Lately, I’ve found myself in a number of executive team environments where, on the surface, things look fine.
What Actually Shifts the Dynamic
The right people are in the room.
The strategy is clear enough.
There’s no obvious conflict.
And yet - progress is slow (or stopped faster than being tackled by Pieter-Steph du Toit).
Decisions linger. Conversations feel circular. Opportunities are missed, not because the team lacks capability, but because something isn’t quite clicking at the top.
When you spend a bit of time inside these teams, the pattern becomes clearer: there’s misalignment. Not the loud, visible kind - but the quiet, more dangerous kind.
The kind that sits underneath the surface:
• Not quite saying what needs to be said
• Holding back in the moment, then revisiting things afterwards
• Mistaking agreement for real alignment
In my experience, this tends to show up in two very different types of teams.
Two Teams, Same Outcome
1. The Newly Formed Executive Team
I’ve recently been working with a leadership team that had gone through significant change. A number of new executives had joined in a relatively short period of time.
Individually, they were all strong. Experienced. Credible.
Collectively, though, they weren’t a team.
In meetings, the tone was constructive - but cautious. Discussions were well-mannered, but often stopped just short of real challenge. Decisions would be “agreed,” but somehow needed revisiting a week later. Constantly.
The newer members were still finding their footing - reading the dynamics, working out where they could push and where they should hold back. Those who’d been there longer weren’t intentionally excluding anyone, but they defaulted to familiar ways of working and, at times, familiar alliances.
No one would describe it as dysfunctional. But it wasn’t effective either.
What was missing wasn’t capability. It was integration.
2. The Long-Standing Leadership Team
In contrast, another team I’ve been working with had been together for years.
They trust each other. They know each other well. There’s history there - which, in many ways, is a real strength.
But over time, that familiarity had started to work against them.
Meetings were efficient - but perhaps too easy. There was a noticeable lack of challenge. People would nod along, only for concerns to surface later in smaller conversations.
Strategic topics would come back again and again, without real movement.
There was alignment but it was surface-level. What had crept in was a kind of unspoken agreement to keep things comfortable.
Different Stories, Same Root Cause
Although these teams look very different, the underlying issue is the same.
It comes down to trust, but not in the usual sense. This isn’t about whether leaders trust each other’s competence or intent. In both cases, they do.
It’s about whether they trust each other enough to:
• Challenge directly
• Disagree in the moment
• Say the thing that might create tension
That’s a different level of trust altogether.
And without it, executive teams tend to default to safer behaviours:
• Holding back
• Testing ideas outside the room instead of inside it
• Agreeing too quickly, then revisiting later
The impact is always the same: slower decisions, diluted accountability, and a gradual loss of momentum.
Why This Matters More Than We Think
When alignment breaks down at the executive level, the organisation feels it – quicker than Cheslin Kolbe on the hunt for the tryline.
Teams pick up on mixed messages. Priorities become less clear. Confidence in decision-making starts to wobble.
And what I often see is this: the organisation becomes a reflection of the executive team.
If the top team is hesitant, fragmented, or overly cautious, that pattern repeats itself all the way down.
Alignment isn’t just a leadership issue. It’s a performance issue.
What Actually Shifts the Dynamic
The encouraging part is that this is fixable. But not by accident.
In both of these teams, things started to improve when alignment became something they worked on deliberately - not something they assumed would happen naturally.
A few shifts made a real difference:
• Be Explicit About Alignment
One of the simplest but most powerful changes was this: stop assuming alignment.
At the end of key discussions, we introduced a discipline of asking:
• What have we actually decided?
• Is anyone not aligned (and why?)
It sounds basic, but it forces clarity. And it surfaces misalignment while it’s still useful to deal with it.
• Make Room for Proper Challenge
Most executive teams don’t lack opinions - they lack a productive way of airing them.
Once we reframed challenge as a responsibility, not a risk, the tone changed:
• People tested each other’s thinking more directly
• Assumptions were questioned earlier
• Decisions got stronger, faster
It wasn’t about creating conflict. It was about making it safe, and expected, to have it.
• Deal With Things in the Room
Both teams had developed versions of the “meeting after the meeting.”
That’s usually a sign that the real conversation isn’t happening where it needs to.
Gently, but consistently, we brought things back into the room:
• If something wasn’t said, we surfaced it
• If decisions were being revisited, we asked why
• If alignment wasn’t there, we didn’t push past it
This alone changed the quality of decisions significantly.
Be Intentional About How the Team Works
Especially with newer teams, integration doesn’t just happen over time, it needs to be built.
Spending focused time on:
• How decisions are made
• How disagreement is handled
• What good challenge looks like
• What’s expected of each other as a team
…creates a shared way of operating that you can’t assume into existence.
Interestingly, even more established teams benefit from resetting this. What worked three years ago often isn’t what’s needed now.
A Final Thought
If there’s one thing I’ve been reminded of recently, it’s this:
Executive teams don’t become aligned because they’re made up of capable people.
They become aligned because they’re willing to do the harder work:
• Saying what needs to be said
• Listening without defensiveness
• Staying in the discomfort long enough to get to real clarity
That takes time. And, often, it helps to step outside the day-to-day to properly work on it.
The teams that do make that investment, formally or informally, tend to unlock a different level of performance quite quickly. Not because they change who’s in the room, but because they change how they show up in it.
And that, in the end, is where alignment really lives.
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