A Team of Leaders Is Not a Leadership Team. Here's the Difference
I have sat in hundreds of executive meetings over 25 years, and I would estimate that ~80-90% of the groups that call themselves a leadership team are not one. They are a team of leaders reporting into something. Each person runs a function well, shows up, presents a slide, answers a few questions, and waits for the person at the head of the table to decide.
That distinction is not semantic. It shapes your workplace culture more than any value statement, and it quietly determines how much of your organization’s capacity ever gets used. When we run our organizational health assessments, most teams are tapping only ~30% of their potential, and two of the biggest drains are the same every time: poor collaboration across functions, and meetings that consume energy without producing anything.
So I asked two of the best team coaches I know, Alexander and Janice Caillet, co-founders of Corentus, to help me get precise about what separates a real leadership team from a well-dressed working group. What follows is the conversation, plus what I have seen in my own work with leadership teams.
Two signs your leadership team is really a working group
Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith drew the line thirty years ago in The Wisdom of Teams: a working group shares information and coordinates; a real team holds itself mutually accountable for a common purpose and shared goals. Alexander’s version is more useful because it tells you exactly where to look.
“This group of individuals, we call them working groups or self-directed units, are not working on shared goals or collective work products together,” he said.
Instead, what you see is a majority of the time is spent information sharing, silo by silo.”
That is the first sign, and it lives inside the meeting. Listen for the subtext: each update carries a hint of advocacy or negotiation for the presenter’s own unit. Nobody ideates. Nobody problem-solves. Nobody decides.
The second sign lives outside the meeting. Members
Spend time in bilateral conversations to renegotiate, relitigate, rearbitrate issues, or they go to the CEO to do the same, or they triangulate.”
The real work of the team happens everywhere except in the room where the team is.
If both signs are present, name it honestly, and then we wonder why we are drowning in meetings.
Give the team work only the team can do
Here is where most leadership team development goes wrong. We try to fix the relationships, the trust etc. Corentus starts somewhere else: the work.
Take an operations team with a $100 million productivity target. Five leaders each own $20 million. They will tell you they have a shared goal. They do not. They have five adjacent goals and a meeting where each one is presented while the other four stay politely silent, because asking about someone else’s number feels like stepping into their lane, and offering a suggestion risks getting one back.
A shared goal is one that nobody can hit alone, and a collective work product is the thing that falls out of it. Alexander described a chief revenue officer of a $1.5 billion sales organization who realized the strategy handed down from the top was being implemented five different ways. Instead of rewriting it, the CRO put three pieces of work in the middle of the room: an account segmentation model, the enterprise-versus-mid-market mix, and the go-to-market strategy.
I’m not gonna do it, we’re gonna figure it out together.”
The classic list at the executive level is short and it is worth writing down: the three-to-five-year strategic plan, the annual operating plan, succession for the top two or three roles, board preparation, any large-scale transformation, a culture change, and leadership development for the top two layers.
When you work on these together, you are forced to shed your identity as a functional leader. You cannot do this work from that place.
How to run effective meetings that actually decide
Once the team has real work, the meeting has to change. Executives now spend nearly 23 hours a week in meetings, up from under 10 in the 1960s, according to research published in Harvard Business Review by Leslie Perlow and colleagues. When I ask executives what share of that time is wasted, the answers range from 20% to 50%.
Corentus’s fix has three parts, and it does not add meeting time, it removes it:
- Move information sharing out of the room. Pre-reads are the discipline; the meeting is for the work. As Janice put it, there is the cost of an information-sharing meeting, “but also the opportunity cost of them coming together and not doing something collaborative.”
- Design every agenda item with an outcome, a purpose and a process: twenty minutes of ideation, thirty of problem solving, twenty to decide. If an item has no outcome and no process, it does not make the agenda.
- Decide how you decide. Most teams default every decision to the team leader. Corentus teaches the four modes, unanimity, consensus, democracy and authority, and a facilitated consensus process they call “zero to five.” Teams that learn it discover something surprising: they can make decisions.
One of their executive teams went from 256 hours of meetings a year to 152 after redesigning their meetings this way. The same team had been running its strategic planning process hub-and-spoke: each leader submitted a plan, a central group consolidated, the CEO negotiated one-on-one for five months. They replaced it with three facilitated mini off-sites and finished in two and a half months. Half the time. Afterwards the team asked the question every team asks: why haven’t we always done it this way?
Two hats: the identity shift behind human-centered leadership
Underneath the mechanics is something more personal. Janice describes it as a missing hat.
“The hat that tends to be missing is them being a team member of that executive team,” she said.
They still wear the hat of being the team leader of their functional team in the executive team.”
I see this constantly. The CFO is in the room as the CFO. The head of R&D is in the room as the head of R&D. Nobody is in the room as a member of the enterprise team, so nobody can compromise without feeling like they lost. Alexander’s refinement is that you hold both hats at the same time: “My unit is XYZ. We’re here and we need this. Yet I know we all need the enterprise.”
This is human-centered leadership at its most practical. Ruth Wageman and Richard Hackman’s study of 120 senior leadership teams found that the strongest ones shared a compelling purpose the members genuinely owned, and that most teams fell well short of that. The two hats are how purpose becomes personal. Once I am solving for the enterprise, a trade-off is not a loss. We are winning, because collectively we chose something we all care about.
Janice’s practical advice is to use the transitions. The walk from your office to the conference room, the thirty seconds between one video call and the next: that is where the identity shift happens, if you let it.
When the conversation locks up: RAFT and SPNS
Real teamwork produces real conflict. The CMO proposes a Super Bowl ad; the CFO says we do not have the money. Without a frame, I interpret the challenge as an attack, feel threatened, raise my voice, and the meeting ends when someone backs down. Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety shows why that pattern is so costly: once the threat response fires, people stop offering the ideas and dissent that a team exists to surface.
Corentus offers two tools. RAFT, for self-awareness: Results, Actions, Feelings, Thinking. What result am I getting, what am I doing to get it, what feeling drives the action, and what thinking sits underneath the feeling? It is the same inner work I write about in Hardwired for Happiness, applied to a single meeting.
SPNS, for the standoff: Stop and label it. Ask for each person’s Perspective and paraphrase it back. Surface each side’s Needs. Build a joint Solution. There is no I in SPNS, and that is the point. “If you do just that, it’s already amazing and it’s half of spins,” Alexander said. Even when no solution emerges, you have heard each other and lowered the temperature. That is the difference between advocacy and inquiry, and it is where the ripest fruit grows.
Why your leadership team is your workplace culture
This is the part leaders underestimate. Whatever the top team does echoes down the organization, because leadership is a public act. Everybody is watching to see whether the leaders are aligned, whether they decide, whether they talk to each other.
When the head of R&D returns to her unit and tells her people that procurement just wants to cheapen the product, her manager two levels down will push back on a supplier recommendation before hearing it. That is not a collaboration problem. It is an echo. Janice’s point is that leaders are role models “whether they want to or not”; the responsibility came with the title.
The alternative is simple and honest. We met, we disagreed, we decided, and we are going this way together. That single sentence, repeated across an executive team, builds more trust than a year of culture posters. It is also why Happiness Squad starts culture work with the top team rather than with an engagement survey; the survey mostly measures the echo.
Three experiments to run next week
Pick one of these and run it before next Friday.
- Close your next meeting with a two-minute after action review. What did we all notice, and what would make it better next time? People are smart; they see the pattern, and giving them a safe place to say it solves a surprising amount.
- Keep a small table over your next five meetings: what percentage of time went to information sharing, ideation, problem solving, decision making? Watch the trend line. Neutral data is something a team can work with; opinions about each other are not.
- Take one collective work product, clarify it, put it in the middle of the room, set up a simple process, and facilitate it.
If you are a leader, start with yourself and the team you are part of. What you create there is echoing through the whole organization.
My full conversation with Alexander and Janice Caillet is on the Flourishing Edge podcast, and if you have ever wondered why your best people leave meetings with less energy than they brought, it is worth an hour of your week.
Learn more about Alexander Caillet and Janice Caillet on LinkedIn.
Listen to the podcast with Ashish, Alexander Caillet and Janice Caillet. above, You can also listen on Apple Podcasts.
Access and subscribe to all of the episodes of the Flourishing Edge Podcast here.
Make Flourishing Your Competitive Edge.
