How to get a Senior Leadership team back to High Performance

What happens when an established firm's most senior team becomes the bottleneck, and what actually fixes it.

The call goes something like this. 

Eight-person SLT at a profitable fintech. The strategy isn't shipping. Decisions get made in the room and unmade in the corridor. Two levels down, attrition has climbed past 20 per cent. And the team itself is angry. Real arguments in meetings. Long, quiet ones afterwards.

The CEO wants us to run an offsite. Or rerun the values. Or do a strategy day.

We almost always pass on the offsite, and the CEO almost always pushes back, and then six months later they call again.

So let me explain why.

Before we go any further: this work is hard

Two things have to be true before we'll take an engagement like this on, and it's worth being upfront about them.

The first is that the work itself is hard. This isn't a soft, generative, find-your-shared-purpose kind of intervention. We are going to bring the senior leadership team into a room and tell them what they've been avoiding telling each other. People will be uncomfortable. People will get defensive. One or two of them, occasionally, will quietly be relieved that someone has finally said it. None of them will enjoy the first hour. The shape of the conversation we facilitate is closer to surgery than coaching, and it needs to be, because nothing softer is going to shift what's actually stuck.

The second is that the CEO has to be able to do two things that don't always come naturally. They have to ask for external expert help, which often cuts against the identity of being the person with the answers. And they have to trust the expert once they've asked, meaning they don't override the diagnosis, don't try to manage the room when we're in it, and don't quietly negotiate with us beforehand to soften what we're going to say.

When both of those are true, the work moves. When one of them isn't, no methodology in the world is going to save it.

Senior team dysfunction is a performance problem first

Richard Hackman did the work on this at Harvard, with Ruth Wageman. Their finding is worth saying out loud: across the 120-plus senior leadership teams they studied, only one in five was genuinely high-performing. The rest were mediocre or poor, and most CEOs didn't realise where their team sat.

The reason isn't soft. It's cognitive. Senior teams under sustained internal conflict run out of bandwidth to think. Amy Edmondson's research at Harvard, now twenty years deep and replicated at Google in Project Aristotle, shows psychological safety is the strongest single predictor of whether a team produces good work. When senior leaders don't feel safe putting half-formed ideas in front of each other, they stop. They withhold. They route around each other. The team starts making decisions on less information than it actually holds.

That's how you get strategy that doesn't ship. The strategy isn't usually wrong. The team is too defended to think with each other about what to do next.

What's underneath is usually quite specific

Wilfred Bion, working at the Tavistock in the 1940s and 50s, named something we still see every week. Groups, when anxious, organise themselves around an unconscious task that has nothing to do with the work in front of them. He called these basic assumptions. Fight-flight. Dependency. Pairing. They look like work. They aren't.

In a fintech SLT in trouble, you can usually name the unspoken thing within the first ten interviews. A founder dynamic nobody will challenge. A bad hire two years ago the CEO can't admit was a bad hire. A strategy one half of the team thinks is wrong and won't say. A decision that got made under pressure and has been quietly corroding trust ever since.

The fighting is downstream of that thing. The team argues about budget allocations and headcount and meeting cadences because those are the safe arguments. The unsafe one stays in the room without ever being spoken.

A workshop on feedback skills doesn't reach this. Neither does a Lencioni-style trust exercise. They aren't wrong as tools, they're just aimed at the wrong layer.

The attrition two levels down is the same problem

Most CEOs treat the retention issue at director and senior manager level as separate. It isn't.

Senior team dynamics replicate downward. There's a name for it in the clinical literature, parallel process. Manfred Kets de Vries at INSEAD has been writing for thirty years about how leaders' unprocessed material shapes the organisation beneath them. What the senior team can't process gets carried by the people below them, who feel it without being told what it is. They watch decisions get reversed. They take direction from one exec and contradiction from another. They sense the politics.

They get tired.

The good ones leave first, because the good ones have options.

The CEO then runs engagement surveys, hires a CPO, increases the L&D spend, builds a culture programme. None of it touches the source, which is two floors up. You're medicating the people catching the illness, not the people producing it.

What we do, concretely

Three phases.

Phase one is diagnostic. We interview every member of the senior leadership team individually, in depth, typically ninety minutes to two hours each. We're not asking what they think of the strategy. We're running a semi-structured psychodynamic protocol, which means we're listening for what isn't in the answer as much as what is. Where the energy drops. Who they protect, sometimes without noticing they're doing it. The thing they nearly say and then don't. The pattern usually emerges by the fifth or sixth interview. We then sit in on the SLT's actual meetings. Not a special one staged for us. Their Monday standing meeting, their strategy review, whatever runs normally. Two or three sessions is usually enough.

Phase two is the readback. This is the part most consultancies won't do, and it's where the change starts. We bring the senior leadership team into a closed half-day session. We tell them what we saw. We name the pattern. We surface the thing they've been working hard not to surface. And we name the power in the room, because most of these teams are not actually equal, and pretending otherwise is part of why they're stuck. The first time we do this, the room usually goes quiet for a minute. Then one of the senior leaders says the thing the team has been working around, and the conversation finally starts.

Phase three is the rebuild, and it draws on a different body of evidence to phases one and two.

Aaron Dignan's Brave New Work and the broader literature on organisational operating systems gives us a tangible vocabulary for what a senior team actually needs to fix. Most teams in this state don't have working agreements about decision rights, meeting design, information flow, or how disagreement gets escalated. Dignan's OS Canvas pulls this apart into twelve dimensions, and at the SLT level we use a stripped-down version of it to look at decisions and meetings first, because those are where the team is bleeding most visibly. We introduce tools like the Advice Process, where the person closest to the decision makes it after consulting those affected and the people with expertise, because it gives the team a clear protocol for moving on things without grinding to consensus.

To be clear, we're not taking a fintech SLT into full Dignan-style self-management. That isn't the model for a regulated FS business and never will be. We're taking the parts that travel: clearer decision rights, sharper meeting design, the Advice Process where it fits.

We also have to be in the room for a while after the readback. We don't hand the team a new operating model and walk away. We facilitate the next several senior leadership meetings ourselves. We model the moves: naming what's happening in real time, surfacing disagreement before it goes underground, holding the silence when the team needs to think. The point is that the team can feel what a different conversation looks like, and gradually take over running it themselves. We taper out. By the end of the engagement they're running their own meetings with the new behaviours, and we're a phone call rather than a fixture.

Alongside this, we do individual coaching with two or three of the senior leaders, usually the ones carrying the heaviest load in the dynamic. And we put a written contracting agreement in place between team members about how they're going to disagree with each other from here on.

The full engagement typically runs four to six months. The first couple of months feel slow. After that the pace changes.

What you actually get

A senior leadership team that can hold a real disagreement in the room and reach a decision that survives the week. Strategic alignment that's earned in the conversation, not declared on a slide. The people two levels down feel the difference, usually within a few months, because their managers stop carrying the tension home to them. The retention curve bends back the right way over the following quarters, on a lag, because the people already on their way out keep going. The next wave doesn't form.

And the team picks up a capability it didn't have before, which is the ability to have a hard conversation in real time without it blowing up or going underground. That is what a high-performing senior team looks like. The work isn't to remove conflict. The work is to make the team capable of using it.

What I'd say to that CEO

If you've done the offsites and the values resets and the strategy days, and you're sitting here a year later with the same eight people having the same fight in different clothes, the work is one level deeper than you've been going. It isn't a feelings exercise. It's an evidence-based intervention drawing on forty years of group dynamics research from the Tavistock, Harvard and INSEAD, alongside contemporary work on organisational operating systems from practitioners like Aaron Dignan and The Ready.

It works because it goes after what the problem actually is.

The fight is never the problem.

The fight is what the team is doing because the real conversation has become too expensive to start.

That's the conversation we get into the room.

Key takeouts

• Senior team conflict isn't a relationship problem, it's a performance problem. Sustained internal conflict eats the cognitive bandwidth the team needs to think strategically. Strategy stops shipping.

• The evidence is forty years deep. Hackman and Wageman at Harvard found only one in five senior leadership teams are genuinely high-performing. Edmondson's psychological safety research, Bion's group dynamics work at the Tavistock, and Kets de Vries at INSEAD all point at the same thing from different angles.

• The attrition two levels down is downstream of the senior team's unprocessed tension. You're medicating the people catching the illness, not the people producing it.

• Standard interventions miss the layer the problem lives on. Offsites, values resets and strategy days don't reach the unconscious group dynamics underneath. That's why the same team keeps having the same fight in different clothes.

• The work to fix this is hard. Surgery, not coaching. Two preconditions: the CEO has to be willing to ask for external expert help, and then trust it once they've asked.

• High-performing senior teams aren't conflict-free. They're the ones who can hold a hard conversation in real time without it blowing up or going underground. That's the capability we build.