Is Your Executive Team Actually a Team?
I ask a version of this question early in an executive team development engagement: Are you a team, or are you a group of people who report to the same person?
The room usually goes quiet for a second. The answer is not always obvious, because most executives have simply never considered that possibility. They assumed that meeting regularly, sharing a boss, and being generally collegial added up to “team.” It doesn’t.
Jon Katzenbach and Doug Smith settled this many years ago in The Wisdom of Teams, and their definition still holds up better than almost anything written since:
a real team is “a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and working approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.”
Most executive groups can point to two or three of those elements. Very few have all of them, and the gap between “some” and “all” is where I often spend time in coaching teams.
Peter Hawkins pushes this definition further in Systemic Team Coaching, and this piece I think gets skipped too often. A team isn’t just an internal arrangement — it’s part of a system that has to work in both directions (inside and outside of the team). Peter adds that an effective team, in fact a value-adding team, also:
“…has ways of meeting and communicating that raise morale and alignment, engages well with its key stakeholder groups, and builds in ways for the team to keep learning and developing over time.”
That matters: the team’s job isn’t only to function well together. It’s to be worth something to everyone depending on it — the board, the staff, the community, the customers, and more. Peter describes it as “outside-in” and “future-back.” In brief, what does the future need from us as a team, that we need to develop in the near term, to be ready to meet the future and evolving needs of our key stakeholders?
So where does team development work start? Not usually with strategy. With safety. One of the more revealing exercises I use in early team-coaching work asks each executive to complete this sentence out loud, in front of their peers: “One thing I need from other members of this group in order to feel safe to learn and grow is…” What I notice: even seasoned, confident leaders slow down to consider what they need and also gain new insights from what others need too. Some admit they’ve been managing their image in that room for years. It’s a real starting point — not alignment on goals, but whether people believe it’s safe to be open, in learning mode, and sometimes even wrong, in front of each other.
A few observations that hold across many executive teams I’ve worked with:
- Purpose gets assumed, not built. Teams that skip explicitly naming why they exist as a team — not just what each person does — drift into a convening of functional silos with a shared calendar.
- Trust is a discipline, not a mood. It has to be built through structured practices — feed-forward conversations, working agreements, sometimes even explicit behavioral norms — not simply hoped for.
- Systemic awareness is often missing. Teams get so focused on their own dynamics that they forget to ask how the board, or the frontline staff, or other key stakeholders actually experience them as a team.
Peter Hawkins organizes systemic team developmental work into what he calls the Five Disciplines of an Effective Team: Commissioning, Clarifying, Co-creating, Connecting, and Core learning. I’ll unpack those in future editions. Looking at both task and process dimensions of the team’s work; and how the team manages both internally as a team but also externally (outside of their team).
For now, I encourage you to sit with the opening question a little longer than feels comfortable: is your leadership team actually a team — or a well-meaning group that shares a room?
Questions for Creating Your Excellence Advantage
✳️ Are we adding value as a team? To whom?
✳️ What can we do collectively (as a team) that we cannot do as individuals?
✳️ What does the future need from us as a team that we are not yet prepared for?
✳️ Is it safe to learn and grow together…as a team?
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Kathy Letendre, President and Founder of Letendre & Associates, advises organizations and leaders to create their excellence advantage.
Contact Kathy by phone or text at 802-779-4315 or via email.