Why Your Leadership Team Isn't Clicking, and What To Do About It

By Erin Sedor | Black Fox Strategy

You’ve got smart people around your table. Accomplished people. People who’ve led teams, built programs, delivered results. Individually, they’re impressive. Collectively?

Something isn’t clicking.

Maybe it shows up as circular conversations that never land on a decision. Maybe it’s the side conversations after the meeting that matter more than the meeting itself. Maybe it’s the strategic plan that gets built every year, presented to the board, and then quietly abandoned because the team responsible for executing it can’t get on the same page long enough to make it work.

This is one of the most common problems I encounter in my work with CEOs and executive directors, and it is almost never framed correctly. The assumption is that the strategy failed. That the market shifted. That the board got in the way. But when I dig in—when I actually sit with the leadership team and watch how they operate—what I find is almost always the same thing.

The team isn’t aligned – there is a marked lack of cohesion even though everyone is perfectly polite to each other. Worse, performance is stalling. Maybe not individually, but entity-wide strategic initiatives are moving at a snail's pace, if at all.

Team Dysfunction Is a Strategy Problem

Let me be direct about this: team cohesion is not a nice-to-have. It is a strategic enabler. Without it, even a brilliantly designed strategy will fail in execution.

The data on this is stark. According to Kaplan and Norton’s landmark research, 85% of leadership teams spend less than one hour per month on strategy. Half spend no time at all. That’s not a scheduling issue. That’s a team focus + dynamics issue. Teams that lack trust, alignment, and shared purpose don’t engage in strategic thinking. They go through the motions. They default to operational firefighting because it’s safer. Nobody has to be vulnerable. Nobody has to say what they really think. Nobody has to confront the elephant in the room.

And so the strategy sits. Beautiful on paper. Dead on arrival.

Meanwhile, 67% of well-formulated strategies fail due to poor execution, according to Harvard Business Review. Not bad strategy. Poor execution. And execution is a team sport. You cannot execute what you haven’t truly agreed to. You cannot agree to what you haven’t honestly discussed. And you cannot honestly discuss anything in a room where trust is thin and communication is guarded. This is the cascade that kills strategic performance, and it starts at the top.

The Pattern Nobody Wants to Name

Here’s what I’ve learned after three decades of working alongside leadership teams in organizations of all sizes and types: the patterns that show up at the executive level replicate throughout the entire organization. If your leadership team operates in silos, your departments will too. If trust is fragile at the top, it will be nonexistent in the middle. The energy and dynamics of the senior team set the tone for everything that follows.

This isn't philosophy. It’s observable reality. In complex adaptive systems—which is what every organization is, whether it acknowledges it or not—patterns repeat at every level. What shows up in the C-suite shows up on the front line. What’s unresolved at the leadership table festers across divisions. The organization is a living reflection of the team that leads it.

I came to this understanding the hard way. I have been on the inside of a team that worked in absolute synchrony – it doesn’t mean we didn’t duke it out here and there, but I never worried about whether someone had my back. In my consulting practice, I have seen how rare my experience was. I find team after team struggling to execute—not because the strategy is flawed, but because the people in charge of it are grappling with trust, confidence, communication, and cohesion. I counsel CEOs behind the scenes as much as I worked with the team on their plan, which is why CEO Strategy Coaching is now at the heart of my practice.

Make no mistake, no matter how intricately woven a strategy is around all the right things, if the team building and implementing it can’t function as a true team, the strategy will fail – usually when you need it the most.

What’s Actually Missing

When a leadership team isn’t clicking, incompetency is usually not the root cause. These are talented people. The issue falls to one or more of three things: a lack of shared purpose, a lack of honest communication, or a lack of understanding about how each person on the team actually thinks, decides, and engages.

Let’s take those one at a time.

Shared Purpose Isn’t Assumed—It’s Built

You might think that because everyone on your leadership team showed up for the same organization, they’re aligned on why they’re there. They’re not. Each person carries their own interpretation of the mission, their own professional motivations, and their own sense of what success looks like. Unless you’ve done the work to surface those perspectives and forge a genuinely shared understanding of purpose, you’re operating on assumption. And assumption is the enemy of alignment.

In my Essential Strategy Formula, purpose is the anchor. Not a tagline. Not a poster on the wall. Purpose that is internally compelling and externally valuable in its contribution. That definition matters for teams, not just organizations. When a leadership team shares a deep, honest understanding of why they exist as a team—what they’re there to create together—everything else gets easier. Decisions have a reference point. Disagreements have a productive frame. Priorities become clearer because they’re connected to something real.

Communication Is Happening—But Not the Kind That Matters

Most leadership teams are communicating constantly. Meetings, emails, Slack threads, reports. What they’re rarely doing is communicating honestly. The kind of communication that moves a team forward requires candor, and candor requires psychological safety, and psychological safety requires trust. Without the foundational trust that allows people to say hard things without fear of retribution or dismissal, communication stays surface-level. Polite. Performative. And ultimately useless for strategic decision-making.

I’ve watched leadership teams spend an hour debating a relatively minor operational decision while avoiding the strategic conversation that everyone knows needs to happen. It’s not laziness. Sometimes it’s self-protection. Sometimes its style – each one thinks they ARE communicating but they aren’t hearing each other. The strategic conversation requires someone to name what isn’t working, and in teams where trust is low, that feels like stepping into traffic; in teams where trust is high, they may simply be comfortable with the inertia.

The Team Doesn’t Actually Know Each Other

This is the one that surprises people most. Your leadership team members may have worked together for years and still not truly understand how each person processes information, makes decisions, handles stress, or engages with conflict. They may have surface-level familiarity without any real insight into the cognitive and motivational styles that drive behavior in high-stakes situations—which is precisely when it matters most.

High-functioning cohesive teams have a greater awareness of each other’s cognitive, engagement, and motivation styles, and they use the unique dynamics of their individual and collective profiles to improve communication, decision quality, and strategic agility. Without that awareness, teams default to assumptions, misread intentions, and create friction that has nothing to do with the work itself.

PrinciplesUs - The Tools That Make This Work

Look, I’m not interested in team building for the sake of team building. I have no use for trust falls, personality quizzes that live in a desk drawer, or facilitated retreats that feel good for a day and change nothing. What I am interested in is equipping leadership teams with real insight and real tools that produce lasting, measurable shifts in how they operate together. It is absolutely critical to strategic planning and performance.

Successful strategy requires powerful, trusting, and cohesive teams. One simply does not exist without the other.

This is where I rely on the PrinciplesUs suite of tools—the PrinciplesYou Assessment, the Team Dashboard, and the 5Cs Culture Survey. I use them because they are evidence-based, grounded in the latest personality science, and designed for practical, ongoing application—not a one-time event. They were developed in partnership with psychologists Adam Grant, Brian Little, and John Golden, and they are backed by more than 2.4 million assessments. This is not a personality quiz or DISC assessment. This is a sophisticated platform for understanding how individuals think, engage, and work together—and then doing something about it.

The PrinciplesYou Assessment gives each team member a detailed profile of their cognitive and behavioral preferences—how they process information, what motivates them, where they’ll naturally excel, and where they’ll need support. When combined with the Team Dashboard, the picture expands. You can see where team members complement each other, where they’re likely to create friction, and how the team’s collective profile compares to archetypes built for strategy, risk management, problem solving, and creativity.

The 5Cs Culture Survey takes it further by measuring the five critical drivers of organizational culture—Connection, Candid Communication, Clarity, Collaboration, and Contribution. This isn’t a generic engagement survey. It gets at the root causes of what’s working and what isn’t, and it translates those findings into a targeted roadmap for action.

What makes these tools different from everything else I’ve encountered in 30-plus years of this work is that they’re designed for continuous use. They’re self-coaching tools that stay with the team long after the initial engagement. As people move in and out of the organization—and they will—the dynamics change, and the tools adapt. You can learn more about how I integrate these into my work at erinsedor.com/principlesus, and explore the full platform at principlesus.com where you can take your own PrinciplesYou assessment for free.

From Insight to Strategic Advantage

Here’s the thing about team cohesion that most consulting approaches get wrong: they treat it as an HR initiative. A morale project. Something soft and supplemental to the “real” work of strategy.

It’s the opposite. Team cohesion is the infrastructure of strategy execution. Without it, your strategic plan is an aspiration, not a commitment. With it, you create something far more powerful than a plan—you create a team that can adapt, decide, and execute as the landscape shifts beneath them.

This is what I mean when I talk about strategic agility. It’s not about pivoting faster or restructuring every eighteen months. It’s about building a leadership team that has the trust, the insight, and the shared purpose to respond to whatever comes—without losing their footing or burning out the organization in the process. A team where individual strengths are understood and channeled, where communication is candid and productive, and where shared purpose isn’t just a phrase in the strategic plan but the actual operating reality of how decisions get made.

Your organization will evolve. People will move in and out of your team. Markets will shift. Industries will change. The question is whether your leadership team has the cohesion to navigate that evolution or whether they’ll fracture under the pressure of it.

What This Means for You

If you’re a CEO or ED reading this and recognizing the pattern, don’t wait for the next strategic planning cycle to address it. The team dynamics problem doesn’t resolve itself with a better plan. It resolves when you do the work to understand the human system that’s responsible for executing the plan.

Start with honest questions. Not about the strategy—about the team.

• Do we trust each other enough to have the conversations that matter?

• Do we actually understand how each person on this team thinks and makes decisions?

• Are we aligned on purpose, or are we just assuming we are?

If the answers are uncertain, that’s your signal. Not a failure, but a starting point.

Because the organizations that consistently execute strategy aren’t the ones with the cleverest plans. They’re the ones led by teams that function as teams in real time—where trust runs deep, communication is honest, and every person at the table understands not just the strategy but each other.

That’s not soft. That’s the hardest, most important work in leadership.

―――――――――

Erin Sedor is an executive advisor and strategic performance expert with 30+ years helping organizations build strategy that actually works. She is the creator of Essential Strategy and the Quantum Intelligence framework for conscious, adaptive leadership.