Why High-Performing Leadership Teams Are A Competitive Advantage
by Tony Gardner
High‑performing leadership teams are closely associated with stronger organisational performance. Studies from McKinsey and others find that companies whose top executive team is aligned and working effectively together are significantly more likely to achieve above‑median results.
Despite this, many leadership teams operate well below their potential — not because they lack individual talent, but because they have never done the deliberate work of building how they lead together.
In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, the most successful organisations share a common characteristic: they possess leadership teams that operate as unified, high-performing units rather than collections of individual executives. These exceptional leadership teams represent far more than the sum of their parts, creating a multiplier effect that drives organisational success, strategic agility, and sustainable competitive advantage.
High-Performing Leadership Teams as a Business Strategy
The traditional model of heroic individual leadership has become increasingly inadequate. As Peter Hawkins argues in Leadership Team Coaching, the demands placed on modern organisations — across functions, geographies, and stakeholder groups — exceed what any single leader can carry. Organisations that continue to depend on individuals rather than investing in collective leadership capability are taking on a structural risk.
High-performing leadership teams deliver results through both good times and bad. They create environments where leaders and staff can do their best work. And they provide, in Lencioni’s phrase, the ultimate competitive advantage — because while strategy can be copied and technology can be bought, a genuinely high-performing leadership team is very difficult to replicate.
What the Evidence Shows
The business case for investing in leadership teams is well-established. Research by the International Coaching Federation (ICF), based on a global study of coaching clients conducted with PricewaterhouseCoopers, found that 86% of organisations that measured return on investment from leadership team coaching initiatives recovered at least their initial investment, with a median company ROI of approximately seven times the amount spent.
Research on team effectiveness by Harvard scholars Richard Hackman and Ruth Wageman identifies six enabling conditions that together predict up to 80% of a team’s effectiveness — and crucially, these conditions can be deliberately designed into a team. This finding is important: high-performing leadership teams are not primarily the product of fortunate chemistry. They are built.
The Five Disciplines of a High-Performing Leadership Team
Professor Peter Hawkins’ Five Disciplines model provides a practical framework for understanding what high-performing leadership teams do differently. The model is distinctive in that it is outward-facing: it positions the leadership team not as an end in itself but as a vehicle for creating value for the organisation and its stakeholders.
The five disciplines are not a sequential checklist. Teams may need to enter the framework at different points depending on their maturity and circumstances. What the model offers is a shared language for diagnosing where a leadership team is strong and where it is constrained.
Commissioning
Commissioning refers to the team’s clarity on why it exists and what it must deliver. A high-performing leadership team has a precise, shared understanding of its mandate — not the headline version, but the real one: what stakeholders need from this team, what value it must create, and how that changes in different circumstances. Teams that skip this discipline often work hard and coherently internally, but in the wrong direction.
Clarifying
Clarifying involves developing shared purpose, priorities and goals that are genuinely aligned across the team. Research on team effectiveness consistently identifies clear direction as one of the most important predictors of team performance — more significant than team composition or interpersonal dynamics. Without it, leadership teams tend to default to functional priorities rather than collective ones.
Co-creating
Co-creating concerns how the team actually works together: the quality of its conversations, its decision-making, and its collective intelligence. Psychological safety — the belief that it is safe to speak up, challenge, and disagree — is foundational to this discipline. Google’s Project Aristotle identified psychological safety as the single most important factor differentiating high-performing teams from the rest. Without it, leadership teams tend to avoid the difficult conversations that good decisions require.
Connecting
Connecting refers to the team’s relationships with key stakeholders beyond the team itself — customers, staff, board, regulators and partners. High-performing leadership teams are outward-facing; they actively manage their stakeholder relationships rather than assuming that internal alignment is enough. McKinsey research on organisational health consistently identifies the quality of stakeholder engagement as a differentiator for high-performing senior teams.
Core Learning
Core learning is the discipline that makes the other four compounding rather than static. It is the team’s capacity to reflect on how it is leading — not just what it is delivering — and to adapt its approach as circumstances evolve. Teams that embed deliberate habits of collective review and learning develop faster and sustain higher performance over time.
Why This Matters for Leadership Team Coaching
Understanding these five disciplines changes what you look for when a leadership team is underperforming. The presenting problem — poor decisions, slow execution, visible conflict, or strategy that isn’t landing — is rarely the root issue. More often, the team lacks clarity on its mandate (commissioning), is not aligned on what matters most (clarifying), has not built the trust needed for honest conversation (co-creating), is poorly connected to the organisation it is trying to lead (connecting), or never pauses to review how it is working (core learning).
Leadership team coaching works on the symptoms but to be as effective as possible it helps the team identify and shift the underlying conditions that are limiting its effectiveness — building the collective capability to lead through whatever the organisation faces next.
Archetype works with senior leadership teams in New Zealand to develop the disciplines, dynamics and shared clarity that high performance requires. Learn more about our approach to leadership team coaching.
