shaped by what leaders do, not what they say, or what they tell you to do.

Sull, D., Sull, C., & Zweig, B. (2019). The Culture 500. MIT Sloan Management Review & Glassdoor.

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/projects/culture-500-introducing-the-2020-culture-champions

Alongside that, leadership teams are much more visible than they realise. One of my clients said to me:

“Nick, it’s like being in a giant goldfish bowl. Everybody sees everything you do, they hear everything you say.”

As a member of a leadership team, you cannot not be a visible role model. There is a massive link between how your leadership team behaves, and the culture that forms around and beneath it in the rest of your business.

What signals do people across the organisation pick up from the senior team?

The first signal people really pick up on is alignment:

  • Are those leaders all pulling together in one direction?
  • Or are they pulling in different directions?

Then there is behaviour:

  • How are those leaders in meetings?
  • Are they open with each other?
  • Do they challenge in a way that is constructive?
  • Do they give respect without avoiding conflict?

People also notice the tone and energy of senior leadership team members, as much as the formal decisions they make.

What tends to happen when the senior leadership team is well aligned?

When the leadership team is really well aligned, and the members of it are tight with each other, a clarity comes across. The members understand the direction they have set, they understand the priorities they have agreed, and that comes across clearly to everybody else in the organisation.

There is also a kind of speed and quality:

  • Decisions are made faster
  • They move into action more cleanly
  • Confidence increases
  • Members of the senior leadership team act without second-guessing each other

A simple question to ask

If you are a leader who wants to deal with these issues, a simple thing to ask yourself is this:

If people across the organisation copied the way this leadership team works together, what kind of culture would that create?

About me

I’m Nick Robinson. I work with senior leadership teams who sense they’re not yet working well enough together.

My programme The Shift is a development experience that helps leadership teams strengthen trust, alignment and how they function together, so the organisation benefits from clearer decisions, stronger collective leadership and better overall performance.