Senior Leaders Who Won't Look at Each Other
Senior leaders who won‘t look at each other. CFOs undermining CMOs in real time. Presidents of entire divisions abdicating decisions because they know it‘ll become ammunition in the next executive meeting. These are system failures, not personality problems. And they‘re fixable.
Most organizations diagnose a dysfunctional leadership team as a “people problem.“ Someone isn‘t collaborative enough, someone‘s too aggressive, someone‘s a bottleneck. So they bring in an executive coach or suggest a team-building offsite. It doesn‘t work because they‘re treating a technical solution to what is fundamentally an adaptive challenge. They‘re treating the symptom, not the disease.
The disease is structural. The CFO undermining the CMO isn‘t a personality conflict—it‘s a role conflict. Each person sits in a position that gives them a partial view of the organization, like the blind men and the elephant. The CFO sees risk and cost. The CMO sees growth and investment. They‘re both right from where they sit. And they‘ll fight forever unless someone rebuilds the system that‘s pitting them against each other.
I learned this negotiating in conflict zones—Iraq, Somalia, Sudan. One of the core diagnostic moves I teach is to look through the person to the faction they represent. Replace the difficult CFO and you‘ll get a new CFO with the same structural incentives and the same conflicts, just with a different personality. You can‘t fix a broken system by fixing individuals. You have to rebuild the system itself.
Patrick Lencioni‘s model maps the deterioration precisely: when trust breaks down, people avoid productive conflict. Without conflict, you get false commitment. Without real commitment, no one holds peers accountable. And without accountability, results suffer. It‘s a cascade, and it starts at the top.
Here‘s how.
Build Trust Through Vulnerability (But Make It Real)
Trust is not a feeling. It‘s a behavioral choice based on predictability and reciprocal risk-taking.
I once worked with a CEO who started a leadership offsite by saying, “I‘ve been making all the strategic decisions unilaterally for three years because I didn‘t trust you to think at my level.“ Brutal and honest. His senior team didn‘t like hearing it, but they believed it. And suddenly they could respond to the actual problem instead of the version they‘d invented.
The first move is public acknowledgment. Not corporate vulnerability (“I‘m working on my listening skills“). Real vulnerability: Here‘s where I‘ve failed. Here‘s what I‘m afraid of. Here‘s what I‘m asking you to risk together.
In that first conversation, you‘re not asking people to be vulnerable back. You‘re putting chips on the table first. You‘re demonstrating that it‘s safe to tell the truth because the most powerful person in the room already did.
For a 30-day reset: In your first leadership team meeting, each senior leader (including you) identifies one thing they haven‘t said out loud in the leadership team, but should have. Not a confession. A perspective. A concern. Something they‘ve been thinking but haven‘t said. Something real. Everyone talks. Everyone listens. No fixing, no defending. Just receiving.
Create Psychological Safety With Standards (Not Soft Boundaries)
This is where most teams fail. They confuse psychological safety with “everyone‘s opinions matter equally“ or “we don‘t give critical feedback.“
Wrong. Amy Edmondson‘s research is clear: psychological safety is the belief that you can speak up without being punished or humiliated. It‘s not the same as being nice. It‘s the discipline of making it rational for people to tell the truth, especially when the stakes are high. In my Leadership in Action course, I draw a sharp distinction between execution-oriented teams (where safety means following the process) and learning-oriented teams (where safety means you can experiment, dissent, and fail without career consequences). Dysfunctional senior teams need the second kind.
The strongest teams I‘ve worked with have rigorous standards and explicit permission to challenge. But they also distinguish between two kinds of silence: “I don‘t have a strong view on this“ (which is fine) and “I disagree but I‘m not going to say so“ (which is corrosive). One team I advised had a simple norm: before closing a decision, the chair asks, “Is anyone sitting on a concern they haven‘t raised?“ Not “does everyone agree?“ (which invites false consensus), but a genuine check for suppressed dissent.
Create explicit standards for your leadership team. Not values. Standards. Behavioral expectations that everyone commits to and holds each other to. Here are ten that matter:
- If you have new information that changes the picture, you‘re obligated to surface it, even if it‘s inconvenient.
- If you see someone undercutting this team‘s decision outside this room, you address it directly with them and raise it with the group.
- Good intent is assumed. Clarifying questions come before conclusions.
- We give feedback directly to each other, not through the CEO and not through back-channels.
- If you can‘t commit to a decision, you say so in the room, not afterwards.
- Trade-offs get named out loud. If we can‘t articulate what we‘re sacrificing, we haven‘t truly decided.
Write them down. Then agree to hold each other to them. When someone violates a standard, you call it immediately. Not to shame. To clarify. “Hey, that felt like a violation of ‘we assume good intent.‘ Help me understand what I‘m missing.“
Psychological safety with standards is what allows people to take the risks required for high performance.
Align on Priorities and Trade-Offs (The Hard Conversation)
I‘ve never seen a dysfunctional senior team that was truly aligned on priorities. They thought they were. They had the same strategic plan document. But when you asked them what the top three priorities were, you got five different answers.
This is the conversation most leadership teams avoid. Ask one question: What are we trying to accomplish in the next 18 months? Not the sanitized version. The real one, grounded in actual constraints like budget, capacity, and political reality.
Each person identifies what they think are the top three priorities, the priorities that should receive 70% of the organization‘s energy, investment, and focus. Then you compare.
If your team can‘t quickly agree on three shared priorities, your organizational dysfunction isn‘t personality; it‘s strategic misalignment. You‘re asking people to row in different directions and wondering why the boat isn‘t moving.
The harder conversation is this: What are we not doing? Every priority you choose is a yes. And every yes is a no to something else. Most dysfunctional teams never have that conversation. So they try to do everything, which means nothing gets done well.
Spend a full leadership meeting on trade-offs. What initiatives are we stopping? What requests are we declining? What gets deprioritized? Make that explicit. You‘ll watch the relief on people‘s faces. They‘ve been carrying the burden of conflicting priorities for months.
Hardwire Peer Accountability (Not Just to the Boss)
Here‘s what happens in dysfunctional teams: People are only accountable to the CEO. They perform for the boss. They don‘t have accountability to their peers.
This is a structural failure, not a character flaw.
I worked with a Chief Strategy Officer who was chronically late on deliverables that the Chief Product Officer needed. The CEO kept asking him to hit deadlines. Nothing changed. Then I created a peer accountability structure: The CPO had the right (and the obligation) to escalate directly to this leader when the deadline slipped, to raise it in front of their peers, and to ensure it was problem-solved together.
One escalation. The behavior changed. Because suddenly he wasn‘t just disappointing the CEO in private. He was letting down his colleagues in public. The peer dynamic was different.
Create a peer accountability system. At the end of each month, each leader reports to the group (not the CEO) on their commitments: What did you say you‘d do? What did you deliver? What changed? What do you need from us?
The CEO doesn‘t referee. The peers do. It completely shifts the dynamic.
Install Tight Decision-Making Rhythms (Make Decisions, Move Forward)
Nothing creates more politics than ambiguous decision-making. When people don‘t know how decisions get made, they politick.
Dysfunctional teams typically have three modes: analysis paralysis, unilateral decisions from above, and endless debate. None work. What works is what I call the Collaborative Loop: Listen → Clarify → Debate → Decide → Explain → Execute → Learn. Most dysfunctional teams skip from Listen straight to Decide (or worse, skip listening entirely). The steps in between are where alignment actually gets built.
You need a clear decision-making rhythm. Weekly pulse meetings (30 minutes, tight agenda, clear decision format). Monthly strategic meetings (deeper dives, peer input). Quarterly business reviews (performance, priorities, course corrections). And clear decision criteria: Who decides? Who advises? Who gets informed?
For a 30-day reset: This month, make one decision using your new decision-making process. Document it. Show people how it works. Refine it. By the end of 30 days, your team should feel the structural difference.
The 30-Day Reset Plan
- Week 1: Vulnerability conversation + establish psychological safety standards.
- Week 2: Clarity on shared priorities. Name the top three. Name what‘s being deprioritized.
- Week 3: Create peer accountability structure. First accountability meeting. Explain to the organization.
- Week 4: Make one significant decision using your new decision-making rhythm. Document it. Review what worked.
You won‘t fix 10 years of dysfunction in 30 days. But you‘ll prove it‘s possible to change the system. And you‘ll build momentum.
The dysfunction on your leadership team isn‘t personal. It‘s structural. You don‘t need better people. You need better systems.
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