There is a kind of dysfunction that almost never appears in board reports. It does not show up in risk registers or audit findings. It is not captured in employee engagement surveys, though you can sometimes feel its effects in the data if you know where to look. It is the dysfunction of the leadership team itself, and in my experience, it is one of the most consequential and consistently underestimated risks in any organisation.
The leadership team sets the tone for everything below it. Not through its stated values or its culture declarations, but through its actual behaviour: how it makes decisions, how it manages disagreement, how clearly it communicates priorities, how much its members genuinely trust and respect each other. Every one of those dynamics radiates downward through the organisation, often invisibly, in ways that have profound effects on performance, culture, and the experience of the people who work there.
What leadership team dysfunction actually looks like
It rarely looks dramatic. It usually looks like a team that is collectively less than the sum of its parts. Individual members are capable and accomplished. In their own domains, they are effective. But in the room together, something is off. Decisions get made and then revisited. Priorities are unclear, or are clear to each person individually but misaligned across the team. Information is managed rather than shared. Meetings are polite but not honest. The difficult conversation is perpetually deferred.
Below the leadership team, people feel it. They may not be able to name it precisely, but they can see the inconsistency in messaging. They can feel the lack of unified direction. They adapt, often ingeniously, to the ambiguity that the leadership team creates. But adaptation to poor leadership team dynamics has a cost. It consumes energy that should go towards the work. It creates political noise that obscures what actually matters. It undermines the confidence of people who are trying to do good work in a confused environment.
Why it persists
Leadership team dysfunction persists partly because it is rarely named. There is an implicit norm in many organisations that the leadership team functions well, because to acknowledge otherwise would be to implicate the people at the top, and those are precisely the people with the power to name it or not. The CEO who has tolerated a difficult dynamic for years has usually found a way to manage around it. The team has adapted to its own dysfunction.
It also persists because the investment required to address it – time, honest conversation, the willingness to be uncomfortable together – can feel disproportionate when set against the immediate pressures of running the organisation. Leadership team development is the thing that gets displaced by the next quarter’s results, the next restructure, the next crisis.
The cost of waiting
The irony is that a leadership team that functions well is one of the highest-leverage investments any organisation can make. The quality of its thinking, the speed and quality of its decisions, the clarity it creates for the rest of the organisation; all of these have measurable effects on performance. Getting this right is not a soft priority. It is a commercial one.
Here’s the question worth sitting with: if your leadership team were assessed today – not on individual performance, but on how well it actually works as a collective – what would you find? And if the answer is uncomfortable, what is it costing you to leave it unaddressed?