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The Hidden Warning Signs Your Executive Team Effectiveness Is Breaking Down (and How to Fix Them)

Key Takeaways


  • 75% of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional, costing organisations an estimated US$438 billion in lost productivity each year [1]


  • Executive team dysfunction rarely announces itself loudly. It hides in polite meetings, corridor conversations, and unspoken disagreements


  • The five most common warning signs are: conflict avoidance, decisions that unravel, fake harmony, slow decision-making, and dropping energy levels


  • Companies that crack the code on team effectiveness see 2.3x higher revenue growth and are 21% more profitable [2]


  • Psychological safety (the ability to speak up without fear) is the single strongest predictor of team performance, according to Google's Project Aristotle [3]


  • Fixing an underperforming executive team starts with diagnosis, not assumptions


  • Esendia, winner of the Talent Labs Award for Best Leadership Strategy, has helped organisations including CIM and Moore Barlow achieve measurable, independently verified results


Executive teams are often described as the engine room of organisational success. They set direction, make high-stakes decisions, and model the behaviours that ripple across every layer of the business. When a top team works well, you feel it: decisions are clear and fast, people are energised, and the organisation delivers on its promises.


But what happens when things are not working?


The uncomfortable truth is that executive team dysfunction rarely announces itself with shouting matches or visible power struggles. Far more often, it lurks beneath the surface, hidden in polite meetings, unspoken disagreements, and subtle patterns of behaviour that quietly erode performance. By the time the impact becomes visible (missed goals, stalled transformation, rising attrition), the cost is already significant.


Research published in the Harvard Business Review found that 75% of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional, struggling with misaligned priorities, unclear roles, and ineffective decision-making. The cost? An estimated US$438 billion in lost productivity globally each year. [1]


For executive teams, where the stakes are higher and the ripple effects reach further, dysfunction can be even more damaging. But the good news is this: identifying the early warning signs gives leaders the chance to intervene before these challenges harden into culture.


This article explores how to recognise when your top team is underperforming, and what you can do to turn things around.


Why Team Dynamics at the Top Are Different


Before exploring the warning signs, it is worth understanding why top team effectiveness presents a unique challenge.


Teams are not simply collections of individuals. They are living systems shaped by invisible team dynamics, shared norms, and unspoken expectations. At the executive level, those dynamics become even harder to read. Senior leaders are skilled at projecting confidence and composure. Conflict avoidance can look like alignment. Disengagement can look like measured restraint. Silence in a meeting can feel like consensus when it is actually suppression.


Understanding a team more deeply requires looking through several lenses at once: the roles each person plays, the developmental stage the team is in, the behaviours people exhibit day to day, and the structural factors (such as decision rights and reporting lines) that either support or undermine the team's ability to function.


When something goes wrong, it is rarely just about individual performance. It is about how team members interact, how they make decisions together, and how they handle tension or setbacks.


The Subtle Warning Signs of Executive Team Underperformance


Executive team dysfunction has a different texture to dysfunction lower down the organisation. These are not people who got to the C-suite by being passive or easily overlooked. They are highly competitive, politically adept, and skilled at managing impressions. When things go wrong at this level, it tends to be more sophisticated, and therefore harder to spot, than simple interpersonal friction.


Research by Thomas Keil and Marianna Zangrillo, published in Harvard Business Review and based on interviews with more than 100 CEOs and senior executives, identified three distinct patterns of failing executive teams: the shark tank (characterised by infighting and political manoeuvring), the petting zoo (conflict avoidance masquerading as collaboration), and the mediocracy (complacency built on past success). [5] What strikes most observers is how different these patterns look on the surface, yet how similar the damage is beneath.


Here is what to watch for.


1. Alignment in the Room, Warfare in the Corridors


At executive level, open disagreement in meetings is often suppressed not because people lack conviction, but because they are skilled enough to know that direct confrontation carries risk. Gartner research found that just 31% of C-suite executives consider the C-suite to be their primary team. The majority still identify primarily with their own function, their own people, and their own agenda. [6]


The result is a particular pattern: apparent agreement in the meeting, followed by quiet non-compliance afterwards. Decisions get relitigated in bilateral conversations. The CFO "raises a concern" with the CEO separately. The COO proceeds with a different interpretation of what was agreed. The strategy looks unified on paper; the execution tells a different story.


This is not conflict avoidance in the way a junior team might avoid it. It is conflict displacement, managed and deliberate, by people who understand power.


2. Decisions That Unravel Through Political Navigation


The version of this that plays out at senior level is more active than simple drift. Research published in HBR found that 70% of senior executives acknowledge that interpersonal conflict slows key strategic decisions. [7] But at the top, the mechanism is often less obvious than delay: it is selective compliance, where executives publicly back a decision and then quietly route around it.


What this looks like in practice: the initiative that always needs "one more piece of analysis" before it can proceed. The resource allocation that somehow never quite reflects what the team agreed. The new operating model that the business units are implementing in their own way. Each individual act looks reasonable in isolation. The cumulative effect is that nothing the team decides actually sticks.


3. Harmony as a Status Game


Keil and Zangrillo's research gave a specific name to one of the most common patterns they observed: the petting zoo. Everyone is courteous. Meetings are civil. And nothing of substance is ever really challenged. [5]


At executive level, this is rarely about timidity. It is more often a calculated choice: senior leaders have worked hard to get where they are, and they understand intuitively that challenging a peer carries relationship risk. The unspoken norm becomes "I won't challenge your territory if you don't challenge mine." Innovation stalls. Risk aversion spreads. And the organisation pays the price for a harmony that was never real.


4. Slow Decisions That Protect Individual Positions


When decision-making stalls at executive level, the cause is rarely confusion. It is usually competing interests dressed up as due diligence. Research by INSEAD, based on filmed and analysed verbal and non-verbal exchanges in real top management team meetings, found that coalition-building, political manoeuvring, and influence tactics are a defining feature of how senior executives actually interact when decisions are at stake, far more so than research on lower-level teams typically reveals. [8]


The tell is that the same decisions get raised, discussed, and deferred across multiple meeting cycles. Everyone agrees something needs to happen. No one is quite ready to be the person who owns it.


5. Energy Directed Inward Rather Than Outward


At senior level, depleted energy tends to show up not as visible exhaustion but as a team that has become absorbed in its own dynamics. Conversations circle back to the same internal tensions. Meetings fill with status updates rather than strategic challenge. Leaders spend more bandwidth managing each other than they do leading the organisation.


The Deloitte 2018 Global Human Capital Trends research found that 73% of C-suite leaders rarely, if ever, work together on genuine cross-functional strategic initiatives, despite C-suite collaboration being ranked the single most pressing human capital issue that year. [9] A team whose energy is absorbed by internal positioning has none left for the work that actually matters.


Why These Warning Signs Matter Beyond the Boardroom


Executive team dysfunction is not contained. It flows downward through every layer of the organisation, shaping culture, slowing execution, and affecting engagement at every level.


Cultural impact. Employees mirror leadership behaviours. When leaders avoid conflict, their teams follow. When leaders operate in silos, collaboration suffers everywhere.


Strategic execution. Slow decisions and lack of alignment at the top directly slow transformation efforts, product launches, and market expansion. The strategy may be sound; the execution falters because the team driving it is not aligned.


Employee engagement. Misalignment at the top widens the gap between what people are asked to do and what the organisation actually needs, reducing engagement and driving attrition in the process.


In today's environment of hybrid work, rapid technological change, and constant pressure to do more with less, organisations simply cannot afford a top team that is pulling in different directions.


For a deeper look at the financial and strategic toll this takes, read our piece on the hidden cost of dysfunctional senior teams in an AI-first world.


How to Fix an Underperforming Executive Team


The encouraging news is that executive teams can change, and often faster than people expect. The key is to approach team development with the same rigour you apply to business strategy.


Start With Diagnosis, Not Assumptions


Too often, organisations jump straight to solutions: offsites, workshops, new KPIs, without understanding the root cause. This leads to wasted effort and little lasting impact. What looks like a personality clash may actually be a problem of unclear decision rights or misaligned incentives. What feels like disengagement may be the symptom of structural barriers the team has no power to remove.


A structured diagnostic process is essential. This means discovery conversations with each team member, dedicated team diagnostics, 360-degree feedback, and personality profiling, layered together to build a genuinely accurate picture of what is happening beneath the surface.


At Esendia, we prefer open-ended discovery calls as our starting point precisely because they allow issues to surface without preconceived frameworks limiting what might emerge. By creating space for honest, individual stories, we get a far truer picture of what is really going on.


Build Vulnerability-Based Trust


Trust is the foundation of every high-performing team, but at the executive level it requires vulnerability: the willingness to admit mistakes, ask for help, and share challenges openly. This often feels counterintuitive for senior leaders who have built careers on expertise and composure.


Creating this kind of trust requires intentional effort. Structured feedback tools like 360-degree reviews, team coaching, and facilitated sessions all help leaders understand how they are perceived and where trust gaps exist.


Google's Project Aristotle famously identified psychological safety (the belief that you will not be punished for speaking up) as the strongest predictor of team performance. [3] For executive teams, this means creating an environment where it is genuinely safe to challenge and be challenged.


Healthy trust sounds like: "I made a mistake on that proposal. Can someone help me fix it?" Low trust sounds like: "Everything's fine", when it clearly is not.


Embrace Productive Conflict


Healthy conflict is not personal. It is about ideas, about testing assumptions, exploring alternatives, and making better decisions together. Executive teams need to learn how to have robust debates without damaging relationships.


This requires skill-building around conflict styles and, in many cases, facilitation support to ensure all voices are heard. Teams that consistently avoid conflict default to false harmony, missing the important ideas and innovations that challenge produces.


For a more detailed look at what healthy team behaviours look like in practice, our complete guide to team effectiveness covers this in full.


Commit Fully to Decisions


Once a decision is made, every member of the executive team must commit to it, even those who initially disagreed. Without this shared commitment, employees receive mixed messages and execution falters.


This is where clarity of decision rights becomes critical. Everyone must understand who is accountable, who has input, and who ultimately decides. Ambiguity at this level is expensive.


Establish Peer Accountability


Many executive teams rely on the CEO to hold people accountable. The most effective teams, however, hold each other accountable as peers. Peer accountability carries a different weight; it speaks directly to shared standards and mutual respect, and sends a powerful signal to the rest of the organisation about what ownership actually looks like.


Focus on Enterprise-Wide Outcomes


Perhaps the biggest shift for many executives is moving from a functional to an enterprise mindset: prioritising what is best for the whole organisation, not just their own area. This often requires changes to incentive structures, meeting agendas, and decision frameworks. But when it happens, the impact on organisational performance is significant.


Companies with highly aligned leadership teams are 2.3x more likely to outperform on revenue growth and are 21% more profitable. [2]


If you want to understand what this transition looks like when top teams are in the middle of it, read when top teams stumble: what you can do for team effectiveness.


What This Looks Like in Practice: Client Stories


CIM: 100% Improved Self-Awareness in Nine Months


When the Chartered Institute of Marketing launched a seven-year strategy requiring a fundamental shift in how it operated, the Senior Management Team was at the heart of the challenge. Historically, they had worked in silos. Now they were expected to collaborate closely across strategic project groups, and the gaps were showing. Disagreements were blocking decisions, communication breakdowns were creating friction between departments, and the first year of the strategy had already demonstrated that the status quo was unsustainable.


Esendia co-designed and co-delivered a nine-month blended team effectiveness programme combining diagnostics, 360-degree feedback, team effectiveness workshops, and individual coaching. The results, independently verified across three data sources, were significant: 100% of participants reported improved self-awareness, 90% reported stronger personal ownership of organisational change, and 80% said trust and psychological safety within the team had strengthened. Every external stakeholder who was able to comment observed clear, independently verified progress in cross-functional collaboration.


As Sarah Lee-Boone, Director of Membership, People and Workplace at CIM, put it: "If you want to see really meaningful change in leadership styles and how people manage and lead, this is probably the most effective way I've experienced to do it. People don't feel like it's training. They see it as something that's really valuable."



Moore Barlow: Building Strategic Focus and Shared Accountability


Following a major merger, Moore Barlow's leadership team had expanded rapidly with new expertise across sales, marketing, IT, and finance. Members had been focused on building their own teams and establishing themselves in their roles. While the team got on well personally, they had limited shared experience of working together strategically, and blind spots about collective strengths and gaps were going unaddressed.


Esendia designed and facilitated a high-impact leadership session, beginning with psychometrics completed before the day itself to accelerate mutual understanding and surface where collective profile gaps existed. The in-person session then focused on clarifying vision, surfacing enablers, blockers, and interdependencies across functions, and building the strategic focus and accountability the team needed to operate as a unified leadership layer.


As Katherine Allison, Chief People Officer at Moore Barlow, reflected: "As a team, we get on well, which is great, but as an effective leadership team, we also need to be strategic and hold each other to account. Ines challenged our thinking. With the psychometrics, she helped us accelerate our understanding of our blind spots as much as our strengths."


The team left with clearer priorities, sharper awareness of their strengths and gaps, and meetings that became more focused and outcome-oriented as a result.



Measuring Success: Making Team Effectiveness Stick


Sustainable team effectiveness requires regular measurement and accountability. Without clear metrics, even the most well-designed interventions can lose momentum.


Three categories of metrics matter most:


Behavioural indicators including psychological safety scores, conflict resolution time, and decision-making speed.


Performance outcomes including goal achievement rates, quality indicators, and innovation metrics.


Engagement measures including team satisfaction scores, retention rates, and voluntary feedback frequency.


The key is consistency. Regular measurement transforms team effectiveness from a one-time initiative into an ongoing organisational capability, embedded in how the team works rather than bolted on as an annual event.


From One Team to Organisation-Wide Impact


Fixing an underperforming executive team is not just about improving one group's dynamic. It is about building a leadership capability that sets the tone for the entire organisation.


When senior leaders build habits of trust, healthy conflict, clear decisions, peer accountability, and enterprise-wide focus, those behaviours cascade through every level. Teams become more collaborative, decisions accelerate, and organisational agility improves.


This is why top team effectiveness is one of the most powerful levers available to HR and L&D leaders. It is not about fixing problems in isolation; it is about creating an organisation built to thrive through complexity and change.


Ready to Go Deeper?


Download our Ultimate Guide to Team Effectiveness Handbook, packed with diagnostic tools, templates, and frameworks you can apply straight away.


Or join our free Top Team Effectiveness Webinar Series, where we walk through what these patterns look like in practice, with real examples and your questions answered openly.


And if you would like a focused conversation about your specific situation, get in touch


Because when executive teams stumble, organisations pay the price. When they perform, they unlock growth, innovation, and cultural strength that no competitor can easily replicate.


Esendia is a winner of the Talent Labs Award for Best Leadership Strategy 2026.

References


[1] Haas, M. and Mortensen, M. (2016) 'The Secrets of Great Teamwork', Harvard Business Review, June. Available at: https://hbr.org/2015/06/75-of-cross-functional-teams-are-dysfunctional


[2] Culture Architects (n.d.) Building High Performing Teams. Available at: https://culturearchitects.co.uk/building-high-performing-teams/.



[4] Lencioni, P. (2002) The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/Wiley. Available at: https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/The+Five+Dysfunctions+of+a+Team%3A+A+Leadership+Fable-p-9780787960759


[5] Keil, T. and Zangrillo, M. (2024) 'Why Leadership Teams Fail', Harvard Business Review, September. Available at: https://hbr.org/2024/09/why-leadership-teams-fail


[6] American Association for Physician Leadership (2025) 'Does Your C-Suite Really Operate as a Team?', reporting Gartner research published in Harvard Business Review, November 2025. Available at: https://www.physicianleaders.org/articles/does-your-c-suite-really-operate-as-a-team.


[7] DigitalDefynd (2026) 'How to Resolve Conflict in the C-Suite'. Available at: https://digitaldefynd.com/IQ/c-suite-conflict-resolution/


[8] Lander, M.W., Koene, B.A.S. and Linssen, S.N. (2022) 'The Politics of Influence in Top Management Team Meetings', INSEAD Knowledge. Available at: https://knowledge.insead.edu/leadership-organisations/politics-influence-top-management-team-meetings.


[9] Deloitte Insights (2018) 'The Symphonic C-Suite: Teams Leading Teams', 2018 Global Human Capital Trends. Available at: https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/human-capital-trends/2018/senior-leadership-c-suite-collaboration.html.

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