What is the purpose of a senior leadership team?
Ask a senior leadership team what it is there to do and you will often hear an answer such as:
“To achieve the organisation’s mission.”
“To deliver the strategy.”
“To uphold our values.”
“To provide leadership.”
All of these answers sound reasonable, but none of them tells the team what it needs to do together - and that really matters.
The purpose of a senior leadership team is to carry out the work that requires senior leaders to think, decide and act together on behalf of the organisation as a whole. This includes making sense of change, resolving competing priorities, making cross-functional decisions and creating shared responsibility for action.
If the purpose of a senior leadership team is expressed only in broad organisational language, almost any activity can be made to fit. Reviewing performance, sharing departmental updates, discussing operational problems, developing strategy, responding to risks and approving policies can all be described as contributing to the mission. The result is often a leadership team with a very full agenda but no shared understanding of its distinctive work. Members attend the meeting, provide updates from their own areas and contribute when a subject touches their expertise. The conversation may be intelligent and constructive, but it remains unclear why these particular people need to be in the room together and what the organisation needs from them collectively that it couldn't obtain from them individually.
A mission is not the same as a leadership team purpose
An organisational mission describes what the organisation exists to achieve, but it doesn't necessarily explain why the senior leadership team exists. Everyone in the organisation should contribute to the mission. If that is also the complete purpose of the senior leadership team, it provides no useful guidance about the team’s particular responsibilities.
A meaningful team purpose needs to answer a more demanding question:
What does the organisation need this group of senior leaders to accomplish together?
The word together is important.
Senior leaders usually have at least two responsibilities. They lead their own function, service or area of expertise. They also contribute to the leadership of the organisation as a whole.
The first responsibility can often be carried out largely within an individual leader’s formal remit. The second requires leaders to integrate different forms of knowledge, make sense of issues that cross organisational boundaries and exercise judgement on behalf of the whole organisation. That's the potential work for which a leadership team is needed.
Ambiguity is not neutral
When a leadership team has not made its collective purpose explicit, people tend to fill the gap with their own assumptions.
One person may believe the team exists primarily to make strategic decisions. Another may see it as a coordination meeting. A third may expect collective problem-solving, while a fourth assumes that each director remains responsible for dealing with matters in their own area. These different assumptions are rarely discussed because they're often invisible. Each person’s interpretation feels self-evident to them.
This can create predictable difficulties. Some leaders bring issues to the team that others believe they should resolve themselves. Some expect consultation where others expect individual initiative. One person believes that a matter has been collectively agreed, while another leaves believing that the conversation was merely exploratory. The team may repeatedly revisit decisions because they never really established what kind of conversation they were having or what collective responsibility followed from it.
This ambiguity also encourages leaders to default to the part of their role that's clearest: representing and protecting their own function. This is understandable as functional responsibilities are usually reinforced through job descriptions, budgets, reporting lines, professional identities and performance measures. Responsibility for the organisation as a whole is often expressed much more vaguely. Without a clear collective purpose, the gravitational pull of the functional role is likely to win.
Your meeting agenda reveals your real purpose
A leadership team’s stated purpose may appear in a strategy document or terms of reference. But the way the team actually spends its time reveals the purpose it serves in practice.
Is most of the meeting devoted to reporting what has already happened?
Do members take turns presenting information from their own functions?
Are operational issues routinely escalated because no one is sure who has the authority to resolve them?
Does the Chief Executive spend the meeting joining the dots between contributions?
Are genuinely cross-organisational questions squeezed into the final 20 minutes?
If so, the team may function primarily as an information-sharing or coordinating group. That's not necessarily wrong. Organisations need coordination. Sharing information can prevent duplication, identify dependencies and help people anticipate one another’s actions. The question is, is that your intention? Coordination should not be confused with collective leadership.
Arguably, the real benefit of collective leadership is being able to address questions that can't be resolved adequately from within any single function.
These might include:
What changes in our environment require a collective response?
Where are our strategic priorities competing with one another?
What trade-offs are we willing to make?
Which risks might we be missing because no one person has formal responsibility?
What does the organisation need from us that no one director can deliver alone?
What must we understand, decide, own or learn together?
If the team can't identify any significant work requiring the integration of its members’ perspectives and authority, then it's reasonable to ask whether the organisation needs a leadership team at all, or whether it needs a well-run coordination meeting. Either way, being intentional and clear about what you're there to do together will be helpful.
Define the work before trying to improve the team
Leadership teams are often encouraged to improve trust, communication, accountability or psychological safety. Of course these things matter, but they can't be considered properly without first understanding what the team is there to do.
The level of trust needed to exchange updates is different from the trust required to challenge a colleague’s interpretation of a strategic risk.
The communication needed to coordinate established plans is different from the dialogue required to reach a decision when legitimate priorities conflict.
Accountability looks different when work is individually owned, jointly coordinated or genuinely collective.
Even the composition of the team should follow from its purpose. Once it's clear what the collective work, it becomes easier to establish whether the right people to do that work are in the room. Without that clarity, membership can become dictated by hierarchy or convention: people attend because their job title says that they belong. Before investing in team development, start by defining the work.
A practical exercise your leadership team
Ask each member, independently, to complete these sentences:
This leadership team exists because the organisation needs us to…
The work that only we can do together is…
The issues that should come to this team are…
The issues that should not come to this team are…
When we leave the room, our collective responsibility is…
Don't expect identical answers. Treat the differences as data, then identify the small number of collective tasks that justify the team’s existence. These might include making sense of changes in the external environment, setting strategic direction, resolving enterprise-level trade-offs, making cross-functional decisions, creating shared commitment or ensuring coordinated action across the organisation.
Be specific. “Deliver the strategy” is broad. “Determine how we will allocate limited resources when our three strategic priorities compete” describes collective work.
“Provide leadership” is broad. “Develop a shared interpretation of emerging risks and decide how the organisation should respond” describes collective work.
“Live our values” is broad. “Make decisions that are consistent with our stated values when performance, cost and quality create competing pressures” describes collective work. The aim is not to produce a more impressive purpose statement. It is to create practical clarity about why the team needs to work collectively and how that should shape its attention, conversations and decisions.
Once that is clear, the team can review:
whether its membership reflects the work;
whether its agenda gives sufficient time to collective priorities;
which matters require individual action, coordination or collective judgement;
how decisions will be made and recorded;
what ownership means beyond the meeting;
and how the team will learn from the consequences of its choices.
From capable individuals to collective effectiveness
Most senior leadership teams are made up of intelligent, experienced and committed people and therefore leadership team difficulties rarely arise because members lack individual capability. The challenge is translating that individual capability into collective effectiveness. That translation doesn't happen simply because capable leaders are placed around the same table. It requires a clear understanding of what they are there to do together, the ability to integrate different perspectives and the collective judgement to act in the interests of the organisation as a whole.
So, ask your senior leadership team:
"What are we actually here to do?"
If the answer is simply to achieve the mission, deliver the strategy or uphold the values, keep going.
What does the organisation need from this particular group of people?
What requires you to think, decide and act together?
And how should that purpose change what you do when you are in the room — and what you take responsibility for when you leave it?
Those questions are not administrative details, they are the foundations of collective leadership.
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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