How do you build a high-performing leadership team?

That gap, between a group of strong leaders and a strong leadership team, is what this post is about. The good news is that it usually closes when the way the team works changes, and the person with the most influence over that is you.

What makes a leadership team high-performing?

A high-performing leadership team works as one team rather than a set of functions. Members rely on each other, disagree in the room, leave with the same version of each decision, take on problems beyond their own area, and judge themselves by the company’s results first.

None of that depends on everyone being brilliant. It depends on how the group behaves when it meets, and between meetings. Yet when a top team isn’t working, the usual reflex is to look at the people.

Google’s research on its own teams points somewhere else. In its re:Work guide to team effectiveness, Google describes Project Aristotle, a study of 180 of its teams. The researchers found that what mattered was less about who was on the team and “more about how the team worked together.” Google’s teams weren’t leadership teams, so the finding shouldn’t be stretched too far, but it matches a common experience: swapping one person rarely changes the meeting.

Is a leadership team really a team?

Often not, and that’s the first thing to check. Many leadership teams are really a group of function heads who meet to share information. That can be useful, but it isn’t a team, and it won’t behave like one.

The Google guide draws the same line. It describes a work group as having “the least amount of interdependence,” meeting to hear and share information, while a team plans work, solves problems and makes decisions together. Members “need one another to get work done.”

Research on senior teams makes a similar point. Ruth Wageman and Richard Hackman, working with Hay Group, studied 125 top teams for the book Senior Leadership Teams. As Management Magazine NZ reported, one of their essential conditions is that it has to be a “real team with clear boundaries as to who is there and why.” Another is getting “the right people on the team,” which also means saying who isn’t on it.

So before anything else, ask two questions. Which decisions does this group make together that no single member could make alone? And is everyone in the room there because the team needs them, or because their title says they should be? If you can’t answer the first question, you have a briefing, not a team. If the room keeps growing, the second question is overdue.

What should you look at in your leadership team?

At Coach42 we look at five things. They aren’t a ladder and they don’t come in a fixed order. Most teams are strong in some and weak in others, and the weakest one is the place to start.

• Trust: do members rely on each other, or go through you?
• Debate: does the disagreement happen in the meeting, or after it?
• Decisions that stick: do decisions stay made, and does everyone leave with the same version?
• Shared ownership: do members take on problems beyond their own function?
• Results: does the team track the company’s shared goals, or mostly its own functions?

These five are our own way of looking at a top team, drawn from what tends to go wrong in leadership meetings. They aren’t a scientific model, and they overlap. The point is to find where your team loses the most, not to score it perfectly.

Do your leaders rely on each other, or on you?

If your leaders talk to you about each other more than they talk to each other, the trust in the team runs through you. That feels like loyalty. In practice it makes you the switchboard for every relationship in the room.

You can spot it in small moments. A leader checks with you before relying on a colleague’s promise. Bad news reaches you privately before it reaches the meeting.

The Google guide describes the opposite. On teams with high psychological safety, people feel “safe to take risks around their team members,” and confident that no one will “embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake.” It credits Amy Edmondson of Harvard with defining team psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is “safe for interpersonal risk taking.”

On a leadership team, the person who sets that tone is the chief executive. One move that helps: open the next meeting with each person naming one thing they got wrong this month, and go first. When you admit a mistake in front of the team, you make it safer for them to do the same with each other, not just with you.

Does the real debate happen in the room?

On a healthy top team, people disagree openly in the meeting and then back the decision outside it. On a struggling one, the meeting is polite and the real conversation happens afterwards, in corridors and private messages.

Leaders often mistake a quiet meeting for an aligned one. Silence among senior people can mean agreement, but it can also mean they’ve learned that disagreeing with you in public costs more than it gains.

Two habits keep debate in the room. First, ask for views before you give yours. Once the chief executive has spoken, most people adjust their answer, often without noticing. Second, go round the table in turn, starting with the quietest person rather than the loudest. On many teams the same two or three voices shape every decision, and the others save their views for later.

The Echo Chamber test looks at the same pattern from your side: how much honest challenge actually reaches you.

Do your decisions stay made?

A decision sticks when everyone leaves the room with the same version of it and nobody reopens it later because they missed the meeting or lost the argument. If decisions keep coming back, the team isn’t really deciding. It’s rehearsing.

The signs are familiar. Two leaders describe the same decision differently to their teams. Someone who wasn’t there objects, and it’s reopened. Each one costs time, and over a quarter the reopened decisions pile up into what we call Decision Debt.

The Google survey for teams includes an item that’s worth asking yourself: “Our team has an effective decision-making process.” Interestingly, the same guide lists consensus-driven decision making among the things that did not significantly affect team effectiveness at Google. Everyone agreeing isn’t the goal. Everyone leaving with the same decision is.

The simplest fix we know is the read-back. At the end of each decision, one person reads back what was agreed, who owns it and what each leader will tell their team. Then someone writes it down. It feels slow the first time. It’s much faster than discussing the same decision three times.

Do your leaders own problems beyond their function?

On a high-performing leadership team, each member is a company leader first and a function head second. On a struggling one, every discussion turns into each person defending their own area, and problems between functions land on your desk.

This one is hard because the incentives often push the wrong way. Your leaders are measured and rewarded on their functions, so giving ground for the company can feel like letting their people down.

You can’t fix that with a speech about teamwork. You can fix part of it by changing who owns what. Next time a problem sits between two functions, say sales and operations, don’t referee it. Give it to both leaders jointly, with one shared goal and a date, and let them come back with a single answer. If you keep sorting out their disagreements, they have no reason to sort them out with each other.

For more on this, read how to build trust between teams. The same habits work one level up.

Does the team track the company’s results, or its own?

A leadership team that mostly reviews functional updates is tracking its parts, not the whole. The test is simple: when the company misses a shared goal, does anyone on the team feel it was theirs?

Google’s research found that different people judge a team by different things. Its guide says that “executives were most concerned with results,” while team members cared more about team culture. A leadership team needs both, but its own results are the company’s results, and those can slip between functions without anyone owning the miss.

Look at your last few agendas. If most of the time goes on each leader reporting their own numbers, the meeting is a set of updates with an audience. A small change helps: start each meeting with three company numbers that everyone owns, before any functional update. Then agree what the team will do about the one that’s off track. If your meetings are mostly updates, it may also be worth working out what those recurring meetings cost.

What does this look like on a real team?

Here’s a hypothetical example. A chief executive leads a team of seven: finance, sales, product, operations, people, marketing and a chief of staff. Each is good at their job. Here’s one quarter.

• Month one: the team agrees to cut one product line. The head of sales tells his team it’s “under review”. The head of product tells hers it’s gone. Two weeks later the decision is back on the agenda. (Decisions that stick.)
• Month one: in the meeting, nobody challenges the plan. Afterwards, three leaders message the chief executive privately with concerns. (Debate.)
• Month two: a delivery problem between operations and sales lands on the chief executive’s desk. She sorts it out herself, over two evenings. (Shared ownership.)
• Month three: the company misses its customer retention goal. In the meeting, each leader explains why their own numbers were fine. (Results.)

Nobody in this story is weak or difficult. The team is full of capable people working as individuals, with the chief executive as the hub of every relationship.

Four small moves change the next quarter: a read-back at the end of every decision, views gathered in turn before she gives hers, the next cross-functional problem handed to two leaders jointly, and retention as the first item on every agenda. None of these needs new people. All of them need her to run the meeting differently.

How healthy is your leadership team?

Most leadership teams have one dimension that costs far more than the rest. Finding it tells you where to start, so you can change one habit well instead of launching a programme.

Exec Team Health is a free test built for this. It takes about 5 minutes, needs no sign-up, and your answers stay in your browser. You answer 16 questions about how your leadership team works, and you get a team health score out of 100 with a bar for each of the five dimensions: trust, debate, decisions that stick, shared ownership and results. They’re shown weakest first, each with one move to try.

For now, you rate the team yourself. A team version, where every member of your leadership team answers anonymously, is coming, and that’s usually the more revealing view, because the gaps between how you see the team and how they see it are often the most useful part. Either way, the score isn’t a diagnosis. It’s a prompt for a better conversation with your team.

If you want a read on how you lead as well, try The 42 Test. You’ll find the other tests and posts for this stage on the CXOs page.

Building a high-performing leadership team isn’t one offsite or one hire. It’s a handful of habits in an ordinary meeting: a mistake you admit first, a view you hold back until others have spoken, a decision read back before people leave, a problem you hand over instead of solving. Start with the one your team loses most on.