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Why Leadership Teams are so hard to get right
- Nazly Frias
- Aug 28
- 9 min read
Updated: Nov 12
Leadership teams are among the most powerful groups in any organization. They are also the most fragile. When they work, they create clarity of direction, unlock execution across silos, and shape culture through what they model. When they don't, misalignment and mistrust spread just as quickly, often more quietly but no less destructively.
And yet, for all their influence, leadership teams remain persistently misunderstood, misframed, and mismanaged. They are reduced to collections of powerful individuals or mistaken for just another cross-functional team. These views contain partial truths, but they miss something essential: leadership teams operate under fundamentally different conditions than any other team in the system.
Their potential is immense. Their fragility is real. This is the paradox that sits at the heart of organizational life—the team with the greatest capacity to shape an organization's future is consistently the hardest to get right.
1. Misunderstood and Misframed
The difficulty begins with how we see leadership teams. Two incomplete lenses dominate.
The first reduces them to a collection of powerful individuals—senior leaders who each bring authority, expertise, and clear accountability for their domain. This view recognizes the weight each person carries, but it misses the deeper work of forging those individuals into something collective. Without that shift from individual authority to shared performance, the leadership team becomes a forum for reporting updates and negotiating trade-offs. It never becomes a team that can act as one.
The second lens treats them as simply another cross-functional team. Organizations apply the same facilitation techniques, process improvements, and team-building approaches used for project teams or functional groups. There's logic here—leadership teams do need alignment, coordination, and ways to work together. But the stakes, nature of the work, and symbolic weight they carry are categorically different. Their conversations don't just determine project success; they set the trajectory of the entire organization.
Both framings capture something real. But taken as the complete picture, these views obscure what makes leadership teams distinct: they are the only team in the system charged with holding the whole organization—its direction, its capacity to execute, and its ability to adapt when the ground shifts.
This difference in responsibility creates entirely different dynamics. It's why techniques that work for other teams often fall flat at the top. It's why leadership teams can appear functional in meetings yet fail to drive the alignment and execution the organization desperately needs.
Their work is qualitatively different, and misunderstanding this difference is one of the primary reasons so many leadership teams never fulfill their potential.
2. The Work Only They Can Do
The most costly misunderstanding about leadership teams is assuming their purpose is self-evident. When this happens, the organization loses its primary source of coherence and direction.
Leadership teams exist for work that no other group can do. They are the only team in the system responsible for holding the whole enterprise—not just coordinating its parts, but ensuring it functions as something greater than the sum of those parts. This responsibility manifests in four essential functions that define their unique role:
Setting Direction. They author the organization's vision, strategy, and priorities. More than that, they ensure these aren't just documents but living guides that create coherence across every level of the system.
Enabling Execution. They reconcile the tension between organizational needs and functional realities. Without this work, organizations fragment into competing priorities, with each department optimizing for itself rather than the whole.
Shaping Culture. They don't just define values—they embody them. Culture isn't what leadership teams say; it's what people observe them doing, especially when decisions are difficult and stakes are high.
Change & Renewal. They develop the organization's ability to adapt, learn, and sustain impact over time. This means creating systems and capabilities that will outlast their own tenure.
These functions make leadership teams categorically different from any other team. They are custodians of purpose and coherence at the enterprise level. The scope of their responsibility—and the symbolic weight they carry—changes everything about how they must operate.
3. Why They Are Uniquely Challenging
Understanding the purpose is only half the challenge. The conditions of leadership team life make collective performance uniquely difficult to achieve.
Dual Accountabilities. Consider the structural tensions every member faces. Each leads a major function with its own goals, metrics, and stakeholder pressures. They are expected to act as organizational stewards while being held accountable for the performance of their domain. The system demands collaboration but often rewards competition. It's a setup that creates conflicting loyalties from day one.
Power and Status Dynamics. Then there are the human dynamics that emerge when powerful people try to work together. Senior leaders arrive with established authority, strong identities, and personal ambitions. Subordinating part of that individual power to serve the collective feels unnatural—and is often actively resisted. Status anxiety, political maneuvering, and subtle rivalries can erode trust even when everyone has good intentions.
Unique Nature of the Work. The stakes compound these challenges. Leadership teams face decisions that are ambiguous, existential, and impossible to delegate. Unlike project teams, they cannot escalate the hardest problems—they are the escalation point. Every choice reverberates through the system with consequences that unfold over months and years.
Scarcity of Safety. Perhaps most damaging is the scarcity of psychological safety at the top. The cost of speaking up, disagreeing, or admitting uncertainty feels higher when you're supposed to be the expert. Candor becomes risky. Silence becomes a survival strategy. What should be robust debate calcifies into polite dysfunction or factional warfare.
This is why so many leadership teams remain "teams in name only." Not because they lack talented individuals, well, sometimes that's part of the problem. But because the structural and relational conditions at the top make collective performance exceptionally difficult.
Becoming a true team at this level requires deliberate, sustained cultivation. It never happens by accident.
4. Beyond High Performance: The Dual Mandate
Most teams have relatively straightforward performance measures: deliver the project, hit the targets, meet the deadline.
Leadership teams face something more complex. Their outcomes are harder to define, harder to measure, and rarely attributable to their actions alone. Their influence operates at a systemic level—shaping direction, setting cultural tone, enabling alignment across the organization. Success becomes ambiguous in ways that would paralyze other teams.
But there's a deeper challenge that makes it hard to get it right at the top: they must serve two masters simultaneously.
Execution in the present: the relentless work of delivering enterprise results now. This means making high-quality decisions under pressure, resolving competing priorities, ensuring alignment sticks, and driving performance across the system. This master speaks loudly, quickly, and demands constant attention.
Change & Renewal for the future: the quieter work of ensuring the organization remains relevant and capable over time. This involves scanning for shifts in the environment, questioning foundational assumptions, building new capabilities, and maintaining the organization's capacity to adapt when conditions change. This master speaks quietly, more slowly, but its rhythm determines whether the organization thrives or merely survives.
These two masters, or mandates, rarely align. They demand attention to different things: the tangible urgency of quarterly results versus the less visible work of building long-term adaptive capacity.
Under pressure, most teams collapse into execution mode because present performance is easier to measure and impossible to ignore. But when leadership teams abandon the change & renewal mandate, they win today while quietly eroding tomorrow.
They may hit this year's numbers, but miss the technological shift that will reshape their industry. They may optimize current operations while failing to develop the capabilities their future strategy requires.
This dual mandate is one of the reasons leadership team effectiveness is so difficult to assess and so critical to get right. Their success cannot be measured only by what they deliver in the current quarter, but by whether they leave the organization more coherent, legitimate, and capable than they found it.
5. Learning to Live in the Paradox
The challenge of leadership teams isn't just complexity—it's paradox. They must function as both a collective and a circle of powerful individuals. They need to deliver results today while simultaneously renewing the system for tomorrow. They require the discipline of clear processes and the openness to sense emerging realities and adapt accordingly.
These tensions don't resolve. They can only be navigated with skill, presence, and intention. Most teams underperform because they collapse these paradoxes into simpler choices: individual authority over collective responsibility, short-term results over long-term capacity, rigid discipline over adaptive sensing.
They default to what feels more manageable rather than hold the harder balance that their role demands.
But when leadership teams learn to inhabit these paradoxes—when they develop the capability to hold multiple truths simultaneously—something transformative becomes possible. Their coherence becomes the organization's coherence. Their ability to adapt becomes the organization's ability to adapt.
This is why investing in a leadership team's development isn't an organizational luxury—it's stewardship of the organization's future capacity. The top team's internal dynamics, decision-making patterns, and relational health cascade through every level of the system. Get it right, and you amplify the organization's potential. Get it wrong, and you constrain what becomes possible, often in ways that aren't visible until the damage is done.
There are fundamentals every leadership team must address: clear composition, explicit mandate, and effective decision processes, among others. But beyond these basics, there is no universal recipe.
A team navigating transformation faces different demands than one managing crisis or sustaining steady growth. Context shapes everything—industry dynamics, organizational culture, competitive pressures, regulatory environment, the specific capabilities and limitations of the people in the room.
What makes this work both difficult and essential is that each leadership team must discover what it means to hold its particular paradoxes in its specific context. They must learn how to be simultaneously decisive and adaptive, individual and collective, present-focused and future-oriented. And they must do this learning while the organization watches, while markets shift, while competitors move.
This is why no framework or checklist will ever be sufficient. The work requires ongoing attention, skillful facilitation of tensions, and the willingness to keep learning how to be a team at the level where the stakes are highest and the margin for error is smallest.
Final Thoughts: The Hard Work Worth Doing
Leadership teams are not abstractions or organizational charts. They are people—fallible, ambitious, sometimes anxious, often hopeful—trying to make sense of complex realities together while the entire organization watches and waits for direction.
The human dimension matters because it's where the real work happens. Behind every strategic decision is a conversation between individuals who bring their own perspectives, blind spots, and competing loyalties to the table. Behind every cultural shift is a group of leaders who must first embody that change themselves. Behind every transformation is a team that must learn to transform its own patterns of thinking and relating before it can guide others through similar shifts.
This is both the difficulty and the possibility. When leaders truly become a team—when they move beyond coordination to genuine collective capability—they create space for a different kind of leadership to emerge throughout the organization.
Teams that can hold paradox give permission for others to embrace complexity rather than seek false simplicity. Teams that can engage in productive conflict model how disagreement can strengthen rather than fracture relationships. Teams that can balance present demands with future needs demonstrate that both urgencies can coexist.
Every leadership team becomes a mirror of itself throughout the system it leads. Its coherence or fragmentation, its candor or avoidance, its willingness to tackle difficult questions or its tendency to defer them—all of it multiplies outward through the organization's culture and capabilities.
No leadership team ever fully "arrives" at some state of perfection. The discipline is simpler and more demanding: to keep seeing yourselves clearly, to keep asking the questions that matter most, and to keep returning to them together. In a world that rewards quick fixes and clear answers, this kind of ongoing attention to team dynamics can feel like a luxury. It's not. It's the foundation upon which everything else your organization hopes to achieve depends.
The hardest teams to get right are the ones where getting it right matters most—not because they are more important, but because their influence travels furthest. Leadership teams live in that responsibility, whether they acknowledge it or not.
This article is part of a four-part exploration of leadership teams, their hidden dynamics, growing pressures, and the path from overload to renewal. Discover the rest of the series:
About the Author
Nazly Frias is the founder of Leadership Impact, a boutique leadership advisory practice specializing in executive teams and senior leaders in impact-driven professional service firms and organizations.
With over 15 years of international experience, Nazly brings a unique dual perspective: she has served as both an insider—leading and being part of leadership teams in global impact consulting firms and public innovation labs—and as an external trusted advisor. This combination allows her to understand the internal dynamics, pressures, and blind spots that leadership teams face while maintaining the objectivity needed to guide transformational change.
Originally from Colombia, Nazly works with clients across the globe in English and Spanish and is based in Berlin.
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