Test your leadership team in 30 seconds

Hi Everyone,

Harvard's Ruth Wageman studied 120 senior leadership teams at companies including IBM, Unilever, and Shell. Only 21% were high performing, and 42% were performing poorly. Less than a quarter operated as real teams.

The difference came down to one question, and you can ask it of your own team right away.

Today, we're walking you through that question, what the answer reveals, and three things to do about it.

The one question

Ask each member of your leadership team:

Which team do they consider their first team? Is it the executive team they sit on, or the function they lead?

When Pat Lencioni asks this question of executive teams, he says many leaders pick the function they lead. In the leadership meeting, they argue for their function's hires, budget, and priorities. Everything else gets less of their attention.

The truth is, a leader's "first team" is the executive team they participate on as a peer, not the team they lead. In other words, their "first team" is the team that decides and problem solves what's best for the company as a whole, not what's best for each department individually.

But to get there, an identity shift is required.

Three things that shift the identity

1. Name the team they're on before each big decision and say it out loud – something like "We're making this call as a leadership team, not as functional leaders." Do it again and again; the repetition is the point. You're reminding people that in this room, they run the company together.
2. Set at least one shared goal that the whole team is accountable for (it should be one number that no single person can move alone)
   
   Revenue from existing customers is one example. To grow it, Sales has to close the right customers, Customer Success has to keep them, Product has to keep building what those customers need, and Marketing has to set expectations the company can meet.
   
   Free cash flow is another. Sales brings in revenue, Operations controls costs, Finance manages the timing of payments and receipts, and Product invests in the right places.
3. Call it out in the meeting when someone on your team puts the company ahead of their own function. Celebrate it. What gets rewarded gets repeated.

One caution

The people on your leadership team should still care about the function they lead. They still need to hire the right people, fight for the right resources, and defend their function's priorities. That part of the job doesn't change.

The change happens in the leadership meeting itself. Outside that room, they lead their function. Inside it, they run the company with you.

Go Deeper

👉 The Table Group: What is your first team? – Patrick Lencioni's short essay on the question every executive team should ask itself.

👉 Krister Lowe and Ruth Wageman: The 3 essential conditions of team effectiveness – a summary of the 120-team study and the framework behind it, co-written by Wageman.

👉 McKinsey: High-performing teams, a timeless leadership topic – practical guidance from Scott Keller and Mary Meaney on what separates aligned top teams from the rest.

👉 Liane Davey: Do you have a first team? – a thoughtful counterpoint on when over-applying the first-team concept can lead to insular thinking.

Coming up tomorrow

Tomorrow we're sharing why your team might score well on safety surveys and still go silent when it matters most.

Thanks for reading!

P.S. What is the most useful thing your leadership team has done together this quarter?