What Should a Leadership Team Actually Be Responsible For?
by Tony Gardner
It sounds like a question with an obvious answer. Ask most senior leaders what their leadership team is responsible for, and you will get a confident reply: strategy, performance, culture, people. Heads will nod. No one will disagree.
But ask a different question — what does this team do together that none of you could do alone? — and the conversation changes. Answers become less certain. There is often a long pause.
That gap between the first answer and the second one is where greatest opportunity for lifting leadership team performance lives.
The question most teams never ask
Many leadership teams operate for years without ever explicitly defining their collective mandate — the specific work that belongs to the team as a whole, rather than to its individual members.
Not answering this question is not a failure of intelligence or intent. It reflects something structural. Senior executives are appointed for their functional expertise. They are accountable for their own domains. The gravitational pull of individual responsibility is strong, and the case for collective work is rarely made explicit.
The result is a team that convenes regularly but operates largely as a coordinating mechanism for individual leaders. Meetings run. Presentations are made. Agreement is expressed. But the team produces few, if any, genuinely collective outputs — decisions, judgements, or directions that required the group to work together and could not have been reached by its members acting separately.
Ruth Wageman, Richard Hackman, and colleagues, drawing on research across 120 senior teams in 11 countries, found that many top teams default to this pattern — drifting toward information-sharing rather than decision-making, coordination rather than collective judgement. Their research identifies four distinct types of senior leadership team, ranging from information-sharing teams at one end to decision-making teams at the other. Most organisations benefit most from a decision-making team — but most teams in practice operate several levels below that.
What the Team Owns Collectively — and What It Doesn’t
The starting point is a clear distinction between what belongs to the team and what belongs to individual members.
Individual members own their functional domains. The CFO owns financial performance. The Chief People Officer owns talent and culture systems. The Chief Operating Officer owns operational delivery. These are not collective responsibilities — they are individual ones, and treating them as otherwise creates confusion rather than clarity.
What belongs to the team collectively is different. Wageman and colleagues describe it as the work that requires genuine interdependence — work that only they can do and only do together.
Work where the collective judgement of the team produces something better than any member could produce alone, and where the stakes are significant enough to warrant the investment of collective time and attention. In practice, this typically includes:
Strategic direction — not the presentation of a strategy developed elsewhere, but genuine deliberation and resolution of the choices that define where the organisation is going and how resources will be allocated
Enterprise-wide priorities — deciding which initiatives sit above any single function and how the organisation’s finite capacity is directed
Cross-functional alignment — resolving the tensions and trade-offs that arise at the boundaries between functions, where no individual leader has the authority or perspective to decide alone
Culture and collective norms — modelling and reinforcing the standards of behaviour the organisation is being asked to hold, which requires consistency across the team
The organisation’s experience of leadership — the coherence of what the organisation receives from the top, shaped by how the team operates together, not just how each leader performs separately
Why the Boundary Matters
Without a clear boundary between collective and individual responsibility, two problems tend to emerge.
The first is that the team crowds its agenda with individual reporting. Functional updates, project status reviews, and operational decisions that sit within a single leader’s remit fill the available time. The team is busy but not performing.
The second is the opposite: individual decisions are treated as collective ones, brought to the group for consensus — slowing everything down and eroding each leader’s authority to act within their own domain. This produces the slow, deferred, and relitigated decisions that characterise underperforming leadership teams.
Katzenbach and Smith’s distinction between a working group and a real team is useful here. A working group is a set of individuals who coordinate around shared interests but remain individually accountable. A real team has a shared purpose and collective accountability for outputs the group produces together. Many leadership teams call themselves teams but function as working groups — and never notice the difference, because no one has asked the question directly.
How To Find the Answer
There is no universal answer to what a leadership team should be responsible for — it depends on the organisation’s strategy, current challenges, and how its CEO wants to lead. What is universal is the need to answer the question explicitly. A useful starting point is three distinctions:
1. What type of team do we need to be? The choice between an information-sharing, consultative, coordinating, or decision-making team determines what the team’s agenda should contain, how much time members should invest in collective work, and what success looks like. Most organisations operating in conditions of complexity and change are best served by a decision-making team — but that requires a genuine commitment to collective accountability, not just the label.
2. What decisions genuinely require us to be in the room together? A practical exercise is to map the decisions made by the team over the past year and ask, for each: Did this require collective deliberation, or could one person have made it? Was the team’s involvement additive, or did it create delay? This quickly surfaces where the team is adding value and where it is becoming a bottleneck.
3. What is the work only this team can do? This is the most generative version of the question. It focuses attention not on what the team is currently doing, but on what the organisation most needs from the team — cross-functional integration, enterprise-wide direction, coherent leadership presence — that no individual member can provide alone.
The Deeper Point
A leadership team that has not resolved its mandate cannot perform consistently, because its members are making different assumptions about what they are there to do. Some will invest heavily in collective work; others will return their attention to their own domains after the meeting. The team will experience persistent misalignment not because its members disagree, but because they are answering different questions.
Getting explicit about collective responsibility is not an administrative task. It is one of the most consequential conversations a leadership team can have — and one that most teams have never had at all.
If your leadership team seems to be unclear about what it should be working on together explore Leadership Team Coaching.
