Why capable leaders don’t always make an effective leadership team

Most business owners know how important it is to have good people in leadership roles. You want people who understand their jobs, make good decisions, take responsibility and genuinely care about the business.

But sometimes, even when you’ve got all of those things, the leadership team still doesn’t work as well as you’d expect. Decisions take too long. Priorities compete. People disagree about who’s responsible for what. Meetings go around in circles, and the same problems keep coming back.

It’s tempting to think someone must be the problem. Perhaps one leader isn’t experienced enough, two people don’t get along or the team needs to communicate better. And sometimes that’s true.

But sometimes the problem isn’t the people you’ve put in charge. It’s the way you’ve asked them to work together.

Let’s say a business has four experienced leaders looking after sales, operations, finance and people. The sales leader wants to grow the business and win more customers. The operations leader wants a steady flow of work so the team can deliver it well. The finance leader wants to protect cash and make sure the business isn’t spending money before it earns it. And the people leader wants to make sure the team has the skills, support and time to do a good job. All four are doing exactly what you’d expect of them.

But what happens when sales wins a large new contract that operations isn’t ready to deliver? Finance doesn’t want to approve more spending until the revenue starts coming in, while the people team knows recruitment will take months. Everyone has a reasonable argument. Everyone is trying to do what’s best for the business. So who decides what happens next?

If nobody is clear about who makes that decision, what information they need or how the business should weigh up the different priorities, things can get difficult very quickly. Leaders start defending their own teams. Decisions get pushed up to the CEO. Meetings become negotiations, and frustration builds. Before long, what started as a perfectly ordinary business decision can look like a problem between people.

Sometimes leaders aren’t pulling in different directions because they disagree about what’s best. They’re being asked to deliver things that haven’t been worked out together.

One of the most frustrating positions for any leader is being held responsible for an outcome without having enough say over what produces it.

Take an operations manager who’s responsible for delivering great customer service but has no influence over the promises the sales team makes. Or a finance manager who’s expected to keep cash under control but doesn’t know what commitments have been made to customers until the invoices arrive. Or a CEO who tells the leadership team to take more ownership but continues to make every important decision themselves. In each case, people are being asked to deliver results without having everything they need to do so.

The response is often to push harder for accountability. Set clearer targets, hold more performance meetings or tell people they need to take greater ownership. But there’s only so much someone can do when the decisions that affect their results sit somewhere else.

If you want people to take responsibility, they need to be able to make the decisions that go with it. They also need the right information, the skills to make those decisions and a clear understanding of what they’re expected to deliver. Otherwise, even very capable people can end up spending more time explaining why something hasn’t happened than making it happen.

Trust matters. So does communication. And it’s much easier to work with people you respect and enjoy spending time with. But getting along isn’t the same as working well together.

A leadership team also needs to know what it’s trying to achieve as a group, not just what each person is responsible for individually. People need to understand which decisions they can make themselves, which decisions need to be made together and when something needs to go to the CEO or board. They need access to the same information, a shared understanding of how the business is performing and a way to work through competing priorities without everything becoming a battle.

That doesn’t mean everyone has to agree. In fact, some of the best decisions come from people who see things differently and are willing to challenge one another. The difference is that they know how to work through those disagreements and make a decision the business can act on. A good leadership team should be able to have a difficult conversation without turning it into a personal conflict.

When a leadership team isn’t working well, it’s worth looking beyond the behaviour you’re seeing. A leader who seems difficult or resistant might be worried about being held responsible for something they can’t control. A manager who doesn’t contribute much in meetings might have learned that decisions made there will be changed later anyway. A CEO who seems unable to let go might still be carrying responsibilities that nobody else has been properly prepared or authorised to take on.

Of course, sometimes people do behave poorly. Sometimes someone needs more support, better skills or a clearer understanding of what’s expected of them. But it’s worth understanding what’s making the behaviour happen before deciding how to fix it. Otherwise, you can spend a lot of time trying to improve relationships or develop individuals, only to find that the same frustrations keep appearing.

Sometimes the answer is helping someone become a better leader. Sometimes it’s changing who makes decisions, how responsibilities are shared or how the team works together. And quite often, it’s both.

Try this: list the three decisions your leadership team argues about most. For each one, ask who actually has the authority to make it, and who is held responsible for the result. If those aren’t the same person, you’ve found the problem.

Seeing the gap is the quick part. Closing it usually means changing who decides, what they’re measured on and what information they have—together, while the business keeps running.

Investing in your leaders is important. Giving people opportunities to learn, grow and become more confident in their roles can make a real difference.

But say you send your entire leadership team away on a serious development programme. They come back energised, with new ideas and a genuine commitment to doing things differently. Then they return to the same unclear responsibilities, competing priorities and decisions that still have to go through the CEO. It won’t take long before some of the old frustrations return.

That’s why developing the people and improving how the business works need to go together. You want leaders who are capable of making good decisions. But you also need to make sure they have the responsibility, authority, information and support to make those decisions work for the business as a whole—and that they understand how what happens in their part of the business affects everyone else. That’s how the business gets the benefit of all their experience, judgement and capability, not just what each person can achieve on their own.

A great leadership team isn’t just a group of great leaders. It’s a group of people who know how to make the business work well together.