The Second Line Is Watching and Interpreting: Why Executive Team Development Isn't Enough

Most CEOs and HR leaders will recognise this pattern: the executive team goes through a genuinely good stretch of development, and six months later the organisation still feels much the same. This article looks at why that happens, and why the layer just below the top team, often called the second line, C-1, or senior leadership team, matters more to leadership development strategy than most budgets currently reflect.

Key Takeaways

• Executive team effectiveness matters, but on its own it rarely translates into organisational performance.
  

• The second line of leadership has a lot of influence over whether strategy actually turns into coordinated action.
  

• Most organisations underinvest in the collective effectiveness of their second-line leadership teams.
  

• Developing the top team without the second line tends to open up a strategy-execution gap.
  

• Developing the second line without the top team tends to create frustration and mixed signals.
  

• The biggest returns come from treating leadership as a system worth strengthening, rather than developing each layer on its own.

Executive Team Development Isn't the Same as Organisational Development

It's easy to make the business case for investing in the executive team. No other group makes decisions faster, drives accountability harder, or shapes culture more visibly, so when the top team isn't working well together, the case for doing something about it is fairly obvious. Senior leaders go on strategy offsites, complete diagnostics designed to build self-awareness, and get executive coaching. Many organisations also run team effectiveness programmes for their executive teams, aimed at building trust, healthier conflict and better decision-making. These interventions do tend to work, at least on their own terms. Relationships improve, conversations get more honest, and priorities become clearer.

For a closer look at what these programmes typically cover and how to get them right, see Esendia's Top Team Effectiveness Handbook.

And then, six or twelve months later, a familiar problem reappears. The top team is visibly better, but the organisation doesn't feel any different. Decisions still move too slowly. Different functions still pull in different directions. Transformation programmes still need far more hands-on executive involvement than anyone planned for.

The usual conclusion is that the organisation needs more executive team development. The irony is that the executive programme is probably working exactly as intended. The real problem is that developing one team was never going to be enough on its own. What's needed is a leadership system, one that develops the second line alongside the top team, not instead of it.

This is a pattern we've explored in more detail in When Top Teams Stumble: What You Can Do for Team Effectiveness.

Why Leadership Change Rarely Cascades Cleanly

Part of why leadership initiatives fall short is a fairly reasonable-sounding assumption: improve the executive team, model better behaviour, and the rest of the organisation will eventually follow suit.

Sometimes that's exactly what happens. More often, though, it's messier, because people don't copy leadership messages nearly as faithfully as leaders would like. What actually gets copied is behaviour: the routines, the habits, the unwritten rules nobody says out loud.

Second-line leaders spend more time watching senior leaders than most executives realise. They notice how difficult decisions get made, how disagreements get handled, and whether collaboration still counts for anything once priorities start competing. They notice which behaviours get rewarded, too, and which ones get tolerated even when they don't match the organisation's stated values. Over time, those observations shape what people genuinely believe good leadership looks like inside that organisation.

This lines up with social learning theory, which argues that people learn a lot of their behaviour simply by watching people they respect. Leadership culture doesn't just cascade down through memos and town halls. It gets interpreted and reshaped at every level on the way down, and each layer adds its own version. That's a big part of why there's so often a gap between what the executive team intends and what employees actually experience.

The Leadership Layer Where Strategy Becomes Reality

Strategy doesn't get executed by executive teams alone. The layer directly below them, sometimes direct reports, sometimes one level further down depending on the size of the business, usually has more influence over whether strategic intent turns into operational reality. These are the functional directors, regional leaders, department heads and programme leaders who translate broad priorities into the daily decisions about resource, trade-offs and delivery.

There's growing research support for this. McKinsey's analysis of organisational health and financial performance found a genuine link between strong management practices and stronger shareholder returns, concluding that middle managers are a business imperative rather than a nice-to-have.[1] The study is about middle managers broadly, but the insight applies just as well to the senior population sitting directly below the executive team. Whether you call them C-1, C-2 or middle management is mostly a question of company size. Their role as the bridge between strategy and execution is the same either way.

This is also where a lot of organisations are currently exposed. Gartner's research into how organisations run talent reviews found that only around 30% of managers who participate in talent reviews believe their leadership bench is strong. [2] A layer under that much pressure is unlikely to absorb a big strategic shift smoothly on top of everything else it's already carrying, which is exactly why it needs deliberate investment rather than being left to work things out on its own.

Why the Second-Line Role Is Harder Than It Looks

What makes this layer hard is that it sits right at the point where strategic intent meets operational reality. These leaders have to create clarity before all the information exists. They're expected to balance enterprise priorities against local pressures while making calls that satisfy both short-term demands and longer-term goals. In practice, they're often the ones helping the rest of the business make sense of change while senior leaders are still working out what it means themselves.

This part of the role is often underestimated. Many second-line leaders have spent years learning how to manage upwards and downwards but have had far fewer chances to build the peer leadership skills that matter most at this level. Influencing colleagues without formal authority, resolving tension between competing functions, and taking joint responsibility for outcomes that cross the whole organisation call for a different skill set than the one that got them promoted in the first place. It isn't unusual to find that leadership within a function is much stronger than leadership across functions.

That distinction matters, because the biggest challenges an organisation faces rarely sit neatly inside one department. Growth, transformation, productivity, customer experience, culture: all of it needs coordination across boundaries. Success at second-line level depends less on directing people inside a function and more on aligning with other leaders. If this layer lacks alignment, shared accountability or clarity about enterprise priorities, even a genuinely strong executive team will struggle to make anything stick.

The Difference Between Developing Leaders and Developing Leadership Teams

There's a deeper issue underneath all this. Most leadership development is built around the individual leader: communication skills, coaching capability, emotional intelligence, strategic thinking, personal effectiveness. All useful things to work on.

But a lot of organisational problems aren't caused by weak leaders at all. They show up when perfectly capable leaders struggle to work well together.

A finance director can run their function brilliantly while unintentionally creating friction for everyone around them. A commercial leader can exceed their targets while making calls that undermine the wider business. An HR leader can build genuinely good people practices while adding complexity everywhere else. None of these people are ineffective. The point is that organisational success increasingly depends on how well leaders work together, not just on how good any one of them is individually.

Google's Project Aristotle reached a similar conclusion: team dynamics mattered more than the individual traits of team members in explaining why some teams performed better than others. Psychological safety came out as the single biggest factor behind high-performing teams.[3]

The implication for leadership teams is a fairly big one. It isn't just stronger leaders that organisations need. It's stronger leadership relationships.

For a broader look at what makes teams effective in the first place, see The Complete Guide to Team Effectiveness: Building High-Performing Teams That Actually Work.

The Reverse Problem: Why Developing the Second Line Alone Often Fails

It's worth saying that the relationship between the top team and the second line cuts both ways.

Plenty of organisations correctly spot that their second line has become too dependent on executive direction. Leaders seem cautious, reluctant to take ownership, too focused on getting sign-off from above. So they invest in programmes built around empowerment, decision-making and entrepreneurial leadership.

But these efforts tend to disappoint if the executive team doesn't change too. Leaders are told to take more ownership, yet big decisions still get escalated. They're told to challenge more, but that challenge isn't always welcomed. They're told to think like enterprise leaders, but they're still rewarded almost entirely on functional results.

In that situation, the programme creates awareness without much real change in behaviour. The system keeps reinforcing the old patterns underneath it. One layer can't evolve much further than the layer above it will allow, or reward.

Where Leadership Development Breaks Down

This pattern appears often enough to be worth laying out in one place. The table below is a rough summary of what tends to happen depending on which layer gets the investment, and why.

Development Focus	What Improves	Common Symptom If Developed in Isolation	Underlying Cause
Executive team only	Trust, alignment and decision-making at the top	Decisions still stall below the top team; transformation needs constant executive involvement	The second line doesn't yet have the collective capability or clear authority to turn strategy into coordinated cross-functional action
Second line only	More individual confidence, more empowered language	Ownership doesn't really stick; escalations carry on; leaders sound empowered but act cautiously	The executive team still absorbs decisions and rewards functional performance, which reinforces the old patterns from above
Both layers, developed separately	Each group improves on its own terms	A gap opens up between layers; mixed signals; the second line feels disconnected from strategy	Every layer interprets and translates leadership behaviour a bit differently, so unaligned layers end up with different assumptions
Both layers, developed as one system	A shared language for team dynamics, aligned decision rights, coordinated priorities	Strategy moves faster through the organisation and the change tends to hold	Leadership behaviour, reward and interpretation stay reasonably consistent across layers

What Leadership-System Development Actually Looks Like

So the real question isn't which layer to invest in next. Leadership effectiveness gets created in the interactions between layers, not just inside them.

The good news is that this doesn't necessarily need a bigger budget. Most organisations are already spending plenty on leadership development.

This lines up with research into why leadership-development investment so often falls short. Ready and Conger looked at leadership programmes across dozens of companies and found that failure is rarely down to weak individual programme design. More often, it's because the development sits alongside the business rather than inside it, disconnected from what's actually happening strategically.[4] The opportunity, in other words, is usually to use the money already being spent differently, rather than to spend more of it.

One practical step is to stop treating team effectiveness as something reserved for senior leadership teams. Most leadership programmes are built almost entirely around the individual, even though leaders spend most of their working life inside teams.

Teaching leaders to spot patterns in group behaviour is worth more than it sounds. Programmes can help people notice avoidance of conflict, decision bottlenecks, dependency patterns, silos and other dynamics that quietly shape performance. Build that awareness at scale and you get a shared language that outlives any single team intervention.

Cost-Effective Ways to Build Leadership Capability Across Levels

Another option is creating occasional development experiences that bring executive and second-line leaders together. Each group faces different challenges, but they're part of the same system, and working jointly on strategic priorities, decisions or culture tends to create more alignment and less risk of one layer moving ahead of the other.

Organisations can also get a lot out of building reflection into processes that already exist. Most teams review performance regularly. Far fewer review how well they collaborate, decide or hold each other accountable. A structured conversation about how the team is actually working often surfaces issues long before they turn into bigger problems.

Perhaps the most useful shift is recognising that understanding team dynamics is itself a leadership skill. Most leaders get promoted for being excellent within a function, and relatively few ever get deliberate development in how teams work as social systems: how trust forms, how conflict emerges, how norms get set, how accountability gets shared. That shouldn't sit only inside dedicated team-effectiveness programmes. It belongs in mainstream leadership development, because it helps a leader improve every team they're ever part of.

A few further starting points, alongside the above:

• Run a joint decision-rights conversation with the executive team and second line together. Get specific about which decisions second-line leaders can actually make without escalating, then check back later on whether that's holding true in practice.
  

• Build in feedback that crosses layers, not just within them, alongside standard 360s, so each layer can see how its behaviour actually lands with the layer next to it.
  

• Set up short cross-layer pairs or small groups, an executive and one or two second-line leaders working a live strategic issue together, rather than developing each group in its own lane.
  

• Extend the same coaching framework used with the executive team to key second-line teams, ideally with coaches who talk to each other, so language and expectations don't drift apart between layers.
  

• Check whether reward and recognition genuinely value cross-functional collaboration at both levels. If incentives only reward the function, they'll usually beat a stated ambition for enterprise thinking.

Extend the same coaching framework used with the executive team to key second-line teams, ideally with coaches who talk to each other, so language and expectations don't drift apart between layers.

Check whether reward and recognition genuinely value cross-functional collaboration at both levels. If incentives only reward the function, they'll usually beat a stated ambition for enterprise thinking.

Develop the System, Not Just the Summit

Executive teams matter. Second-line leaders matter just as much. The mistake is thinking either one, on its own, can transform how the organisation performs.

There's a name for this way of thinking in the coaching world: systemic coaching, or more specifically systemic team coaching, an approach built up over several decades by Peter Hawkins. Ordinary team coaching treats the team as the client. Systemic team coaching treats the team and its wider system, the layers around it, the stakeholders, the organisation, as the client.[5] What this article is really arguing for is applying that lens to the relationship between the executive team and the second line, rather than coaching either one as though it existed on its own.

Every organisation runs as a leadership system, where the behaviour of one layer shapes the behaviour of the next. Strengthen only one layer and progress tends to stall. Strengthen the connections between layers and the improvement travels further and lasts longer.

So the real question for a CEO or HR leader isn't whether the executive team is effective. It's whether the leadership system underneath it can carry that effectiveness through the rest of the organisation. Strategy doesn't scale through org charts, communication plans or executive intent alone. It scales through the decisions, behaviours and relationships that connect leaders at every level.

We go deeper into this relationship in Team Effectiveness at the Top: Strengthening Both the Executive Team and the Second Line.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the "second line" of leadership?

It's the layer of leaders sitting just below the executive team, sometimes direct reports, sometimes one level further down depending on the size of the organisation. Functional directors, regional leaders, department heads and programme leaders typically sit here, translating strategy into day-to-day decisions.

Why isn't executive team development enough on its own?

Because strategy isn't executed by the executive team alone. Even a highly effective top team depends on the layer below it to turn intent into coordinated action, and if that layer hasn't been developed as a team, the usual result is a strategy-execution gap.

What is leadership system development?

It's an approach that develops the connections between leadership layers, not just the layers themselves. Rather than treating the executive team and the second line as two separate development projects, it looks at how their behaviour, decisions and relationships interact.

What is systemic coaching, and how is it different from team coaching?

Systemic coaching, and specifically systemic team coaching, is an approach developed by Peter Hawkins that treats a team and its wider organisational system, not just the team on its own, as the coaching client. It focuses on the connections between a team and the layers, stakeholders and organisation around it.

How can organisations find reliable top team effectiveness consultants?

A reliable top team effectiveness consultant works from an evidence-based model rather than a generic workshop format, and can point to research-backed frameworks such as those referenced throughout this article. They should be able to show experience diagnosing team dynamics, not just individual leaders, and a track record of helping executive teams translate improved trust and decision-making into measurable organisational outcomes. Just as important, they should understand that top team effectiveness rarely works in isolation, and be equipped to address how the executive team's development connects to the layers below it, as Esendia's top team effectiveness consulting is designed to do.

References

[1] Field, E., Hancock, B., Smallets, S. and Weddle, B. (2023). Investing in Middle Managers Pays Off—Literally. McKinsey & Company. Available at: mckinsey.com – Investing in Middle Managers Pays Off

[2] Gartner, Inc. (2024). Gartner HR Research Finds Only 30% of Managers Who Participate in Talent Reviews Believe Their Leadership Bench Is Strong. Available at: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-10-30-gartner-hr-research-finds-only-30-percent-of-managers-who-participate-in-talent-reviews-believe-their-leadership-bench-is-strong

[3] Google re:Work (2015). Understand Team Effectiveness: Project Aristotle. Available at: rework.withgoogle.com – Understand Team Effectiveness

[4] Ready, D.A. and Conger, J.A. (2003). Why Leadership-Development Efforts Fail. MIT Sloan Management Review, 44(3), 83–88. Available at: sloanreview.mit.edu – Why Leadership-Development Efforts Fail

[5] Hawkins, P. (2017). Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership (3rd ed.). London: Kogan Page.