Why Senior Teams Are Not Always Teams
- Andrew Pigott
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
The strategy conversation goes well. The chief executive has set out the case clearly: simplify access, reduce duplication, move resource toward prevention and earlier intervention. The data is strong. The financial logic is sound. Around the table, the senior team agrees. There is no significant challenge. The direction is set.
Then implementation begins.
The team was aligned while the decision was abstract. It became harder when the decision started asking each area to give something up.
Operations raises concerns about frontline capacity that is already stretched. Finance worries about the cost of running two systems in parallel during transition. HR flags workforce relations risk. The operational lead says the corporate design does not translate cleanly to local demand. Together, they do not prevent agreement — they prevent it moving. The transformation director finds that every element of the plan, confirmed in principle at the strategy session, is being reopened in practice.
Nobody is being obstructive. Each concern is legitimate and well-articulated. But the team has not yet made the shift from bringing a constituency into the room to holding the whole organisation together in the room. So the decision keeps returning, dressed up as implementation detail.
Not politics. Not selfishness.
The instinct when this happens is to reach for a relational explanation: there is not enough trust, leaders are protecting their patch, the chief executive is not pressing hard enough. These readings are common. They are also usually incomplete.
Senior leaders in complex organisations carry two legitimate sets of responsibility simultaneously. They are accountable for a function, service, profession, site or budget — and they are collectively responsible for an enterprise they are jointly meant to hold. Both responsibilities are real. Both generate scrutiny, performance pressure and reputational risk.
Senior teams often meet together without truly being designed to lead together. What looks like a commitment gap may actually be a gap in shared mandate, shared identity and shared consequences.
Functional loyalty, in this context, is not a character flaw. It is usually the most rational response to how the system has arranged accountability and scrutiny. When a director's performance is assessed against their own area's targets, their budget, their workforce, their service quality indicators, it should not surprise anyone that their primary orientation remains toward those things when a decision starts to bite. If leaders are measured mainly on local performance while being asked to act collectively, the team should not be surprised when local accountability wins under pressure.
The more useful question is not "why are these leaders protecting their patch?" It is "what has this team been designed to hold together, and what does that require when interests diverge?"
Shared calendar is not the same as shared work
Team effectiveness research makes a useful distinction here: a real team is not just a group that meets regularly and communicates well. It is a group with shared work that requires genuine interdependence — work that no individual can hold alone.
Many senior leadership groups have a shared calendar and a shared agenda. Fewer have a shared task in this sense. They are collegial. They are well-informed about each other's areas. But collegiality is not the same as collective accountability. A group can be pleasant, well-run and highly functional as a forum, and still operate primarily as a negotiation between representatives rather than as an enterprise team.
The King's Fund makes a similar point in its work on collective leadership in health and care: senior leadership is not only about leading one's own area well, but holding responsibility for outcomes that cut across boundaries. That shift, they note, does not happen automatically when senior leaders are placed in a room together. It requires deliberate design and explicit conversation.
The pattern is not unique to public services. A large organisation whose regional or divisional leaders meet monthly, share data and agree priorities in principle can still find that every decision affecting local resource or headcount is quietly re-litigated once leaders return to their own area. The room looks like one team. What operates beyond the room often does not.
A pattern from a large local authority
A metropolitan local authority sets a new corporate priority: a shift toward how adult social care, housing and public health services work together to support people earlier, reduce acute demand and create a more financially sustainable model over five years.
The senior team endorses the direction. The logic is clear and the external pressure, financial and demographic, makes inaction increasingly difficult. But as the design work begins, the same conversation recurs in different forms. The director of adult social care worries that the new integrated model will expose her service to demand it has no additional resource to meet. The director of housing is concerned that his team's contribution will be difficult to quantify. The chief finance officer is cautious about any model that creates interdependencies before savings are confirmed.
In each case, the concern is reasonable. In combination, they prevent the design moving. Each leader has attended the senior team as a steward of the whole but returned to their own area as a guardian of their own position. The group has not agreed what holding the enterprise decision requires of each of them once they leave the room.
Four diagnostic questions
These are not remedies to impose. They are questions to ask together, early, before the alignment in the room starts to thin out.
What exists at this table that no single function can hold alone?
This question identifies whether the group has a shared enterprise task or only a shared agenda. If leaders struggle to answer it clearly, the team may not yet have articulated what it exists to do together. "Strategic oversight" is not precise enough. The answer should name something specific: a decision, a trade-off, an outcome that genuinely requires all of them.
What are you carrying from your area, and what are you holding here for the whole?
This question names the dual role without shaming anyone for it. Local responsibility is acknowledged rather than suppressed, while being made visible as one input rather than the controlling voice. The point is not to demand that leaders abandon their local accountability. It is to make the tension discussable.
Where have recent decisions looked agreed but unravelled in practice?
Reviewing decisions that held in the room but weakened in execution moves the conversation from personality to pattern. At what point did enterprise agreement revert to local negotiation? What was the trigger? What does that reveal about what the team has not yet resolved collectively?
Once this team has decided something, what do members owe the decision beyond this room?
This question makes collective responsibility explicit without demanding false unanimity. Leaders can hold reservations and still hold a decision. But the team needs to agree what that means: how they talk about it in their own areas, how they handle challenges to it, and what they bring back to the table rather than resolve locally.
The real test of the team
A senior team can look highly effective inside the meeting room. The conversation is serious, the relationships are good, the papers are thorough. But the test is not how the meeting feels. It is whether the decisions it makes continue to hold once members return to their own areas and are asked to absorb a cost or accept a constraint that the enterprise decision requires.
The hardest shift is not from disagreement to agreement. It is from representation to shared responsibility.
If that shift has not been made explicit, the meeting may be doing something valuable and yet not quite doing the thing only it can do: making and holding decisions that no individual function, service or place can carry alone.
A senior team becomes real when the decision still holds after everyone has returned to the place where it costs them something.
At Common Path Connection, we help senior teams look beneath surface alignment to the loyalties, accountabilities and decision patterns that shape what actually holds.
Our Leadership & Teams work helps teams clarify what they exist to hold together, which decisions only they can make, and how enterprise commitments stay alive once leaders return to their own areas.
Our Leadership Team Reset is designed for teams that are ready to have that conversation in depth.
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