The Two-Team Tension: Balancing Your Own Team and the Leadership Team
The two-team tension describes the conflict senior leaders face when balancing membership of the leadership team against leading their own functional team. When unresolved, leaders default to prioritising their own function — weakening collective leadership at the top. Naming this tension and agreeing on the leadership team as “first team” is the core resolution.
4 min read
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.
How Does the Two-Team Tension Show Up for Leaders?
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 Does the Two-Team Tension Matter for Organisational Performance?
When leadership team members cannot balance their membership of two teams is causes issues in both and the organisation.
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.
What Does It Mean to Make the Leadership Team 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.
How Do You Make the Leadership Team Worth Prioritising?
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.
See Leadership Team Coaching for a fuller description of how Archetype works with leadership teams over time.
What Practical Strategies Help Leaders Balance the Two Teams?
Individual leaders cannot remove the two-team tension, but they can navigate it more consciously. Several practical strategies make a difference:
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 weight to a shared leadership reality that can be managed.
Be explicit about your “first team” . Agree with your CEO and leadership team colleagues that, as members of the leadership team, your primary duty is to the organisation-wide decisions you make together. Talk about this with your own team so they understand how you will handle tensions when they arise.
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.
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.
Use a 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 Does Leadership Team Coaching Help With the Two-Team Tension?
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.
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.
What Should I Do If the Two-Team Tension is Affecting My Leadership Team?
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.
Possible next steps
Read about 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 .
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the two-team tension in leadership?
The two-team tension is the pull senior leaders feel between their role as a member of the senior leadership team and their role as the leader of their own functional team. Most leaders unconsciously prioritise the team they lead, which weakens the collective leadership the organisation needs at the top.
Is the two-team tension normal?
Yes. It is one of the most consistently observed dynamics in senior leadership teams. Ruth Wageman’s research across more than 120 senior leadership teams found that confusion about what the leadership team is for — including who belongs to which team “first” — is one of the most common contributors to leadership team ineffectiveness.
What is a leader’s “first team”?
A leader’s first team is the team they treat as primary when there is a conflict between the two. For members of a senior leadership team, effective practice means making the leadership team the first team — anchoring decisions and loyalty in what the leadership team has collectively agreed is right for the organisation.
Why do senior leaders default to their own function?
Their own team is where they hold the most authority, where they have often built their career, and where the work feels most tangible and controllable. The leadership team, by contrast, involves more ambiguity, peer-level influence rather than direct authority, and often less rewarding meeting dynamics.
How does leadership team coaching address the two-team tension?
Leadership team coaching creates a shared language and explicit agreements about what it means to be part of the leadership team. It helps leaders surface where they are feeling pulled, builds a compelling case for the leadership team’s purpose, and develops trust and candour that makes being a member of the leadership team feel worth the investment.