10 Reasons Senior Leadership Teams Fail, and How to Develop a Stronger One

Most senior leadership teams are made up of capable, experienced people. Yet put them in a room together and something often goes missing: decisions stall, meetings become status updates, and the real conversations happen in the corridor afterwards.

The problem is rarely individual talent. It's how the team works as a team. The good news is that every one of the failure points below can be fixed with focused leadership team development.

If you're looking for the basics (what a senior leadership team is and what it should be responsible for), start with our guide to why senior leadership teams fail and what to do about it. This article focuses on the fixes.

1. No shared purpose

The problem: Each leader is clear on their own function's goals, but no one can say in one sentence what the leadership team exists to do together. The team becomes a collection of department heads, not a leadership team.

The fix: Agree a leadership team charter: a one-page statement of the team's purpose, the three to five priorities only the SLT can deliver, and how you'll measure them. Revisit it every quarter.

2. Functional loyalty beats team loyalty

The problem: Leaders see their own department as their "first team" and the SLT as a meeting they attend. Resources are defended, not shared.

The fix: Make the leadership team everyone's first team. Set at least one shared objective that every member is measured on, and review cross-functional trade-offs openly at SLT meetings rather than one to one.

3. Low trust and guarded conversations

The problem: People hold back concerns, avoid admitting mistakes and save the honest views for private conversations. Without trust, every other fix fails.

The fix: Build trust deliberately. Start with structured personal sharing (career histories, working preferences, how each person handles pressure) and a psychometric tool such as EQ-i 2.0 so the team understands how each member operates. Leaders go first: when the CEO admits a mistake, others follow.

4. Artificial harmony

The problem: Meetings feel polite and efficient, but important disagreements never surface. Decisions are agreed in the room and quietly ignored afterwards.

The fix: Treat healthy conflict as part of the job. Ask "What's the strongest argument against this?" before every major decision, and rotate a "challenger" role so disagreement becomes expected, not personal.

5. Meetings that are status updates

The problem: SLT meetings are filled with operational reporting that could be an email, leaving no time for strategy, risk or people decisions.

The fix: Split operational and strategic agendas. Move updates to a pre-read, and protect at least half of every SLT meeting for the few decisions only the leadership team can make.

6. Unclear decision rights

The problem: No one is sure who decides what. Issues bounce between leaders, get escalated to the CEO or quietly stall.

The fix: For your top recurring decisions, agree who decides, who is consulted and who is informed. A simple decision-rights grid removes most of the friction in one session.

7. No accountability between peers

The problem: Leaders hold their own teams to account but avoid challenging each other. Missed commitments go unmentioned, so standards slip.

The fix: Make commitments visible. End every meeting by recording who will do what by when, open the next meeting by reviewing it, and agree as a team that peers, not just the CEO, are expected to raise missed commitments.

8. Leaders stuck in operational mode

The problem: Senior leaders spend their days firefighting and rescuing their teams, leaving no time to lead. Strategy becomes something you'll get to "next quarter".

The fix: Help each leader delegate operational decisions and step up to strategic work. See how one leader made this shift in our case study From Rescuer to Leader: how an Operations Director got her weekends back.

9. Lack of emotional intelligence under pressure

The problem: Under pressure, capable leaders become defensive, controlling or withdrawn, and the team's behaviour follows.

The fix: Develop emotional intelligence across the team. Self-awareness, impulse control and empathy are learnable skills, and they matter most when the stakes are high. Our guide to emotional intelligence coaching explains how this works in practice.

10. No investment in the team itself

The problem: Organisations invest in individual leaders but never in the leadership team as a unit. The team is expected to "just work".

The fix: Treat executive team development as an ongoing priority, not a one-off away day. The strongest leadership teams review how they work together as regularly as they review the numbers.

Leadership team building exercises that actually work

Good leadership team building is less about activities and more about structured conversations. Three exercises we use with senior teams:

1. The team charter workshop: in half a day, agree your shared purpose, top priorities and behavioural ground rules, then sign it.

2. The "best and worst" review: each leader shares the best and worst decision the team made this year, and the group identifies what made the difference.

3. The peer feedback round: each member tells every other member one thing they value and one thing they'd like more of. It's uncomfortable the first time and transformative by the third.

When to bring in leadership team coaching

Some issues are hard to fix from the inside, especially when trust is low or the CEO is part of the problem. Leadership team coaching gives the SLT an independent facilitator who can surface what isn't being said, hold the team to account and build new habits over time.

Consider senior leadership team coaching if:

• the same issues come up meeting after meeting

• a new CEO or several new members have joined

• the team is facing a merger, restructure or major change

• strategy is agreed but not delivered

Call us on 0845 052 3701 (UK)

Find out more about Senior Leadership Training programmes by calling us on 0845 052 3701.