A top team can make or break a business – but for anyone who’s in either a high-performing or underperforming team, it’s often hard for them to pinpoint the root cause.
What’s clear from both research and what we see played out in the many teams we work with, is this: A successful leadership team is not just about having a squad of A-players; it needs to be a finely tuned ensemble that knows where it’s going, why, and how to best work together.
Distilling our collective experience of over a hundred years of top teamwork, we identified five critical features—purpose, people dynamics, process, perspective, and persona—essential components that leadership teams must get right to maximize their impact.
1. Purpose: Shared Mission and Goals
The biggest difference is often a top team’s ability to operate as a collective. This means overriding personal and functional loyalties to ensure that all decisions are made with the singular objective of what’s right for the business.
Often the devil is in the detail: individual leaders all signed up to the vision and mission articulated but lack clarity about what this means in practice. Fuzziness at the next level of detail leaves scope of differing interpretations and difficulties in prioritising initiatives and aligning others across the organisation.
2. People Dynamics: Trust, Constructive Conflict, and Honest Discussions
While technical competence and expertise are often what helped senior leaders to reach the top, it’s how they interact with one another that makes or breaks a leadership team. Effective leadership teams are built on trust, honest discussions, and constructive conflict. When trust is established, leaders feel comfortable sharing ideas, challenging assumptions, and providing critical feedback. This dynamic encourages innovation and better problem-solving.
It requires all team members to recognise and adapt to the diverse personalities within the group (including their own!). By stepping outside of their own preferences and communication styles, differing perspectives are embraced rather than resisted. This flexibility not only improves team problem-solving and decision-making but also strengthens trust.
With this, it’s essential that leadership teams remember that they don’t need agreement, they need commitment. In fact, team members should disagree – debate hard! (respectfully) - but then commit. Fake consensus is a red flag in any team, but a killer in top teams that needs to be addressed urgently. Fake consensus leaves room for commitment to ‘alternate realities’, which undermine the shared vision, mission and agreed priorities. Often, the underlying cause is contrasting ambitions for the business, resulting in a lack of trust and therefore lack of willingness to be completely open and honest.
3. Process: Because chaos soon gets tiring
No matter how talented the individuals are, the effectiveness of a leadership team hinges on the processes it employs. Effective collaboration doesn’t happen by accident; it requires intentional design and continuous refinement. This means having practical operating patterns in place for things like collaboration, decision-making, and accountability. Often this area gets overlooked, the less ‘sexy’ element of top team functioning, neglected by people with a stronger action-orientation – typically more numerous in top teams!
This ranges from simply establishing clear roles and responsibilities for each team member, to discipline in how time is spent together, including seemingly small things like whether we read the board papers, or how the team makes decisions, to larger items such as accountability – both giving it clearly and holding people to it. Discipline reduces ambiguity, maximises time spent, and fosters better coordination – essentially making it more likely that the team will realise the great things they’ve said they’ll do.
4. Perspective: Future-Focused and Outward-Looking
For leadership teams to thrive in rapidly evolving business environments, they must be future-focused. Looking beyond current challenges, senior teams must keep an eye on external trends, market shifts, and emerging opportunities. Having a broad, outward-looking view enables leadership teams to proactively drive change within the organisation: change before you have to.
A leadership team with a future-focused mindset recognizes that to remain competitive, they must be able to anticipate challenges and seize opportunities before they become urgent. Often this equates to balancing time spent working ‘on’ the business compared to ‘in’ the business - thinking beyond immediate concerns to anticipate future challenges and opportunities.
5. Persona: The Team’s External Identity
Someone only a leader if they are perceived as one by their followers, and the same applies to leadership teams, with the added complication that they must be seen as united. Leadership is relational, which means that it’s all about how others see you and the impact you have on them. This is why great leadership teams want to understand how they’re viewed, and the best teams are viewed as a tight, cohesive unit – regardless of differences of opinions within the team – they appear, and act as one united team on the outside.
