written by Leadership Coach, Nick Roud September 3rd 2026, Auckland, New Zealand
For many leaders, the instinct to focus on their team is not merely understandable; it is commendable.
People management is visible work. It requires attention, energy and judgement. There are performance conversations to conduct, priorities to clarify, conflicts to resolve and talented people to retain. A leader who invests in their team is often rightly regarded as caring, conscientious and effective. A CEO here in NZ shared with me that he spends 80% of his time in 1:1s! This has since changed following our coaching sessions. His recent RLA360 degree leadership assessment bought clarity that he was not effective with his peer group, lack of trust, misaligned business needs etc.
But there is a problem that is rarely discussed with enough honesty, I see it a great deal when coaching leadership teams, an intense focus on leading down can become a way of neglecting the relationships that sit alongside you.
The most capable leaders do not only lead their teams. They work their peer network with intention. They build trust across functions, manage dependencies before they become crises and make it easier for other leaders to succeed. They understand that no team, however high-performing, can deliver sustainably if its leader has weak relationships with the people whose cooperation, decisions and resources shape the team’s environment.
In other words, your leadership focus may be holding you back if it is aimed in only one direction. Think of a triangle the top is your relationship with your CEO and the bottom corners are your peer groups. Now flip that triangle upside down, your top corners are with your peers and the bottom corner is your team. One theme doesn’t vanish in the triangle, your peer to peer relationships!
Let’s take that triangle image forwards, I use it a great deal in my coaching business. Leading yourself, leading your team and leading the organisation. Yet many managers operate as though only one side matters. They pour their attention into the people who report to them, while treating relationships with peers as optional, political or something to deal with only when a problem arises.
That approach creates a leadership ceiling. It can also leave your team exposed.
The quality of your peer-to-peer relationships is not a distraction from leadership. It is one of the clearest tests of it.
The Comfort of Leading Down
Leading a team provides a sense of control.
You set expectations. You run meetings. You allocate work. You give feedback. Even where there are tensions, the formal structure offers clarity, you are accountable for the team’s direction, and your role gives you a recognised platform from which to act.
Peer relationships are more ambiguous. Yet often the cause of me being bought into work with an ELT team.
Your peers do not report to you. You cannot simply instruct them to change priorities, release budget, alter a process or attend a meeting. They have their own pressures, targets, personalities and political realities. They may see the same organisational issue from an entirely different perspective. They may even see your team’s success as creating additional work or risk for theirs.
This makes peer leadership harder. It demands influence rather than authority, curiosity rather than certainty, and a willingness to invest before an immediate return is obvious.
As a result, many leaders retreat into the part of the job they can control. They become excellent advocates for their own team, while failing to become effective partners to the wider business. We start to see information being hidden, we see people being protected and silos explode.
Sound familiar?
Projects become stuck between departments. Decisions are revisited because key people were not engaged early enough. Teams duplicate work. Minor misunderstandings harden into narratives: “They never involve us.” “They do not understand the commercial reality.” “They always arrive late with impossible requests.”
These issues are often labelled as communication problems. In reality, they are relationship problems. Let’s get a little deeper into that shall we!
A weekly update will not repair a lack of trust. A better project plan will not compensate for a history of transactional behaviour. Nor will a senior leader’s intervention create genuine collaboration if the people responsible have not built a working relationship of their own. A one day workshop where everyone shows up and ticks a box only to rush back to how they behaved yesterday is exceptionally common across New Zealand.
The good news is that peer relationships are not mysterious. They are built in the same way trust is built anywhere, through consistency, generosity, candour, reliability and a genuine interest in the other person’s world. And let me be very clear you don’t do that by working from home. Get in the room, be in the room and work the room.
Your Team Feels the Effects
A leader may believe they are protecting their team by concentrating exclusively on its needs. In practice, they may be limiting its influence and in the mid to long term damage the organisation.
Your team’s ability to succeed depends on factors beyond its direct control. It may need information from another function, a decision from a senior stakeholder, capacity from operations, technical support from IT, approval from finance or cooperation from a commercial partner. If you have not developed productive peer relationships, every one of those needs becomes harder to meet.
Your team will notice. They are smart, intelligent that’s why you hired them.
They notice when they have to chase another department repeatedly for a response. They notice when their work is misunderstood by senior colleagues. They notice when their leader arrives late to cross-functional discussions, defensive and underprepared. They notice when opportunities go to teams whose leaders are better connected, more trusted or more proactive.
Over time, a strong internal team culture can turn inward. Team members become loyal to one another but cynical about the rest of the organisation. They begin to use language such as “us and them”. They assume other functions are obstacles rather than partners. They become protective, even territorial. If I hear “us and them” or blame the session is halted, the elephant is popped into the centre of the room and we get to work on it. We do not move on till this has been thrashed out. It’s a moment of change.
That might create solidarity in the short term. It does not create organisational impact.
The role of a leader is not simply to create a safe and effective team. It is to help that team thrive in the real environment in which it operates. That means representing its interests, certainly. But it also means helping it understand the pressures and priorities of others.
A balanced leader does not shield the team from the organisation. They connect the team to it.
That can involve explaining why a peer’s request is reasonable, even if it is inconvenient. It can mean encouraging a team member to seek input earlier, rather than blaming another department for slowing down delivery. It can mean recognising that a compromise which serves the organisation is sometimes better than a local victory for your function.
This is not about becoming less loyal to your people. It is about leading them with a wider lens. The ELT in my opinion should know enough about each and every department as opposed to their division.
Collaboration Is Not a Soft Skill
There is a tendency to describe peer-to-peer relationships as “soft”. That language is misleading. Many an executive shares with me during the RLA360 debrief oh, my relationship with my peer group isn’t important it’s with my boss and my people. Let’s go I say…………
Weak peer relationships create hard costs, delayed delivery, duplicated effort, increased turnover, poor decision-making and missed revenue. They also consume leadership time. The more trust has eroded, the more meetings are needed. The more meetings are needed, the less clear ownership becomes. The less clear ownership becomes, the more senior escalation follows.
By contrast, strong peer relationships speed things up.
When trust exists, people share concerns before they become problems. They can challenge one another without making every disagreement personal. They offer context rather than simply saying no. They are more likely to look for solutions that work across teams, rather than defending their own position at all costs.
Trust does not mean agreement. In fact, the strongest peer relationships often contain robust disagreement. The difference is that the disagreement takes place within a shared commitment to the organisation’s goals.
A useful question for any leader is this, when a peer disagrees with me, do I experience it as a threat to my authority, or as information I need to understand? And top that off with am I triggered by one or all of my peers if this disagreemnt occurs?
If your instinct is to defend, persuade or escalate immediately, you may be treating a peer relationship as a contest. If your instinct is to ask questions, clarify trade-offs and explore options, you are more likely to create a partnership.
This does not mean becoming endlessly accommodating. Leadership requires boundaries, clarity and sometimes firm challenge. But challenge lands differently when it comes from someone who has earned the right to give it.
The peer relationship is where you practise leadership without the safety net of hierarchy. It reveals whether you can create movement when you cannot simply give an instruction.
The Hidden Cost of Being Too Team-Centred
There is a particular leadership trap that affects conscientious managers. They mistake advocacy for effectiveness.
They become the defender of their team in every discussion. They fight for headcount, budget, recognition, autonomy and priority. On the surface, this can look admirable. It may even win appreciation from the people they lead.
Yet if advocacy becomes reflexive, it can damage your credibility with peers.
Other leaders start to predict your behaviour. They assume you will oppose any proposal that creates work for your team. They expect you to frame every organisational conversation through the lens of your own function. To beat this home with you, this is not leadership this is sole-trader at its very finest. Peers may stop sharing ideas early because they anticipate resistance.
The irony is that a leader who always fights for their own team can end up with less influence, not more.
The strongest advocates are not those who argue hardest. They are the ones who understand the whole system well enough to make a persuasive case. They know when to push, when to partner, when to concede and when to offer something in return. Their peers trust that they will not use every meeting as an opportunity to win at someone else’s expense.
This is the difference between a team champion and an organisational leader.
A team champion asks: “What is best for my people?”
An organisational leader asks: “What is best for the organisation, and what does my team need in order to play its part successfully?”
Both questions matter. The second requires more maturity.
It also requires you to accept an uncomfortable truth, your team may not always be the priority. That does not mean it is unimportant. It means your role includes helping your team understand where it fits within a broader set of strategic demands.
Leaders who can hold this tension become trusted at more senior levels. They are seen as people who think beyond their own remit. They create confidence because others know they will not simply defend a departmental position; they will contribute to the best available decision.
Relationships Need Deliberate Attention
Most peer relationships do not fail because of a dramatic rupture. They weaken through neglect. Oh we come together once a month Nick or we just get on with things as we are all so busy! Alarm bells ringing in my ears…..Let’s Go……..
You get busy. Your diary fills with team meetings, one-to-ones, delivery reviews and urgent problems. Conversations with peers become functional a request for information, an update on a deadline, a quick message asking for approval. You may see one another regularly, but you stop really talking.
Then pressure arrives.
A major project is delayed. A customer issue escalates. Budgets are cut. Someone’s priorities change. Suddenly, the relationship is tested at the precise moment it has the least resilience.
This is why relationship-building cannot be reserved for moments of need. If you only contact a peer when you require something, the relationship becomes transactional by default.
Instead, make peer connection part of your leadership rhythm. I’d encourage daily attention to begin with.
That does not require endless networking or artificial coffee meetings. It requires purposeful curiosity. Know what your peers are trying to achieve. Understand the pressures they are under. Ask where your team creates difficulty for theirs. Offer help when there is no obvious immediate benefit to you.
A simple question can transform the quality of a peer conversation: “What are you dealing with at the moment that I may not fully understand?”
The answer may challenge your assumptions. It may reveal competing deadlines, operational constraints, commercial pressures or previous experiences with your team that you did not know existed. It may also reveal opportunities to work differently.
The aim is not to become friends with every colleague. Friendship is welcome, but it is not the measure of a strong professional relationship. The aim is to create enough understanding and trust that you can work through complexity together.
That means being reliable. If you agree to do something, do it. If you cannot meet a commitment, say so early. If there is bad news, do not let your peer discover it indirectly. If you have a concern about their team or their approach, speak to them before you speak about them.
These habits sound basic. They are also rare enough to be distinctive.
Start With the Relationships You Avoid
Most leaders can quickly identify the peer relationships that feel easy. These are often people with similar priorities, communication styles or ways of seeing the world. They may be colleagues you have known for years, or leaders whose teams naturally work closely with yours.
Those relationships matter. But they are not usually where your greatest leadership growth lies.
Pay attention instead to the relationships you avoid. Again name it, land your message and be mature enough to let the ego stay outside.
Perhaps there is a peer you find overly political, abrupt or demanding. Perhaps you feel they do not respect your expertise. Perhaps past disagreement has made every interaction guarded. Perhaps you simply do not understand what their function does or why it matters.
These are precisely the relationships worth examining.
Avoidance is expensive. It leaves assumptions untested and allows stories to take hold. The less direct contact you have, the more likely you are to interpret their actions negatively. Meanwhile, they may be telling an equally unhelpful story about you.
You do not have to pretend there is no tension. In fact, naming it constructively can be a sign of leadership.
You might say: “I get the sense that our teams sometimes come together late in the process, and that creates frustration on both sides. I would like us to work out how we can involve each other earlier. What is your view?”
This is not a confrontation. It is an invitation to improve the system.
The crucial point is to enter the conversation without preparing a case against the other person. Go in ready to learn something. You may still need to challenge them, but challenge based on understanding is far more productive than challenge based on assumption.
Lead Across, Not Just Down
Leadership becomes more complex as you become more senior because your success relies increasingly on people you do not manage directly.
Early in a career, competence and individual delivery may carry significant weight. As responsibility grows, the ability to coordinate, influence and align becomes more important. At senior levels, people are judged not only by what their own team achieves but by the conditions they create for the wider organisation.
That requires a shift in identity.
You are not simply the head of your team. You are a member of a leadership group.
That group has its own obligations. It must model constructive disagreement. It must share information. It must avoid making decisions that optimise one area while damaging another. It must demonstrate, visibly, that leaders can work together even when priorities compete.
Employees take their cue from what they see.
If the senior team operates in silos, middle managers will do the same. If leaders criticise peers privately but avoid difficult conversations directly, that behaviour will spread. If departments compete for status and resources without any sense of shared purpose, collaboration becomes a slogan rather than a reality.
Conversely, when leaders show respect for one another, seek cross-functional input and resolve tensions openly, they give permission for others to act in the same way.
This is why peer leadership is not just about your personal effectiveness. It shapes culture.
A culture of collaboration is not created by a values poster, a workshop or a new set of behaviours on an intranet. It is created in the everyday interactions between leaders. The meeting where someone makes space for another function’s perspective; the conversation where a leader owns the impact of their team’s actions; the decision where a group accepts a local inconvenience in service of a larger goal.
Balancing Your Leadership Attention
None of this means reducing your commitment to the people who report to you. Your team still needs direction, development, feedback and support. A leader who neglects their team in pursuit of visibility across the organisation is not balanced; they are simply distracted.
The challenge is to allocate your attention consciously.
Ask yourself how your leadership time is currently distributed. If almost all of it is spent dealing with immediate team needs, you may be operating reactively. If your peer relationships only feature when something needs fixing, you are likely missing opportunities to prevent problems rather than manage them.
A more balanced approach might include three commitments.
First, protect time for your team. Keep regular one-to-ones, be clear about priorities and remain close enough to the work to understand what your people need to perform well. Your credibility as a leader begins with the experience of those you lead.
Second, create a rhythm for peer connection. Identify the leaders whose work most affects your team’s ability to deliver. Meet them before a crisis requires it. Use the time to understand their goals, anticipate pinch points and agree how you will communicate when pressure rises.
Third, widen your perspective in decision-making. Before defending your team’s preferred outcome, ask what the consequences might be for customers, colleagues and the organisation as a whole. Invite others to do the same. This is how leadership moves from advocacy to stewardship.
The goal is not perfect harmony. Organisations need constructive tension. Different functions should bring different perspectives, otherwise poor decisions go unchallenged. The goal is mature tension: disagreement that improves the decision rather than damages the relationship.
Questions Worth Asking
If you want to strengthen your leadership across the organisation, begin with an honest assessment.
Consider these questions:
- Which peer relationships do I actively invest in, and which do I leave to chance?
- Who are the leaders my team depends on most, and how well do I understand their priorities?
- When was the last time I offered support to a peer without needing anything in return?
- Do my team members hear me speak respectfully about other functions, especially when they are not present?
- Where do our teams create friction, and have I discussed that directly with the relevant leader?
- Am I known for protecting only my own area, or for helping the organisation make better decisions?
- When conflict arises, do I seek understanding first, or do I prepare my defence?
- What would my peers say it is like to work with me when the pressure is on?
Do not treat these questions as a performance exercise. Treat them as a mirror.
Leadership is rarely held back by a lack of effort. More often, it is limited by where that effort goes. You can work extraordinarily hard for your team and still fail to create the relationships that enable it to flourish.
The leaders who make the greatest difference understand that their team is not an island. They build capability within it, but they also build bridges beyond it. They lead down with care, across with courage and upwards with a clear view of the wider system.
That balance is not an optional extra. It is the work.
Nick,
