The Executive Team Test
Dana Campbell, PCC
CEO | Leadership Coach | Advisor | Speaker | Change Leader | Stress Resiliency Expert
9 things you should expect to see when your executives actually operate as a team
TL;DR
This week, I was talking with a newly appointed President who is building out an entire commercial operation—and, along with it, her new leadership team.
She was clear about one thing: she didn't want to recreate the leadership teams she'd experienced in the past.
She described those meetings as boring and tedious, with the ubiquitous round robin: each leader reports out on their function, the team discusses a few issues that need alignment, everyone leaves with their respective action items, and they come back the next week and do it again.
She wanted to start this team differently.
But as we talked, we got into a harder question: What exactly would “different” look like?
For all the attention we give to building leadership teams, the playbook is remarkably consistent.
Meet weekly. Report out on your function. Surface issues that need input. Try to get everyone aligned on the big stuff. Repeat.
This old model of bringing leadership teams together sets a low bar for what you should get from some of the smartest, most experienced people in your organization.
Great executive teams create value that none of the individual executives can create independently.
Here is what you should expect to see happening around the table when your executives actually operate as a team:
1. The biggest company problems become team problems.
Growth isn't automatically the CRO's problem. Organizational capacity isn't automatically the CHRO's. A product challenge that threatens the strategy doesn't simply get handed back to Product.
One executive may still own the outcome. But when an issue is sufficiently consequential or interconnected, the team understands that solving it is a collective responsibility.
The test: Listen to the language around your table. Is it “How can we help you solve your problem?” or “What do we need to solve together?”
2. The team's best time is spent solving, not reporting.
Finance still needs to share the numbers. Sales needs to surface what's happening in the market. Product needs to keep the team close to the roadmap.
But information that could have been read before the meeting shouldn't consume the highest-value time your executives have together.
The test: Look at your last three executive-team agendas. How much time was spent reporting and coordinating versus working on consequential enterprise problems that required the people in the room?
3. Executives know how to get into each other's business.
This is one of the murkier parts of being on an executive team.
How far should the CFO wade into a Product problem before they're stepping on toes? If the CRO sees something the CMO isn't seeing, how hard should they push? If the CHRO hears an organizational problem underneath what everyone else is treating as a commercial one, is it their job to say so?
On strong teams, functional authority doesn't preclude enterprise contribution.
The CFO doesn't need to be a Product expert to see something Product may be missing. The CHRO doesn't need to own Operations to recognize that an execution problem may actually be an organizational one.
The test: When an issue sits primarily within one leader's function, do the other executives meaningfully engage—or does everyone defer to the functional expert?
4. Questions expand the team's thinking rather than test someone's expertise.
There's a significant difference between:
Why would you do that?
and:
What are you seeing that I'm not?
The goal isn't to challenge someone's authority or prove that their answer is wrong. It's to understand what they see and add to it.
You're not questioning someone's knowledge. You're expanding what the team knows.
The test: Pay attention to the questions being asked. Are they opening up the thinking—or forcing people to defend the position they brought into the room?
5. People actually change their minds.
Another executive's perspective should occasionally change what you see.
Finance raises an implication Product hadn't considered. Sales shares something happening in the market that changes an assumption behind the plan. People surfaces a capacity constraint that causes the team to rethink the timing altogether.
The measure of a great executive-team conversation isn't whether the best idea in the room wins. It's whether the team leaves with an idea that wasn't in the room when the conversation started.
The test: Think about your last few consequential executive-team discussions. When was the last time someone's position materially changed because of what happened in the room?
6. The team can see the enterprise together.
Different perspectives only become valuable if the team has enough shared context to integrate them.
What are we optimizing for right now? What matters most? What do we believe to be true about the business? Which tradeoffs are we willing to make? What are we protecting? What new information would cause us to change course?
We call this the team's enterprise operating lens.
A shared lens doesn't mean a shared opinion. It gives different opinions a common context in which to become useful to one another.
The test: Put a difficult tradeoff in front of the team. Do people have a shared basis for evaluating it—or does each executive evaluate it primarily through the needs of their own function?
7. The CEO isn't automatically the closer.
Watch what happens when a messy, cross-functional problem hits the table.
Does the team wrestle with it together? Or do six executives eventually offer six perspectives and turn toward the CEO to make sense of them?
The CEO belongs in the integration. They just can't always be the integration.
If every consequential issue requires the CEO to synthesize the perspectives and produce the answer, the organization hasn't built that capacity into the team.
The test: Who actually integrates the conversation? If the CEO stopped short of providing the answer, could the team get there?
8. The team can make a decision that's bad for a function and right for the company.
It's easy to be enterprise-first when everything fits.
It's harder when Product has to give up resources it fought for, Sales has to walk away from revenue, Finance has to accept an investment that makes the short-term numbers harder, or an initiative someone personally championed no longer deserves to survive.
The test: When enterprise and functional priorities genuinely collide, which one wins?
9. The team can move when there isn't a playbook.
Increasingly, the hardest challenges facing executive teams aren't decisions between A and B. Nobody knows the answer yet.
Customer expectations are moving. New competitors are emerging. AI is changing what's possible. The economics of the business are shifting. There may be early signals about what's working, but not enough evidence to simply copy someone else's answer.
This is when the collective intelligence of the team should be most valuable.
Can the team combine what Sales is hearing, what Product is seeing, what Finance understands about the economics, what People knows about organizational capacity, and what the CEO is hearing from the Board and market to create a path forward?
The test: When there isn't an obvious answer, does the team create one together—or does everyone retreat to what they know and wait for the CEO?
The real test
Look at what your business needs to solve over the next 12 months.
Not the goals that sit neatly inside Sales, Product, Finance or People. The harder problems—the ones that cut across the business, require real tradeoffs, or don't yet have an obvious answer.
Those are the problems your executive team needs to be able to solve together.
If this test surfaced something worth talking about, pass it along to a colleague and compare notes. And if you want an outside perspective on what you're seeing, reach out. We're always happy to talk through where your team is getting stuck and what might need to change.
