Executive team cohesion sets the tone for the whole organisation
I often hear the same thing in my first conversation with a CEO.
They start by talking about their teams.
"Functions are working in silos."
"Managers do not collaborate enough."
"Everyone protects their own area."
"Decisions take too long to filter through."
"We need to rebuild cohesion."
So we talk about structure, management, accountabilities and how information flows. Then, fairly quickly, I ask a different question.
And how does your executive team actually work together?
Sometimes there is a pause. Because the problem they are trying to fix in the organisation often shows up at the top as well. Not necessarily as open conflict - which is precisely why it can be hard to see.
An executive team can be made up of capable, loyal people who like and respect one another. Meetings can be perfectly civil. Everyone can be strong in their own role.
And yet something essential can still be missing: operating as one team for the business, rather than simply running each function well.
The organisation's first silo may be sitting around the table
In most executive teams, everyone comes to the table with a clear functional responsibility: finance, sales, operations, HR, production, marketing. That is as it should be.
The difficulty starts when they leave with exactly the same lens, without fully taking on a second role: jointly leading the business with their peers.
That is one of the most common misunderstandings about what it means to sit on an executive team.
Being part of an executive team is not simply about representing your function to the CEO. It means accepting that sales performance is also an operations issue; that recruitment challenges are not just 'HR's problem'; that margin is not only finance's concern; and that a transformation cannot be left to whichever executive happens to own it.
I remain accountable for my function, but I also become jointly accountable for what happens to the business as a whole.
That shift rarely happens automatically.
Research on senior leadership teams points in the same direction. Putting excellent leaders in the same room does not automatically create an excellent team. Ruth Wageman and Richard Hackman, among others, emphasise interdependence. A real team exists when it has shared work to do, a common purpose and challenges that no member can solve alone.
That is the point at which cohesion stops being about 'getting along' and becomes a matter of governance and performance.
The organisation learns more from what the executive team does than from what it asks others to do.
An executive team is constantly signalling how the organisation should operate, even when it says nothing.
When two executives never resolve their disagreements with each other, their teams end up resolving them instead.
When each executive goes back to their function with a different interpretation of a decision, several versions of the strategy start to circulate.
When every trade-off is pushed back up to the CEO, managers learn that escalation works better than collaboration.
When each executive protects their own resources, budget or priorities, it becomes difficult to ask the wider organisation to 'break down silos'.
And when the real disagreements happen after the meeting, in offices or on the phone, the organisation gradually learns that the formal meeting is not quite where decisions are really made.
This is the point that matters to me. The executive team is not only where the organisation is led. It also shapes, often unintentionally, the behaviours that spread through it.
What it tolerates becomes easier to tolerate elsewhere.
What it works around will be worked around elsewhere.
What it manages to do together, by contrast, gives others permission to collaborate.
Donald Sull's work on strategy execution also shows how fragile cross-functional collaboration can be. Only 9% of the managers surveyed said they could consistently rely on colleagues in other functions or business units. When that collaboration breaks down, duplication, delays and missed commitments follow. The Center for Creative Leadership makes a similar point: the way the senior team operates becomes a model for teams across the organisation.
Before asking teams to collaborate better, it is worth looking at what is happening at the top.
Getting along is not the same as working together
This is where the trap lies.
The executive teams that are hardest to shift are not always the ones in open conflict. Sometimes they are the ones where everything appears to be working reasonably well.
People like one another.
They avoid putting a colleague in a difficult position.
They know the pressure others are under.
They take care of the relationship.
As a result, some disagreements are never fully surfaced. Some decisions are made without checking that everyone will stand behind them. Some requests are never really voiced. And good relationships can end up protecting the status quo.
Cohesion is not the absence of tension. It is the ability to work with tension without damaging the relationship.
It means being able to say:
"I do not agree with this decision."
"I need you to change the way you work with my team."
"We made this decision together, so I will stand behind it with my people."
"On this issue, I need to give up what would be best for my function because it is not what is best for the business."
That is far more demanding than simply getting along.
The real test starts when the meeting ends
When I want to understand whether an executive team is truly aligned, I pay less attention to what happens in the meeting than to what happens immediately afterwards.
What does each person say when they go back to their team?
Do they say, "We decided" or "They decided"?
Do they explain the collective decision, or immediately add why they personally would have preferred a different one?
Do they work with their peers to make the trade-off succeed, or focus on limiting the impact on their own function?
A collective decision is not proven by a few nods around a table. It is proven by the way people carry it once they are no longer in the room together.
That is one of the clearest indicators of cohesion in a senior team.
An executive team does not need to do everything together
There is another misconception I come across often: operating as a team does not mean co-creating everything.
Not every issue needs nine people around a table for two hours. Finance should be able to make certain financial decisions. Sales should be able to make certain commercial ones. The CEO should be able to make the calls that sit with their role.
Cohesion is not about removing individual accountability. It is about knowing which issues have to become collective because they affect the business beyond any one function.
That is when executive meetings change in nature. They stop being a sequence of updates - "Over to sales. Over to finance. Over to HR." - and become a place to work on the issues no one can solve alone.
An acquisition.
A transformation.
A reorganisation.
A recruitment challenge that is constraining growth.
Margin pressure that forces several choices to be revisited.
The arrival of AI.
A decision that benefits one part of the business at the expense of another.
If every item on the executive agenda can be handled one function at a time, it is worth asking what still requires everyone to be in the room.
Cohesion is part of the hidden infrastructure of performance
This is the view that has changed most for me over the years.
I used to think of cohesion primarily as a quality of a group. Today, I see it more as part of the invisible infrastructure that makes execution possible.
When it is strong, many things become easier.
Disagreements are dealt with quickly.
An executive can ask for help without losing credibility.
Decisions hold.
Trade-offs remain consistent across functions.
Managers understand what really matters.
And, above all, the organisation stops wasting energy trying to interpret the gaps between the people leading it.
There is still a great deal of room for improvement. One Center for Creative Leadership study found that 65% of leaders saw tension between executives' functional responsibilities and their responsibility to the business as a whole.
Only 18% described their senior team as highly effective in its collective responsibilities.
That does not mean the leaders themselves are ineffective. It means that an executive team does not become a team simply because an organisation chart places several people on the same line.
So, before the next executive team off-site...
Before launching a programme to 'break down silos' across the organisation, I would start by looking at its first team.
Three simple questions:
• What are we genuinely achieving together that no one around this table could achieve alone?
• Which disagreements are we able to resolve here, rather than elsewhere?
• When we leave this room, are we still carrying the same decision?
The answers are often more revealing than a lengthy diagnostic.
After more than twenty-five years spent on executive teams, and then supporting CEOs and leadership teams, I remain convinced of one thing: collaboration does not spread through instruction. It spreads through consistency.
So when a CEO tells me about silos, poor cross-functional working or a lack of collaboration, I look at what is happening in the teams, of course. But not only there. I also look at what is happening at the top, because sometimes that is exactly where the work needs to begin.
And in your executive team, are you a collection of high-performing functional leaders, or a team that is jointly accountable for the success of the business?
The value of executive team cohesion lies in what it makes possible. In my next article, I will look at what a cohesive leadership team can build together: a shared strategic direction and ambitions that are genuinely owned by everyone.
Is your executive team looking to work better together, or to strengthen collaboration across the organisation?
I offer a confidential 30-minute introductory conversation, with no commitment, to understand what is happening and identify the most useful next step.
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