You hired capable leaders. Why isn’t your senior leadership team effective?
What does a senior leadership team need from its CEO to be effective?
Once someone reaches a senior position, it's easy to assume they shouldn't need too much from the CEO. You've hired them because they're experienced and capable, and you expect them to make difficult decisions, and work independently and collectively as a senior leadership team.
But bringing capable people together doesn’t automatically create an effective leadership team. Senior leadership team effectiveness depends not only on the capability of individual executives, but also on whether they have the clarity, authority and collective capability to work together. Senior leaders still need challenge, support and trust from the CEO, but that support should help the team become less dependent over time.
What do senior leaders need from their CEO?
A recent study by Damlaj and colleagues explored how CEOs influence the engagement of their top management teams.
Through interviews with 15 senior executives, the researchers identified needs at three levels:
Individual: the opportunity to make an impact, grow and feel supported
Team: accountability and unity
Organisational: clear direction and consistent ways of working
The study is small and based on the experiences of top management team members, so it offers a framework for reflection rather than a proven formula. But its findings raise some useful questions.
Do senior leaders have meaningful authority, or only responsibility?
Do they receive honest feedback and constructive challenge?
Are the organisation’s priorities clear?
Does the CEO hold everyone to the same standards?
These conditions affect whether senior leaders contribute fully or become cautious, protect their own functions and refer difficult decisions upwards.
Why individual support alone doesn't create an effective leadership team
A CEO could have an excellent relationship with every executive and still have a team that struggles to work collectively. Each person may feel trusted and supported while continuing to operate primarily as the head of their own function rather than collectively as a leadership team. People may leave meetings and raise their concerns with the CEO afterwards rather than saying what they think in the room. Problems involving more than one function may get passed back and forth, and people return to their own teams with different versions of what was agreed.
Individual engagement matters, but it is not the same as collective effectiveness. So as well as considering what individual senior leaders need from them, CEOs also need to consider what the team as a whole requires to work effectively together.
That collective work might include:
developing a shared understanding of what is happening;
weighing competing priorities from different functional perspectives;
exercising judgement on behalf of the organisation as a whole;
making decisions that cross functional boundaries;
agreeing what each leader will contribute;
supporting collective decisions beyond the meeting
It also requires accountability between team members. If the team believe that it's solely the CEO's responsibility to challenge missed commitments, resolve tensions or reconcile different interpretations, then the team remains dependent on the CEO rather than learning to manage more of its collective work itself.
When does CEO support become dependence?
Senior teams are more likely to depend heavily on the CEO when priorities, authority and decision-making responsibilities are unclear.
The CEO then finds themselves:
resolving differences between executives;
clarifying priorities in separate conversations;
explaining one person’s position to another;
reconnecting decisions made in different places;
answering questions the team could resolve together.
None of these activities is inherently inappropriate. CEOs have a legitimate role in setting direction, resolving some disagreements and making the decisions that they own. The important question is whether the CEOs involvement is helping the team to develop its collective capability, or compensating for its absence.
What is CEO compensatory work?
CEO compensatory work is the additional work the CEO carries out to compensate for gaps in the team’s collective functioning. It's the work involved in continually joining the dots: reconciling different interpretations, brokering compromises, re-explaining decisions in individual conversations and re-establishing priorities.
Some of this is clearly part of the CEO's role, but when they repeatedly have to do this compensatory work, it may indicate that the senior leadership team lacks clarity, agreed ways of working, or collective capability.
How can a CEO reduce the team's dependence?
A CEO can reduce dependence by being really clear about the authority that the team has, and helping them exercise collective judgement, challenge one another and resolve cross-organisational issues without continually referring them upwards.
That means making clear:
which decisions belong to the CEO;
which decisions belong to the team;
what individual executives can decide;
what the team is collectively responsible for;
how disagreements will be handled;
how members will hold one another accountable.
It may also mean resisting the temptation to resolve every difficulty personally. If two executives bring an unresolved issue to the CEO, the immediate question might not be, “What decision should I make?” but, “What is preventing you from resolving this together?”
The aim is not to withdraw support, but to provide the support the team needs to strengthen its capacity to think, decide and act together. Support should strengthen people’s ability to exercise judgement rather than routinely requiring the CEO to exercise that judgement for them.
A useful check for CEOs and senior leadership teams
These questions can help a CEO and senior leadership team examine the balance between necessary support and unnecessary dependence:
Are team members clear about the authority they have, as well as what they are responsible for?
Are organisational priorities and decision rights clear?
Do team members receive honest feedback and constructive challenge?
Can they disagree and resolve cross-functional issues without routing them through the CEO?
Do they hold one another to agreed commitments?
Where is the CEO still having to join things together?
Is the CEO’s support building the team’s collective capability or maintaining its dependence?
Senior leaders still need leadership, but that leadership should help them contribute not only as capable individuals, but also as members of a team with shared responsibility for the organisation.
The CEO creates and protects the conditions for collective leadership, but the whole team must learn how to work within, and eventually help sustain, those conditions.
Research discussed: Damlaj, W., Hurtienne, M. and Hurtienne, L. (2026), “CEO’s Influence on Top Management Team’s Employee Engagement: A Qualitative Study”, Human Resource Development Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1002/hrdq.70031
Interested in exploring these ideas further?
I'm Dr Marie Stopforth, a Chartered Psychologist who works with senior leadership teams. I share occasional insights on collective leadership, senior teams and the psychology of leading together.
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