Nick Roud, Executive Leadership Coach, 19th October 2026, Auckland, New Zealand.
There is a peculiar thing that happens when clever, successful, highly paid people are placed around one table and told they are now a “leadership team.” They nod solemnly. They agree about “alignment.” They use words like “synergy” with a straight face. And then, the moment the meeting ends, they return to their departments like feudal lords returning to their castles, pulling up the drawbridge, feeding the moat monsters, and preparing to defend their territory against all comers.
This is not a team. It is a collection of empires with a shared calendar invite.
And yet we persist in pretending otherwise. We call it an executive leadership team, put its name on an organisation chart, and hope that the word “team” will do the heavy lifting. It won’t. A team is not created by a title, an offsite, or a particularly expensive set of matching chairs. A team is created by relationships specifically, the relationships between peers and by the willingness of those peers to put the enterprise ahead of their own little kingdom.
Let me try and put it plainly: a leadership team is “more than a collection of capable individuals”; it is a system of relationships, decisions, conversations and shared accountability. Which is a polite way of saying that if your executive peers do not trust each other, no amount of strategy decks will save you.
The Myth of the Lone Genius
Every organisation loves the story of the brilliant individual. The sales director who delivers the number. The CFO who finds the savings. The operations leader who fixes the supply chain. The technology leader who builds the thing everyone else suddenly cannot live without. And fair enough. Talent matters. But at the top of an organisation, individual brilliance is roughly as useful as a very fast car with four drivers, each holding a different map, arguing about the destination while the fuel gauge heads towards empty.
The executive team is not a showcase for individual talent. It is the mechanism by which an organisation makes decisions, allocates resources, resolves conflict, and creates direction. If that mechanism is broken if peers compete rather than collaborate then the organisation does not merely underperform. It develops a personality disorder.
You see it everywhere. Marketing blames sales. Sales blames product. Product blames technology. Technology blames “the business,” which is a wonderfully vague accusation because it allows everyone to feel justified without anyone having to be specific. Finance watches all of this with the weary expression of someone who has seen the invoices and knows exactly how much this theatre costs.
Meanwhile, customers experience the organisation as one confusing, contradictory, slow-moving entity. Because to them, it is one organisation. They do not know or care that internally it is divided into departments, budgets, KPIs and egos.
My work over the last ten years on peer-to-peer leadership makes the same point: the relationships between executive peers determine how the wider organisation behaves. Unfortunately I see this too often it starts at the very top. If the top team operates in silos, middle managers will do the same. If leaders criticise peers privately but avoid difficult conversations directly, that behaviour spreads. If departments compete for status and resources without shared purpose, collaboration becomes a slogan rather than a reality.
In other words: the fish rots from the head, but it usually starts with two executives who stopped speaking to each other in about 2019.
Silos Are Not Structures. They Are Choices.
People often talk about silos as though they are an unfortunate feature of organisational design. As though someone accidentally built walls between departments while nobody was looking.
Nonsense.
Silos are choices. One of the most common ask from organisations is Nick we operate in silos. It’s historic, we must change this.
They are the accumulated result of decisions about who gets information, who gets credit, who gets resources, and who is allowed to make decisions. They are reinforced every time a leader says, “That’s not my area,” “That’s not my budget,” or the corporate classic: “We need to protect our people.”
Protect them from what, precisely? From the rest of the organisation? From cooperation? From the terrifying possibility that another department might have a useful idea?
Of course, functional expertise matters. You want your CFO to be financially rigorous, your CTO to understand technology, your head of people to understand people. Nobody is suggesting that the finance leader should redesign the network architecture, or that the chief operating officer should personally write the brand guidelines.
But expertise is not the same as territory.
The best executive peers hold two ideas at once: “I am accountable for my function” and “I am accountable for the whole enterprise.” The first without the second produces a silo. The second without the first produces a well-meaning person who wanders into everyone else’s lane offering opinions and calling it leadership.
The magic is in the combination. You need people with deep functional strength who can also lift their heads above the parapet and ask a more useful question: “What does the organisation need from me now?”
That question changes everything. It turns a departmental manager into an enterprise leader. It turns a budget negotiation into a strategic conversation. It turns “my people” into “our people.”
Recently I came back from Australia with one of my executive teams in Perth who had been grappling with its people future. This was not strategy but wholly focused on people. We spent a few days coming back to “what can I contribute to the team, the organisation now”. Our time together really uncovered a number of gaps not only in the ELT but also how ‘comfortable each other had got with regard to their peer relationships’.
The Meeting Is Not the Team
Here is another uncomfortable truth: your executive meeting is not your executive team.
You can have a beautifully run weekly meeting. Tight agenda. Clear actions. Everyone arrives on time, mostly. And still have a team that is fundamentally broken because the real decisions are being made in corridors, private messages, and one-to-one conversations that never involve the people affected by them.
The meeting is merely the visible part of the system. The relationships are the operating system underneath.
And if the operating system is corrupted, the meeting becomes theatre. People present updates. They perform confidence. They avoid the real issue. Then everyone leaves and does something completely different.
A healthy executive team has what I describe as candour, mutual respect and shared commitment. Not agreement. Agreement is overrated. If everyone agrees all the time, either you have an extraordinarily aligned group of people or someone is not saying what they actually think. Usually the latter.
What you want is productive conflict: people willing to challenge each other in the room, disagree vigorously, then leave aligned behind the decision. Not the corporate pantomime where everyone nods in the meeting and undermines the decision before the car park gate has closed. The team I am coaching will often hear me say is this an 80%er? If so, it’s time to get on with it. Move on.
The test is simple. After a difficult decision, do your peers defend it outside the room? Do they explain it honestly, even if they argued against it? Or do they say, with a small smile, “Well, it wasn’t my call”?
That sentence should be treated as a leadership emergency.
Trust Is Built in Boring Moments
We tend to imagine trust as something grand: loyalty in a crisis, courage in a board meeting, a dramatic act of support when everything is falling apart.
Sometimes it is. But mostly, trust is built in deeply unglamorous moments.
It is built when you give a peer information before they ask for it. When you admit you got something wrong before someone else has to point it out. When you ask for their view before the decision is made, rather than afterwards, when their input can only serve as decoration.
It is built when you do not take credit for their work. When you do not brief against them. When you do not treat their department as a supplier, an obstacle, or a convenient explanation for your own problems.
One key observation is that trust is built through hundreds of small interactions, and that consistent leadership action matters more than declarations. This is deeply annoying for anyone hoping to fix culture with a keynote speech, but it is true.
You cannot ask people to collaborate while rewarding territorial behaviour. You cannot ask for candour while punishing the first person who tells you something uncomfortable. You cannot ask for one team while allowing leaders to compete for resources, status and the CEO’s attention like seagulls fighting over a chip.
Culture is not what you say. It is what you tolerate, reward, ignore and repeat.
From “My Team” to “Our Team”
Every executive has two teams, whether they like it or not. Three if you count home!
The first is the team they lead: their direct reports, their function, their people. This team gets most of their attention because it is immediate, visible and emotionally satisfying. You can see progress. You can solve problems. You can be the hero.
The second is the team of peers around them. This team is harder. It is less controllable. It involves people who may have different priorities, different styles, different incentives and, occasionally, the interpersonal warmth of a tax audit.
But the second team is often more important.
Because if the peer team is fragmented, the first team inherits the fragmentation. Your people watch what you do with your peers. They notice whether you speak respectfully about colleagues. They notice whether you share information or hoard it. They notice whether you solve problems across boundaries or throw them over the fence.
And they copy it. That’s right the ripple effect is in full flow.
This is why moving from silo to one team cannot be delegated to HR, a consultant, or a poster in the staff kitchen. It has to be modelled by the people at the top. If the executive team behaves like one team, the organisation has a chance. If it does not, then every “one team” campaign is simply an expensive exercise in collective eye-rolling.
My view of leadership is useful here: senior leadership is less about personally controlling the work and more about creating context, choosing priorities, shaping culture, developing successors and making difficult calls. In other words, your job is not merely to run your patch. Your job is to make the whole system work.
What Good Peer Relationships Actually Look Like
Let us be specific, because “strong relationships” can sound like something from a corporate wellness brochure, preferably accompanied by a photo of people laughing while holding coffee cups.
Strong executive peer relationships look like this:
- You can disagree without it becoming personal.
- You can challenge a peer’s thinking without them treating it as an attack.
- You can admit uncertainty without losing authority.
- You can ask for help without feeling weak.
- You can give difficult feedback directly, privately and early.
- You can receive difficult feedback without sulking, retaliating, or calling a lawyer.
- You share information before it becomes ammunition.
- You make decisions for the enterprise, not for your departmental convenience.
- You support decisions publicly, even when you argued against them privately.
- You treat another leader’s success as the organisation’s success, not a threat to your own.
None of this requires you to become best friends. Thank goodness. Some of the most effective executive teams are not socially close at all. They do not go on holidays together. They do not share a group chat full of thumbs-up emojis. But they respect each other, trust each other’s judgement, and know how to have the conversations that matter.
Friendship is optional. Respect, candour and accountability are not.
The Cost of Getting It Wrong
The cost of poor peer relationships is rarely visible on a single line of the budget. It hides in slower decisions, duplicated work, missed opportunities, defensive behaviour, talent loss and the quiet exhaustion of people who spend their energy navigating politics rather than serving customers.
It shows up when a decision that should take a week takes three months. When a customer problem crosses three departments and nobody owns it. When an opportunity dies because no one wants to share the credit. When your best people leave, not because of pay, but because they are tired of working in an organisation where the leaders cannot get along. Typically called a ‘toxic’ environment.
And it shows up in the most damaging way of all: indecision.
Siloed teams do not merely disagree. They delay. They escalate. They create committees. They commission another analysis. They wait for someone else to blink. Meanwhile, the world moves on, competitors move faster, and the organisation becomes very good at explaining why things did not happen.
A leadership team that cannot make timely decisions is not a leadership team. It is a support group for people who enjoy meetings.
Moving from Silo to One Team
So how do you actually move from silo to one team? Not with a slogan. Not with a “collaboration value” added to the wall. With deliberate, repeated behaviour.
Start with a shared definition of success. Not each function’s success. The enterprise’s success. What must be true in twelve months for the organisation to win? Then ask each leader to explain how their function contributes to that outcome and, more importantly, what they may need to give up, change or share to make it possible.
Then examine the incentives. If leaders are rewarded only for functional results, do not be surprised when they behave functionally. If collaboration is rewarded only in words, it will remain words. Reward shared outcomes. Recognise people who make other teams better. Celebrate the leader who gives away credit, shares talent, or solves a problem outside their own lane.
Then change the conversations. Put enterprise issues not departmental updates at the centre of executive meetings. Ask peers to bring decisions, trade-offs and problems that require collective ownership. Create space for disagreement. Then insist on alignment once the decision is made.
And finally, deal with behaviour. Not with a vague conversation about “values,” but with direct feedback. If a leader hoards information, undermines peers, or treats collaboration as optional, say so. Calmly. Clearly. Early. My coaching philosophy is built around direct, respectful challenge, practical reflection and behavioural change not corporate noise.
Because the longer poor behaviour is tolerated, the more it becomes normal. And once it is normal, it becomes culture.
The Hard Part Is You
Here is the part nobody enjoys hearing: if you are an executive, the first place to look is not at your peers. It is in the mirror.
Ask yourself:
- Do I share information early, or only when it suits me?
- Do I ask for peer input before decisions, or seek approval afterwards?
- Do I speak about colleagues with respect when they are not in the room?
- Do I make it easy for peers to challenge me?
- Do I take responsibility for enterprise outcomes, or quietly retreat into my function?
- Do I give credit away, or collect it like a magpie collects shiny objects?
- Do I address conflict directly, or let it ferment until it becomes a organisational wound?
Most executives would say they want one team. Fewer are willing to do the things that create one: give up control, share credit, have uncomfortable conversations, and put collective success above personal advantage.
To me leadership involves making yourself less central not irrelevant, but less involved in the things competent others can handle. At peer level, that means trusting your colleagues with real responsibility, real information and real influence.
It means accepting that you are not the hero of every story.
Which, for many high-achieving executives, is roughly as appealing as being asked to hand over the car keys, the credit card, and the remote control simultaneously.
But it is the work.
One Team Is a Discipline
“One team” is not a feeling. It is not a workshop outcome. It is not a set of values printed on a mug.
It is a discipline.
It is choosing, again and again, to act as if the organisation’s success matters more than your department’s comfort. It is choosing candour over politics. Shared outcomes over territorial victories. Direct conversations over corridor whispers. Enterprise decisions over departmental convenience.
The organisations that get this right are not necessarily filled with nicer people. They are filled with leaders who understand that the executive team is the organisation’s first team and that everything else flows from it.
So look around your leadership table.
Ask yourself whether you have a team of leaders, or a collection of capable individuals politely occupying the same room.
Then ask what you, personally, will do this week to make it more of the former.
Because your peers are not your competition.
They are your colleagues. Your counterparts. Your fellow travellers in the strange, demanding, occasionally ridiculous business of leading an organisation.
And if you cannot make that relationship work, do not expect anyone below you to manage it either.
Nick Roud, Auckland, NZ
