The Two-Team Tension: Balancing Your Own Team and the Leadership Team
Most leaders don’t belong to one team but two: the leadership team and the team they lead. The pull between these roles creates constant tension in time, loyalty, and attention. When it is not recognised and managed, leaders default to defending their own area and the leadership team becomes a coordination forum, not the team that leads the organisation. The two‑team tension cluster explores how to balance these commitments well.
This article explores that two-team tension, why it matters, and what effective leaders do to manage it rather than be managed by it.
4 min read
Two hats, one leader: how the tension shows up
For many leaders, the team they lead feels like “home”. It is where they are the senior authority, where people look to them for answers, and often where they have grown up professionally. The senior leadership team, by contrast, can feel less clear and less within their control. They are one voice among peers. Influence must be exercised differently. The work is more ambiguous and longer term.
Typical patterns that show up in this dual role include:
• Over-investing in the team they lead, under-investing in the leadership team
• Advocating hard for their function, but hesitating to challenge peers on organisation-wide issues
• Treating leadership team meetings as updates or negotiations on behalf of their own team, rather than as the primary place where the organisation is led
• Feeling personally torn when what is best for their function is not clearly aligned with what is best for the organisation
None of this is a character or leadership capability flaw. It is a predictable consequence of carrying two significant roles without a shared language or clear expectations for how to balance them.
Why this matters for organisational performance
Ruth Wageman’s research on senior leadership teams shows that more than half of such teams are ineffective, and that one of the most common reasons is confusion about what the leadership team is actually for. When leaders see their primary team as the one they lead, and the leadership team mainly as a forum for reporting and negotiation, the organisation gets strong functional silos but weak collective leadership.
The consequences are familiar:
• Strategy agreed in principle but not truly owned across the organisation
• Decisions that are revisited in corridor conversations or “re-decided” in functional teams
• Mixed messages cascading through the organisation as each leader translates decisions for their own team
Effective leadership teams behave differently. Leaders recognise that they are stewards of the whole organisation first, and stewards of their function second. They still advocate strongly for their people and work, but they do so from within a shared commitment to the organisation’s purpose and direction.
Clarifying Your “First Team”
One practical idea that has gained traction in leadership research and practice is the notion of a leader’s “first team”. The question is simple: when there is a conflict between what your own team wants and what the leadership team has agreed the organisation needs, which team do you treat as primary?
Effective organisations are explicit about this. For members of the senior leadership team, the leadership team is their first team. Their loyalty and decision-making, when push comes to shove, are anchored in what the leadership team has agreed as right for the organisation. Their own team is still vital — but it is understood as the team they lead in service of those organisation-wide decisions, not the place where those decisions are remade.
Making this explicit matters. Without that clarity, leaders default to protecting their own area, especially under pressure.
Making the Leadership Team Worth Belonging To
The two-team tension is easier to live with when the leadership team itself feels like a real, high-value team rather than a meeting you attend.
Leaders are far more willing to make the leadership team their first team when:
• The purpose of the leadership team is clear and compelling
• The work done in that team is genuinely consequential, not administrative
• There is enough trust and challenge in the room for real issues to be addressed
• Decisions are made and followed through, not endlessly deferred or revisited
Leadership team coaching aims directly at this. It helps the team clarify its purpose, define what it must do together that no other team can do, and build ways of working that make membership feel worthwhile, even when it is demanding.
LINK TO PILLAR
See the Leadership Team Coaching pillar page for a fuller description of how Archetype works with leadership teams over time. (Link to: /leadership-team-coaching)
Practical Strategies for Leaders in Two Teams
Individual leaders cannot remove the two-team tension, but they can navigate it more consciously. Several practical strategies make a difference:
1. Name the tension Acknowledge, at least to yourself and ideally with your peers, that you are carrying commitments to two teams. This shifts the experience from private guilt to a shared leadership reality that can be managed.
2. Be explicit about your “first team” Agree with your CEO and colleagues that, as a member of the leadership team, your primary duty is to the organisation-wide decisions you make together. Make this explicit with your own team so they understand how you will handle tensions when they arise.
3. Translate, do not renegotiate When you leave a leadership team meeting, your role is to translate decisions into meaningful implications for your team — not to reopen the decision in a smaller forum. Invite questions and challenge, but keep the integrity of leadership team commitments intact.
4. Create time for both roles Protect time for the work of the leadership team, not just the work of your own team. That means preparing for leadership team meetings, following through on agreed actions, and engaging with peers outside the formal meeting rhythm.
5. Use the coach as a thinking partner In a coached leadership team, leaders can use the coach to explore where they are feeling pulled between their two teams, and to design more intentional responses rather than reactive ones.
How Leadership Team Coaching Helps
Leadership team coaching does three things that make the two-team tension more manageable and more productive.
First, it helps the leadership team define its purpose clearly and compellingly. When leaders understand what only this team can do, it is easier to prioritise it.
Second, it creates forums where the tensions between organisational needs and functional needs can be surfaced and worked with openly, rather than pushed down into private frustration.
Third, it develops shared norms for how leaders talk about leadership team decisions with their own teams: when to invite challenge, how to explain trade-offs, and how to maintain a consistent story across the organisation.
Over time, this turns the two-team tension into a source of maturity rather than confusion. Leaders become more skilful at holding competing demands, and the organisation benefits from both strong functional leadership and strong collective leadership.
Where To Go Next
If this two-team tension feels familiar, you are not alone. It is one of the most common issues Archetype sees when working with leadership teams.
Suggested next steps on archetype.nz:
• Read the Leadership Team Coaching pillar page for an overview of our approach (Link to: /leadership-team-coaching)
• Explore “Five signs your leadership team is functioning as a group, not a team” (Link to: /leadership-team-coaching/signs-leadership-team-not-working)
• Get in touch to talk about your leadership team and the tensions you are facing (Link to: /contact-archetype)