Five Signs Your Leadership Team Is Functioning as a Group Not a Team

The true state of a leadership team’s performance can be hard to see. Authority, activity, and visible consensus can all mask the absence of genuine collective performance. And leadership teams rarely describe themselves as underperforming — the signals tend to show up elsewhere: in execution, in decisions, in how the organisation experiences those at the top.

Research from Ruth Wageman, Richard Hackman, and colleagues — drawing on 120 senior teams across 11 countries — found that over 50% of senior leadership teams are ineffective, and over 90% are too large to make decisions effectively.

Underperformance at the top is more common than most organisations, and their leaders, acknowledge.

A useful lens for understanding why comes from Katzenbach and Smith’s distinction between a working group and a real team. A working group is a collection of individuals, each accountable for their own domain, who coordinate but do not truly collaborate. A real team has shared accountability for a collective output — the members succeed or fail together. Many leadership teams operate as working groups while assuming they are something more. The signs below reflect that gap.

1. Strategy doesn’t translate into execution

The team agrees on direction in the room, then leaves and pursues different priorities. Alignment at the top is assumed rather than built. Individual leaders return to their own domains and interpret strategy through the lens of their own function. The result is effort without coherence — activity that doesn’t compound.

This is one of the clearest indicators that the team is operating as a collection of functional heads rather than a collective leadership. Shared direction requires more than agreement in a meeting; it requires shared ownership of outcomes that sit above any one function.

2. Decisions are slow, deferred, or relitigated

Meetings produce agreement but not resolution. The same issues resurface without clear ownership or movement. Decisions made in one forum are quietly undone or re-opened in another.

This pattern often reflects an unclear mandate — the team hasn’t established what decisions belong to it collectively versus what sits with individual members. It can also reflect a structural problem: teams that are too large to decide effectively often default to discussion rather than resolution.

3. Functional heads operate as silos

Leaders manage their own domains effectively but struggle to operate as a collective. Cross-functional work depends on personal relationships rather than shared processes. When collaboration does happen, it is bilateral — two functions negotiating — rather than genuinely collective.

The organisation often experiences this as inconsistency: different messages, different priorities, different standards depending on which part of the business you’re in. The leadership team is present at the top but not visible as a unified force throughout the organisation.

4. The team has changed significantly

A new CEO, significant new appointments, post-merger integration, or rapid growth has altered the team’s composition. The former way of working no longer fits — the relationships, norms, and working rhythms that existed before don’t transfer automatically to a different team.

Composition change is one of the most underestimated sources of leadership team underperformance. The team that worked well under previous conditions may not be well-configured for current ones. And new members who are individually capable may struggle to integrate into a team whose ways of working are implicit rather than explicit.

5. The team’s external relationships are inconsistent

Different leaders send different messages to the same stakeholders. The organisation — including the board, investors, staff, and key partners — experiences the leadership team as multiple voices rather than one. Messaging - and trust and confidence in leadership — become functions of which leader someone interacts with.

This is a tangible consequence of operating as a working group rather than a real team. A genuinely aligned leadership team presents a coherent face to the organisation, not because messages are scripted, but because the shared direction is real enough to be expressed consistently by each of its members.

What to do if you recognise these signs

These signs rarely appear in isolation. They tend to cluster — and their presence usually reflects something structural rather than personal. The issue is less about individual capability and more about whether the team has done the work deliberately to perform collectively.

Leadership team coaching addresses the conditions that make collective performance possible: clarity of purpose, appropriate size and composition, the right working rhythms, and deliberate attention to how the team operates — not just what it decides.

If you recognise two or more of these signs it’s worth examining whether your leadership team has put in place what it takes to function as a real team rather than a working group.

If change may be playing a role in your leadership teams performance read Coaching Leadership Teams Through Organisational Change.

Or learn more about Leadership Team Coaching.