Why Leadership Teams Fail?

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Why Leadership Teams Fail

By Thomas Keil and Marianna Zangrillo | Harvard Business Review Magazine | September–October 2024

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In their pursuit of strong performance, CEOs and executives often overlook a critical factor in organizational success: the health of their leadership team. That’s a big problem, because a dysfunctional team can become a serious drag on strategy execution and erode morale. Not only that, the health of a senior team can make or break a CEO’s tenure.  Leadership teams tend to exhibit one of three main patterns of dysfunction referred as shark tank, petting zoo and mediocracy.

The shark tank. Only highly ambitious leaders make it to the top team, and it’s inevitable that they will compete with one another—to promote their ideas, gain access to scarce resources, or win promotions. Within limits, this is healthy and important, because competition fosters innovation and drives results. But unconstrained it can lead to a self-serving, destructive feeding frenzy in which meetings become battlegrounds for personal agendas, decisions are made through power struggles rather than open discussion, and teams have difficulty coming to consensus and executing on strategic initiatives.  Why do leadership teams become shark tanks? Often, research suggests, it’s because the CEO or the executive leading the team fails to provide clear direction, set boundaries, and reign in incipient aggressive behaviors among team members.

The petting zoo.  The problems that top teams face rarely have an obvious solution; that’s why they haven’t been solved at lower levels of the organization. To address the complicated problems they’re presented with, the members of a leadership team have to spar actively. They must challenge one another’s ideas, question assumptions, and push back in debates. Even as they move collaboratively toward a shared goal, they are propelled by the forces of conflict, competition, and ambition. When these forces fade away, what’s left is a petting zoo, in which an atmosphere of ineffectual niceness reigns. Everybody shies away from confrontation, meetings become echo chambers, ideas go unchallenged, and decisions are made without sufficient critical evaluation. As a result, teams uncover few opportunities for innovation, renewal, and growth.  Why do some become petting zoos? Often, it’s because the team leader has put an inordinate amount of emphasis on collaboration.

The mediocracy. While the first two patterns of dysfunction emerge from an overemphasis on either competition or collaboration, the third pattern emerges when neither competition nor collaboration is emphasized enough. Team members lack the skills or motivation needed to drive individual unit performance; at the same time, there is little collaborative spirit on the team. The executives operate in silos, hindering synergy and leading to duplicated efforts and missed opportunities.  In mediocracies, there’s a mismatch between what a team needs to do and what it is able to do. Long periods of success are sometimes to blame: Instead of challenging themselves and developing plans to meet the demands of the future, teams become complacent, fixate on past glories, and develop a harmful preference for the status quo.

From shark tank to team of stars. Conflict is everywhere in a shark tank, and the only way to settle things down is to locate the source—which often will turn out to be just one or two people who are engaging in self-serving behaviors that turn collaboration into cutthroat competition. If you discover that this is the case, you’ll need to confront the individuals and make them aware of the effects of their behavior.  If you want to not only control but also prevent shark-tank behaviors, you’ll need to clearly define for your team what behaviors are desirable, acceptable, and unacceptable.

From petting zoo to synergistic team. You need to encourage more conflict among members of the leadership team, in the form of constructively critical debate. But you’ll only be able to manage that if you can first create a foundation of trust and psychological safety. 

From mediocracy to a set of high performers. If you find that most of your leaders are ill-suited for their roles or not up to the task, you may need to significantly remake your team. 

The authors’ research suggests that it’s often a lack of clarity—strategic, operational, and behavioral—that paves the way for leadership-team dysfunction.  No matter what kind of dysfunction a company may need to address, there are several general steps that all leaders should take to ensure the health of their teams:  Develop a clear vision and purpose.  Focus on alignment.  Outline responsibilities. And establish behavioral norms.

3 key takeaways from the article

1. In their pursuit of strong performance, CEOs and executives often overlook a critical factor in organizational success: the health of their leadership team. That’s a big problem, because a dysfunctional team can become a serious drag on strategy execution and erode morale.
2. Leadership teams tend to exhibit one of three main patterns of dysfunction. The first, characterized by infighting and political maneuvering – labelled as shark tank. The second, characterized by conflict avoidance and an overemphasis on collaboration, termed as petting zoo. And the third, characterized by complacency, a lack of competence, and an unhealthy focus on past success – referred as mediocracy.
3. It’s often a lack of clarity—strategic, operational, and behavioral—that paves the way for leadership-team dysfunction.  No matter what kind of dysfunction a company may need to address, there are several general steps that all leaders should take to ensure the health of their teams:  Develop a clear vision and purpose.  Focus on alignment.  Outline responsibilities. And establish behavioral norms.

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Topics:  Teams, Organizational Performance, Trust, Collaboration, Competition, Synergies