When a leadership team is not working well, the effects spread through the whole organisation. Decisions slow down. Conflicting messages reach the teams below. Good people start to disengage. The dysfunction itself is usually not mysterious. It tends to follow one of a small number of recognisable patterns.
The politeness trap ¶
The most common pattern we see is a leadership team that has learned to be polite to each other at the expense of being honest. Disagreements are smoothed over in meetings and relitigated in corridors. Decisions are made but not really made, because the people who disagreed in the meeting did not say so, and will not implement the decision with any conviction. The politeness looks like cohesion from the outside. It is the opposite.
Unclear ownership at the boundaries ¶
The second pattern is structural rather than interpersonal. Most leadership teams have clear ownership of their own functions, but unclear ownership of the decisions that sit at the boundary between functions. Who decides when the operations team and the commercial team disagree about a customer commitment? Who owns the decision when a people issue has a financial dimension? These boundary questions are where most leadership team conflict actually lives, and they are almost never resolved by talking about values or culture.
The absent conversation ¶
The third pattern is a specific conversation that the leadership team has been avoiding, usually for a long time. It might be about a person who is not performing. It might be about a strategic direction that some members of the team do not believe in. It might be about the relationship between two members of the team that has broken down. The absent conversation tends to shape everything else in the team's dynamic, because everyone knows it is there and nobody is having it.
What it takes to address these patterns ¶
None of these patterns are fixed by a team-building day or a values workshop. The politeness trap requires a facilitated process that creates genuine permission to disagree. Unclear boundary ownership requires structural work: mapping the decisions, assigning ownership, and testing the assignments against real cases. The absent conversation requires someone with enough standing and enough skill to name it and create the conditions for it to happen. That is usually where external support is most useful.
If any of these patterns sound familiar, the leadership team effectiveness programme we run is designed specifically to address them. It takes two to three months and it is not comfortable, but it tends to produce lasting change. Get in touch to discuss whether it is the right fit.