What Makes a Leadership Team Effective? The Research-Backed Answer
A leadership team is effective when it is genuinely structured as a team, has a clear and compelling purpose, is made up of the right people operating under the right conditions, practises five disciplines — including actively managing its stakeholder relationships — and maintains a climate where honest, challenging conversation is normal rather than rare. Research shows that most leadership teams are not doing all of these things. The gap is rarely obvious from the inside.
by Tony Gardner
6 min read
In this article
Five Signs Your Leadership Team Needs Coaching
What’s the Difference Between Individual Coaching and Team Coaching?
The Two-Team Tension: My Team or the Leadership Team?
Evidence-Based Leadership Team Coaching
Coaching Leadership Teams Through Organisational Change
Leadership Team Coaching Results and ROI
What to Expect from a Leadership Team Coaching Programme
What to Expect from an Archetype Leadership Team Coaching Programme
Most Leadership Teams Are Less Effective Than They Think
Research by Harvard scholars Ruth Wageman and Richard Hackman — based on 120 senior leadership teams studied across 11 countries — found that fewer than one in four leadership teams could be considered highly effective. More than 40% were actively under-serving the key stakeholders who depended on them.
That is not a comment on the quality of individual leaders. Most senior leadership teams are made up of highly capable people.
The finding is about something else: how the team operates and the environment in which it operates. These are things that can be changed. That is what makes leadership team effectiveness coachable — and why it is worth understanding properly.
Is It Actually a Team?
The first question any leadership team should honestly ask is whether it is genuinely operating as a team at all.
Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith’s research on real team performance found that many groups called leadership teams are functioning as working groups: collections of capable individuals who share information, coordinate functions, and report to the same person, but who do not hold genuine mutual accountability or produce meaningful collective outputs. Members of a working group are primarily accountable to the CEO. Members of a real team are accountable to each other as well — for shared outcomes that no individual could produce alone.
The distinction matters because every other investment in a leadership team’s effectiveness — coaching, development, frameworks, offsites — produces far less if the group is not genuinely functioning as a team in the first place.
A real team, in the research definition, has four characteristics:
Clear, stable membership — people know who is on the team, and that doesn’t change constantly
A shared purpose that requires collective effort, not just coordinated individual effort
Complementary skills — members bring different capabilities that the team genuinely needs
Mutual accountability — to each other, for shared outcomes, not just to the person at the top
The practical test: does the work of this organisation actually require these people to make decisions and produce outcomes together, or are we sharing information and aligning individual functions? At the senior level, the answer is almost always yes — but many teams don’t operate that way.
Wageman, Hackman and colleagues identified six conditions that together account for up to 80% of a leadership team’s effectiveness — and crucially, 60% of that effectiveness is determined by structural design decisions made before the team begins its work together. The conditions divide into two tiers.
Three Essentials — Without These, the Team Will Struggle
A Real Team
Not just a collection of people who report to the same leader. A team with clear, stable membership, where members genuinely need each other to do the work that matters — and where accountability is mutual, not just individual.
Over 90% of senior leadership teams are too large to make decisions effectively. Perceived politics and a desire for inclusion push membership up; team effectiveness goes down. The research consistently points to five to seven members as the range within which a senior team can genuinely function as a decision-making unit.
Ask yourself: Do all the people in our leadership team actually need to be there — and do we operate as though they do?
A Compelling Direction
Not a list of KPIs. A purpose that is clear, genuinely challenging, and consequential enough to demand the team’s collective best — and that is meaningfully different from the sum of individual functional objectives.
Research consistently confirms that goal clarity at the team level has a direct positive effect on team performance and alignment. Teams that can articulate a shared purpose — what they uniquely exist to achieve together — consistently outperform those that cannot.
Ask yourself: Can every member of our team articulate what this team exists to achieve — as a team, not as a group of functions?
The Right People
Not simply the most senior people, and not only functional heads. The right people means members who collectively bring the skills, perspectives, and interpersonal capabilities the team’s work requires.
Assembling individually exceptional leaders and expecting them to be collectively exceptional is one of the most common and costly mistakes at the senior level. Excellence in leading a function is a different capability from contributing effectively to collective leadership.
Ask yourself: Are the people in this team here because of their role, or because of what they contribute to the team’s collective work?
Three Enablers — These Amplify the Essentials
Sound Structure
Clear norms, sensible size, and work that is genuinely designed to require collaboration. Teams with well-defined operating agreements — how decisions get made, what topics belong in the room, how conflict is managed — function more effectively and make better use of the time members spend together.
Ask yourself: Do we have clear agreements about how we work — and do we keep them?
Supportive Organisational Context
A leadership team does not operate in a vacuum. The systems, reward structures, information flows, and resources the organisation provides either support or undermine the team’s ability to function. When individual performance incentives compete with collective accountability, teams fragment — regardless of intent.
Ask yourself: Does the way our organisation rewards and recognises people reinforce collective accountability, or undermine it?
Expert Coaching
Available at the right moments — particularly at launch, at significant transition points, and when the team is stuck — and focused on improving collective processes, not on telling the team what to decide. The research is direct on this: coaching amplifies the performance of a well-designed team significantly, but coaching cannot substitute for poor structural design. The conditions come first.
Six Conditions: What the Research Says Works
What’s the Difference Between Individual Coaching and Team Coaching?
Individual leadership coaching develops a person, helping them develop the capabilities for their journey.
Leadership team coaching develops a team and its systems for being effective.
The distinction matters more than it might appear. A leadership team of individually excellent people can still function poorly as a collective.
Functional heads can optimise their own area at the expense of the organisation. Competing priorities can slow decisions to a crawl. Trust gaps can make honest conversation impossible.
Individual coaching does not fix these problems and can sometimes make them worse, as more confident individual leaders push harder for their own agendas without a shared framework for alignment.
Research supports this distinction. Team coaching delivers 2.3 times greater impact on organisational alignment than individual coaching alone. Organisations that invest in leadership team coaching alongside individual development report 39% greater cross-functional collaboration and 45% improvement in team effectiveness scores within six months.
The unit of change in leadership team coaching is the team itself: its collective mindset, its shared habits, and its ability to create value that no individual leader could create alone.
Learn more about our 1:1 Executive Leadership Coaching
The Two-Team Tension: My Team or the Leadership Team?
Most leaders in a leadership team are members of two teams: they are part of the senior leadership team, and they lead a team of their own. This often creates tension for them around where they place their time, energy, and perhaps loyalty.
Many, consciously or unconsciously, give priority to the team they lead, where they are the senior voice, often started their career, and feel most control. In the leadership team, they are one voice among peers and if that team is not functioning well it feels like it is a worse use of their time.
When this tension is not surfaced and worked with, it quietly undermines collective leadership. Functional priorities trump whole-of-organisation priorities. Leaders protect their own teams when trade-offs are needed. The leadership team becomes a coordination forum for functions, not the place where the organisation is genuinely led.
Leadership team coaching brings this dual role into the open and helps leaders consciously balance their commitment to both teams, rather than drifting towards the most familiar or comfortable one.
Evidence-Based
Successfully coaching a leadership team requires structure and flexibility. Structure in the form of proven tools and flexibility to shape the process to the unique needs of the team.
Archetype uses the world’s most robust, evidence-based research into leadership team performance as the foundation for its programmes. Professor Peter Hawkins and Professor Ruth Wageman have led the development evidence-based leadership development frameworks that we use as the starting point and resources for our programmes.
The 5 Disciplines for High-Performing Leadership Teams
Professor Peter Hawkins' Five Disciplines model, developed over two decades and refined through hundreds of leadership teams worldwide, provides a map of what high-performing leadership teams must develop.
The model identifies five disciplines, three focused on the team's internal life and two that connect the team to the world beyond it.
Commissioning - the 'why'
Why does this team exist? The primary need for any leadership team is to have a clear purpose that requires the team to collaborate and which every team member understands similarly. Purpose is revealed rather than invented. Many leadership teams skip this step, operating with a vague sense of vague sense of direction that is insufficient to drive alignment and drive high-performance.
Clarifying - the 'what'
Once purpose is clear, the team can clarify what it’s trying to achieve: team KPIs, objectives, roles, expressed in the team charter that translates purpose into accountable action. Clarifying turns the 'why' into the tangible 'what' that everyone can work towards.
Co-creating - the 'how' inside the room
Co-creating is where most team coaching time is spent. It addresses collaboration, decision-making, how conflict is handled, and whether team members bring their real thinking into the room or withholding genuine views. Building genuine co-creation requires psychological safety, the shared confidence that honest contribution will be received, not penalised.
Connecting - the 'how' outside the room
Connecting beyond the team examines the team's relationships with stakeholders and the system within which it operates. Most team development ignores this dimension. Yet a leadership team's performance is shaped as much by how it manages its external relationships as by how it operates internally. Connecting asks: are we one voice to our stakeholders, or many?
Core Learning - the discipline behind all disciplines
Core Learning is the team's capacity to reflect, adapt, and improve continuously. It enables the team to evolve as challenges change, to turn mistakes into insight, and to sustain high performance rather than peak briefly and plateau. It is the discipline that makes all the others durable.
The 6 Conditions of Leadership Team Effectiveness
Alongside Hawkins' framework, Archetype draws on the research of Harvard scholars Professor Ruth Wageman, the late Professor Richard Hackman, and their colleagues.
Their landmark study - Senior Leadership Teams: What It Takes to Make Them Great (HBR Press, 2008) - examined 120 senior leadership teams across 11 countries, including teams at IBM, Shell, Unilever, and Sainsbury's.
The conclusion: six conditions account for up to 80% of a leadership team's effectiveness.
Three are essential:
1) A real team: a stable group with clear membership, genuinely interdependent work, and shared accountability, not simply a collection of leaders who report to the same person but do not need to work and lead together.
2) A compelling direction: a purpose that is clear, challenging, and consequential enough to demand the team's collective best. Different but aligned with organisational purpose, a leadership team purpose is the cornerstone of its performance, providing direction for how to functions and where it is leading the organisation.
3) The right people: members with the skills, diversity of perspective, and interpersonal capabilities the team's work requires. Sometimes this means members who are not simply the heads of functional departments.
Three are enablers that amplify the essentials:
4) Sound structure: clear norms, sensible size (typically five to seven members), and task design that genuinely requires collaboration. Size is a common challenge, where perceived politics or a desire for inclusivity leads to an over-sized leadership team.
5) Complementary organisational context: the systems, rewards, and resources that enable the team to function effectively. A leadership team does not operate in a vacuum and its performance is impacted by the environment it operates in, from the quality of data and insights it receives, to its relationship with the board, to the recognition and reward its members experience.
6) Expert team coaching: available when needed, focused on collective processes, and offered at the right moments in the team's development cycle. The goal is not a dependence on a coach rather the coach is a resource to be accessed when needed or most impactful. This is often when a team goes through membership. change or the origination is not achieving its goals.
When all six are in good shape the team is strong and effective.
Coaching Leadership Teams Through Organisational Change
Organisational change is one of the most demanding tests a leadership team faces. A new strategy, a restructure, a merger, a shift in market conditions, or a change of leadership at the top all place extraordinary pressure on the team’s ability to think clearly, decide collectively, and move at pace.
A number of reviews conclude that a large share of major change initiatives fail to deliver their intended benefits, often estimated at around two‑thirds, with inadequate senior leadership alignment and engagement cited as one of the most common causes.
Research identifies leadership alignment and collective leadership effectiveness — not flawed plans — as the primary reasons change fails to deliver. IMD’s analysis of major transformations found that lack of senior team alignment is among the most common causes of change failure, ahead of inadequate strategy or poor planning.
Leadership team coaching in a change context works on what matters most: helping the team get clear on what the change requires of them collectively, building the trust and candour needed to make difficult decisions under pressure, and developing the shared disciplines that allow the team to lead the change effectively.
Read more here about coaching leadership teams through change.
Read more about the pivotal role of leadership team alignment during organisational change.
Results and Return on Investment
The business case for leadership team coaching is substantial and well-evidenced. The outcome is clarity around the team’s role, how it operates and where t is leading the organisation.
The International Coaching Federation reports that 86% of organisations that invested in team coaching reported a positive return on investment.
Research published in coaching and organisational development journals documents an average 45% improvement in team effectiveness scores within six months of a sustained team coaching engagement. And a 52% improvement in psychological safety scores - the cultural foundation on which strategic candour and genuine collaboration depend.
The McKinsey Global Institute has found that organisations in the top quartile for leadership effectiveness deliver approximately twice the financial performance of those in the bottom quartile. The Wageman and Hackman research adds specificity: when the six conditions of team effectiveness are in place, coaching amplifies the performance of a well-designed team significantly.
At Archetype, we have helped private and public sector senior leadership teams around New Zealand improve how they function and lift their performance.
We measure outcomes at three levels: team process (how the team is working), team performance (what it is delivering), and stakeholder experience (how those the team serves experience its impact).
What to Expect from a Leadership Team Coaching Programme
Leadership team coaching is about bringing together senior leaders to build unified, powerful leadership.
It is a programme that combines team workshops with 1:1 conversations, typically over three to twelve months.
Discovery and assessment
Before coaching begins we develop a clear picture of where the team currently stands. This includes one-to-one conversations with each team member, often interviews with key stakeholders, and where appropriate structured assessment. Discovery surfaces what the team knows about itself, what it doesn't, and what the organisation most needs from it.
Contracting
Effective coaching rests on clear agreements: what the programme will address, how sessions will work, what confidentiality means in a team context, and how success will be measured. Contracting happens with the team as a whole, not just with the most senior sponsor.
Coaching sessions
Sessions typically run half a day to a full day, monthly or fortnightly, with the team working on its real agenda in real time. Between sessions, agreed actions are implemented and reviewed. The coach observes, challenges, and creates conditions for the team to develop its own capability, not to become dependent on the coach.
Stakeholder integration
At key points in the programme, we may bring key stakeholders to reflect on what they experience and what they need. This is the Connecting discipline in practice and it is where many teams make significant breakthroughs.
Review and embedding
The final phase focuses on embedding new habits, building the team's capacity for self-coaching, and reviewing outcomes against the original assessment.
Interested in combining team coaching with individual leadership development? Learn more about 1:1 Executive Coaching.
What to Expect from an Archetype Leadership Team Coaching Programme
There may be an urgent issue or it may be that the team simply isn’t working that well together. Whatever the situation the first step is a conversation to see what might help.
The way forward may be a one-off workshop focusing on a specific issue or capability, or a structured programme of work including 1:1 coaching to lift the team’s performance and effectiveness. Most of our work is somewhere in between.
The first step is Discovery, where we learn about the team’s situation. For a single workshop this may simply be a conversation. For a programme, it will likely include a one-to-one conversation with each team-member and perhaps others who interact with the team.
The next step is design, where we shape the workshop or programme to the needs and resources of the team and organisation. For a workshop this may only be a couple of hours, for a programme it could be a day of work.
The delivery programme will draw on some or all of the below elements to deliver the desired or necessary change and is concluded with the Review.
“Tony understands how powerful it is when leadership teams are teams. He has guided our leadership team from, in some cases, strangers through formation to performance. His style is insightful, flexible and engaging. He has enabled the team to work out how we can do our best work together.”