Build the Right C-Suite Team for Your Strategy

CEOs almost never go it alone: They rely on a strong senior management team to succeed. Yet new CEOs frequently contend with top leadership teams that are poorly aligned and consume energy rather than propel the organization forward. This makes building a well-functioning team one of their first and most important tasks.

Our research and experience suggest that the secret to establishing a good team lies in understanding and addressing a fundamental paradox of leadership. That is, the people who make it to the top are highly competitive and personally ambitious; but to be effective, they must also be able to collaborate for the good of the whole.

Examples abound of leadership teams where executives were unable to put their egos aside when necessary. Before Satya Nadella took the helm at Microsoft, the company was infamous for infighting; Nadella himself described the previous leadership as “groups of warring gangs.”1 General Electric executives used top management meetings to spin positive stories about their achievements for years, rather than working together on emerging problems.2 Results at both companies suffered as their leaders pursued primacy.

The stakes are high, as is the cost of failure from missed opportunities and poor decisions. CEOs need teams that can strike the right balance between competition and collaboration as appropriate for their business and the challenges it faces. In this article, we’ll look at the approaches that CEOs have taken in a variety of contexts and offer a four-step framework for building effective top leadership teams.

The Paradox That Undermines Performance

Few executives reach the C-suite without competing against internal rivals. Meanwhile, their ambition enables them to drive their areas of responsibility forward as they rise to the top.

Paradoxically, a single-minded focus on competition that serves aspiring leaders so well often gets in the way once they reach the top team. As executive team members, leaders have responsibility for the whole corporation, not only their specific area.