The Team You’re Actually On

Senior leadership teams have a keystone that no other team carries or rests upon in the same crucial way.

It literally holds the show together. And if you’re a senior leader who doesn’t know it’s there – then you are a problem.

Only at the point of that keystone – the senior leadership team – is the whole organisation joined together.

So this can start being a problem when someone gets promoted to the senior team for the first time, and continues if their CEO or MD either doesn’t get its importance or know how to deal with it.

Say you get promoted to Chief Financial Officer, CFO. That’s a big deal! All those responsibilities that come along with the car and the bonus.

Here’s the thing that can be VERY hard to wrap your head around if you’ve got a ‘C’ or a ‘Director’ in your job title.

If you are on the senior leadership team, then that is the team you are ON.

So far so obvious.

But what is much less obvious is that, as CFO for example, you are NOT a member of the finance team. You just head that up.

I go into senior teams and see it happen over and over. A room full of smart, capable people, but each one quietly still captaining their own function. No one really comfortable with sitting on the team they’re actually on.

It’s the difference between leadership and membership.

And when people get it wrong, what happens is that:

Silo-working becomes entrenched;
Mutual accountability on the senior leadership team becomes almost impossible; and
Performance down the line suffers.

That confusion, about which team you’re really on, is why your team agrees in the room, but those decisions and their commitment begin to unravel the moment people are outside of it.

We already know the organisational costs of silos are real and consequential. Work by Tett shows that fragmentation produces organisational blindness, with serious downstream costs.

And we can now see it in the data. When work went hybrid, studies by Yang and Zuzul et al. found cross-group connection (people talking across functions rather than within them) falling by around a quarter. That makes the job of holding a senior team together harder still for any CEO today.

The issue isn’t a failure of the individuals, and it isn’t just a conceptual challenge. It’s an identity problem. And almost nobody is naming it as one.

Senior leadership teams have to grasp this identity. THIS is who we are, and this is who I am as a Chief Something Officer – a member of that team. Get this right and the decisions stop unravelling, accountability comes to life.

Get it wrong, and that keystone never sets. The building comes down.

About me

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

My flagship programme The Shift is a development experience that helps leadership teams strengthen trust, alignment and how they function together. The result for the organisation: clearer decisions, stronger collective leadership and better performance.

If you would like to learn more about that work, please get in touch:

https://www.nickrobinson.org/the-shift-leadership-team-development

About me

Further reading