What Type of Leadership Team Do You Have - and What Type Do You Need?
by Tony Gardner
Most senior leadership teams were never designed. They formed — through appointments, organisational structure, and the habits of whoever led them in the past and who leads them now.
The question of what type of team they should be may have never been asked. That omission matters more than most organisations realise.
Research by Ruth Wageman, Richard Hackman, and colleagues, drawing on over 120 senior teams across 11 countries, found that the majority of leadership teams are operating below the level their organisation needs. One of the central reasons is a mismatch between the type of team a leadership group has become and the type of team the organisation’s complexity and strategic demands actually require.
The four types
Wageman and Hackman’s research identifies four distinct types of senior leadership team, differentiated by the degree of collective interdependence they require and the kind of work they do together.
Type 1: Information-Sharing . Members gather to exchange updates, surface relevant information, and keep each other informed. Each person then returns to their domain and acts independently. The team - or group - functions as a reporting forum. There is no collective output — no decision, judgement, or direction that required the group to work together.
Type 2: Consultative. The leader, or sometimes a team-member, is responsible for a decision, but consults the team before doing so. Members are invited to advise, raise concerns, or offer perspective. Final authority rests with one person. The team’s involvement is input, not accountability.
Type 3: Coordinating . Members align their individual work and manage the dependencies between functions. They orchestrate who does what and surface cross-functional tensions early. But the outputs remain individually owned — each member is accountable for their domain, and the team’s role is to ensure those domains don’t conflict.
Type 4: Decision-Making . The team holds genuine collective accountability for shared outcomes. Decisions are made through deliberation, and members succeed or fail together on work that none of them could produce alone. This is a real team in Katzenbach and Smith’s sense — not a working group operating under a team label.
Why most teams are operating at the wrong level
The drift toward Type 1 and Type 2 is not the result of poor leadership. It is the predictable outcome of how senior leaders are appointed and incentivised.
Senior executives are selected for individual capability. They are accountable for their own functions. Their performance is evaluated on domain results. The structural logic of their role pulls them toward individual, not collective, work. Meeting together becomes a ritual of coordination and reporting — valuable, but far below what the organisation needs from the people at the top.
McKinsey research on top-team effectiveness echoes this finding. Many CEO-level teams spend the majority of their collective time on operational updates and functional performance reviews — work that is necessary but that does not require the people in the room. The genuinely collective work — the cross-functional trade-offs, the enterprise-wide allocation of resources, the resolution of strategic tensions — either doesn’t happen or happens bilaterally, outside the team setting.
The result is a team that is busy but not performing at the level its organisation requires.
What type does your organisation need?
Not every organisation needs a Type 4 decision-making team. The right type depends on the nature of the work at the top and the degree of interdependence required.
A holding company with largely independent business units may function well with a Type 1 or Type 2 team — the businesses are separate, the integration demands are low, and collective deliberation at the top may add little value. A professionally managed firm operating in conditions of strategic complexity, significant cross-functional interdependence, or rapid change almost certainly needs a Type 3 or Type 4 team.
Three questions help clarify the answer:
Does the organisation’s performance depend on integration across functions?
If strategy execution requires marketing, operations, technology, and finance to move together — and if the failure of one function to move damages the others — the leadership team needs to be doing more than coordinating. It needs to be making collective decisions about priorities, trade-offs, and resource allocation.
Are the most important decisions at the top genuinely cross-functional?
If the decisions that most affect organisational performance cut across multiple domains and cannot be made well by any single leader, the team needs collective deliberation — not consultation, not coordination, but shared accountability for the outcome.
Is the organisation’s experience of leadership shaped by collective coherence at the top?
If what employees, investors, or the board receive from the leadership team varies significantly depending on which leader they interact with, the team is not performing as a unified leadership presence. That coherence requires more than information-sharing — it requires genuine alignment on direction, not just awareness of each other’s activities.
If the answer to most of these questions is yes, the team needs to be operating at Type 3 or Type 4 — and the gap between where it is and where it needs to be is the gap that leadership team coaching is designed to close.
How to get there
Moving up the spectrum from Type 1 toward Type 4 is not primarily a matter of intent. Most leadership teams would say they want to be more strategic, more collective, more decisive. The barrier is structural — the conditions that produce higher-level team performance don’t exist yet, and good intentions don’t create them.
Wageman and Hackman identify six conditions that distinguish effective from ineffective senior teams. Three of them are foundational — and all three are relevant to the question of type:
1. Establish a real team. This means defining the team’s boundaries explicitly — who is on the team, what the team is responsible for collectively, and what genuinely requires the group’s deliberation. Many leadership teams are too large to decide effectively, include people whose presence is positional rather than functional, and have never defined what belongs to the team versus what belongs to individuals. Getting this right is the precondition for everything else.
2. Set a compelling direction. The team needs a shared purpose that is specific enough to generate genuine interdependence — a set of outcomes the team is collectively accountable for achieving, not just individually contributing to. Without a shared stake in a collective outcome, there is no basis for Type 3 or Type 4 behaviour. The team will default to individual reporting because that is what its incentives and structure support.
3. Build an enabling operating model. This means establishing the norms and practices that support collective work: how the team makes decisions (and who has authority for which type of decision), how it manages conflict, how it allocates its collective time, and how it holds itself accountable for collective outputs rather than just individual performance. McKinsey’s research on top teams similarly identifies clear decision rights and focused agendas as among the most significant practical levers for improving top-team performance.
Beyond these conditions, the practical transition from one type to another typically requires:
Redesigning the team’s agenda — shifting from functional reporting to the genuine collective work: cross-functional decisions, strategic trade-offs, enterprise priorities
Making decision rights explicit — clarifying what the team decides together versus what individual members decide alone, and holding to that distinction
Creating accountability for collective outputs — establishing what the team, as a team, is being held to — not just what each member is delivering in their own domain
Working on the team, not just in it — investing time in how the team operates, not just what it produces. Effective teams are not accidents; they are built through deliberate attention to the conditions that make collective performance possible.
The question worth asking
Most leadership teams do not know what type they are. They have a sense that they are not performing as well as they could, but they locate the problem in individual behaviour — someone who dominates, someone who defers, someone who doesn’t follow through — rather than in the design of the team itself.
The more useful question is structural: what type of team have we become, what type does our organisation need, and what would it take to close that gap?
These questions rarely gets asked in the ordinary run of leadership team meetings. It is exactly the kind of question that leadership team coaching creates the space to answer.
If you’re uncertain what type of leadership team you have — or what type you need to be — explore how Archetype works with leadership teams.
