You've assembled exceptional leaders. Each executive on your team has a track record of success, strategic acumen, and the ability to drive results. Yet when they gather in your boardroom, something curious happens. The collective output falls short of what their combined talent should produce.

This isn't a failure of individual competence. It's a failure of system design. Most executive teams operate as loose confederations of talented individuals pursuing parallel agendas rather than as genuine teams pursuing collective outcomes. The symptoms are familiar: polite but unproductive meetings, decisions that get relitigated in hallways, strategic initiatives that stall at functional boundaries, and a persistent sense that the team's whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts.

The conventional response is to invest in team-building exercises or communication training. These interventions miss the point entirely. The underperformance isn't rooted in interpersonal dynamics or trust deficits—though those may be present. It's rooted in how the team is structured, what it's actually accountable for, and whether genuine interdependence exists among its members. Understanding this distinction is the first step toward unlocking the collective capability your leadership team already possesses but cannot currently access.

There's a seductive logic to executive team composition: assemble the best leaders from each function, and you'll have an excellent leadership team. This reasoning contains a fundamental error. It confuses the aggregation of individual excellence with the creation of collective capability.

Research on team effectiveness consistently demonstrates that group performance depends more on interaction patterns than individual talent. A study of senior leadership teams found that the correlation between individual member capability and team performance was surprisingly weak. What mattered more was how members engaged with each other, how information flowed, and whether the team had genuine shared work.

Most executive teams don't actually have shared work. Each member runs their function, reports on progress, and occasionally weighs in on enterprise matters. The 'team' becomes a coordination mechanism rather than a performance unit. Members optimize for their domains while the spaces between functions—where the most important strategic opportunities and threats live—remain inadequately addressed.

This structure creates predictable pathologies. Executives compete for resources rather than collaborate on outcomes. Information gets hoarded because knowledge is power in a zero-sum environment. Strategic discussions become negotiation sessions where each leader advocates for their area. Real debate gets suppressed because challenging a peer's position feels like a political act rather than a contribution to collective thinking.

The aggregation fallacy also manifests in how executive teams spend their time. Most agendas are packed with functional reviews and operational updates—activities that don't require genuine teamwork. The team meets regularly but rarely engages in work that actually requires collective intelligence. Members could review the same information asynchronously and achieve the same outcome.

Takeaway

Assembling talented individuals creates a collection, not a team. Collective capability emerges only when the work itself requires genuine interdependence.

Transforming a collection of executives into a genuine team requires deliberate design of what I call the team's operating system: its purpose, membership logic, and operating norms. Most leadership teams inherit these elements rather than construct them intentionally, which explains their dysfunction.

Start with purpose. Why does this team exist as a team? 'Running the company' is too vague to guide behavior. Effective executive teams define specific collective responsibilities that no individual member or subset could accomplish alone. These typically include enterprise strategy formulation, resource allocation across the portfolio, organizational culture stewardship, and navigation of enterprise-level risks and opportunities.

Membership criteria follow from purpose. The question isn't 'who are our most senior leaders?' but 'who must be present to accomplish our collective work?' This often produces uncomfortable realizations. Some executives who expect membership don't contribute to genuine team tasks. Others who aren't included probably should be. The most effective executive teams are smaller than most organizations assume—typically six to eight members rather than twelve to fifteen.

Operating norms define how the team actually works together. This includes decision rights, meeting cadence and structure, communication protocols, and behavioral expectations. The most critical norm concerns how the team handles conflict. Teams that suppress disagreement in favor of artificial harmony never access their collective intelligence. Teams that allow conflict to become personal or political destroy trust. The productive middle ground—what Patrick Lencioni calls 'productive conflict'—requires explicit cultivation.

Finally, effective operating systems include accountability mechanisms for the team itself, not just for individual members. This means measuring collective outcomes, conducting team retrospectives, and creating consequences for team-level underperformance. Without this, the operating system remains aspirational rather than operational.

Takeaway

Design your leadership team with the same rigor you'd apply to any strategic initiative. Purpose defines membership, membership enables norms, and norms require accountability.

The ultimate test of executive team design is whether genuine interdependence exists among members. Without interdependence, you have a working group that shares information, not a team that creates collective value. Building interdependence requires structural intervention, not just behavioral aspiration.

Goal interdependence comes first. When executives are evaluated and compensated primarily on functional performance, they will optimize for functional outcomes regardless of what they say in leadership meetings. Creating genuine team behavior requires goals that can only be achieved through cross-functional collaboration. This means a meaningful portion of executive compensation should depend on enterprise outcomes that no single function controls.

Resource interdependence amplifies the effect. When the executive team collectively allocates capital, talent, and strategic attention rather than each function receiving a predetermined budget, leaders must engage genuinely with enterprise trade-offs. This creates productive tension that surfaces strategic assumptions and forces real debate about priorities.

Information interdependence completes the structure. Most executive teams operate with significant information asymmetry—each member knows their function deeply but understands peer functions superficially. This asymmetry undermines collective decision-making because members can't meaningfully evaluate proposals outside their expertise. Effective teams create mechanisms for deep cross-functional understanding, including executive rotations, immersive functional deep-dives, and joint problem-solving on complex challenges.

The combination of these interdependencies fundamentally changes team dynamics. When my success depends on your success, helping you becomes self-interested rather than charitable. When we jointly allocate resources, I must understand your needs as well as my own. When I comprehend your challenges deeply, I can contribute meaningfully to your decisions. This interlocking structure transforms parallel individual achievement into genuine collective performance.

Takeaway

Interdependence isn't a feeling to cultivate—it's a structure to build. Align goals, share resource decisions, and create information flow that makes collaboration essential rather than optional.

The gap between your leadership team's potential and its performance isn't mysterious. It's structural. You've likely assembled excellent individual leaders but failed to create the conditions for collective excellence. The aggregation fallacy, absent operating system design, and insufficient interdependence explain most of the underperformance you observe.

Addressing this requires leadership courage. You'll need to shrink the team, clarify its genuine purpose, redesign compensation to reward collective outcomes, and fundamentally change how the team spends its time together. These changes will surface resistance because they threaten existing power arrangements and comfortable patterns.

The prize justifies the disruption. A leadership team that genuinely performs as a team—accessing collective intelligence, making integrated strategic decisions, moving in coordinated execution—represents an organizational capability most competitors cannot match. It transforms enterprise strategy from a document into a living practice. This is the executive team your organization needs. Building it is your responsibility.