Executive Team Alignment: Every Executive Has Two Teams, and the First One Decides
Executive Team Alignment: Every Executive Has Two Teams, and the First One Decides
Quick answer: Executive team alignment depends on which team each executive calls their first team. Executives who put their function first protect its numbers and bring updates to meetings. Executives who put the executive team first decide together on business outcomes. Behnam Tabrizi’s study of 95 cross-functional teams found nearly 75% were dysfunctional.
Key takeaways
Every executive belongs to two teams: the function they lead and the executive team of their peers.
The team an executive calls first is the team they make decisions for.
Nearly 75% of 95 cross-functional teams in 25 large corporations failed at least three of five success criteria (Tabrizi, Harvard Business Review, 2015).
61% of more than 1,200 managers said at least half their decision-making time is ineffective (McKinsey, 2019).
Set three to five business outcomes for the next 90 to 120 days before any function sets its own objectives.
Give every executive meeting a list of cross-functional decisions, with one named owner for each commitment.
Watch Mickey Anderson on UNLEASHED: Every Executive Has Two Teams.
Write business outcomes your whole executive team can repeat
When each executive reads the strategy differently, each function builds its own version of winning. The free Clear Intent Builder walks your leadership team through four plain statements about who you are, what you do, why you do it, and where you’re going, so every function starts from the same direction.
Why do strong functions add up to a business that misses its numbers?
Strong functions miss business outcomes together when each one sets objectives that make its own numbers look good, and nobody on the executive team owns the work between them. Every function can hit its targets for a full quarter while the business misses the result the CEO is chasing.
From inside the organization, the signs are easy to recognize. Each function has its own numbers, its own targets and a leader working hard to hit them. Cross-functional initiatives take far longer than they should, and in the organizations we work with, three times longer isn’t unusual. Handoffs break down between marketing and sales, sales and delivery, and product and customer success.
Executive meetings fill with status updates, and real decisions get rescheduled or sent back to the CEO. The CEO ends up translating between functions and connecting work that no one else is connecting. Mickey Anderson, Co-Founder of LoyaltyOps, said on UNLEASHED:
“The myth that if each function does its job well, the business wins on its own is a complete fallacy.”
Research on cross-functional work finds the same problem. Behnam Tabrizi, writing in Harvard Business Review in June 2015, studied 95 teams in 25 leading corporations and found that nearly 75% of cross-functional teams were dysfunctional. A team counted as dysfunctional when it failed at least three of five criteria: meeting a planned budget, staying on schedule, meeting specifications, meeting customer expectations, and staying aligned with the company’s goals.
Nearly 3 in 4 cross-functional teams studied were dysfunctional, failing at least three of five criteria, in Behnam Tabrizi’s 2015 study of 95 teams in 25 corporations.
What does it mean for the executive team to be your first team?
Your first team is the team you put ahead of your own function when the two conflict. Every executive belongs to two teams: the function they lead and the executive team of their peers, and the first-team idea says the executive team comes first and the function comes second.
Patrick Lencioni describes this idea in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, where the peer executive group is each leader’s first team. The choice matters because of what follows from it. Mickey put it this way on UNLEASHED:
“Whichever team the executive names as their first team is going to be the one they optimize for.”
When executives name their function as their first team, they tend to:
Protect their function ahead of the business
Set objectives that make their function look strong
Defend their function’s position in any trade-off
Bring updates to the executive team
Wait for the CEO to connect the functions
When executives name the executive team as their first team, they bring their function’s context to shared decisions, debate hard, decide together and own the business outcome. Their functional teams gain too, because their work becomes part of shared work and their people can see how it connects to every other function.
Function-first executives protect their function, set objectives that make it look strong and bring updates, while executive-team-first executives bring context to shared decisions, decide together and own the business outcome.
Two other well-known books on organizational performance describe the same need. Jim Collins’ Good to Great names disciplined focus and confronting the brutal facts together as practices the executive level has to share. General Stanley McChrystal’s Team of Teams documents how Joint Special Operations Command broke down the separation between units, agencies and countries, and credits shared consciousness, plus decisions pushed to the people closest to the work, for the speed that followed.
Why do executives put their function first?
Executives put their function first because it's what they were promoted for and what they feel responsible for protecting. Most executives earned the role by being excellent at their function, and few were shown what it takes to be a strong member of an executive team.
Mickey said on UNLEASHED:
“Most executives are promoted for being great at their function. Few are ever taught how to be a great executive team member.”
The instinct comes from good intentions.
Function-first leaders want to keep their people focused, shield them from blame and deliver what matters most to their own area. That makes it a leadership gap the executive team can close together, and no executive is at fault.
In our experience, the fear of leaving the functional team unprotected rarely comes true. When a leader puts the executive team first, their people work on meaningful priorities, see how their work connects to the rest of the business, and spend less time fighting for resources on their own.
What does this look like in an organization of 30 to 300 people?
In organizations of 30 to 300 people, function-first behaviour usually shows up when the CEO can no longer personally connect with every function. Early on, the CEO talks to every function leader most days and catches the gaps. Once there are five or six function heads with teams of their own, the gaps between functions grow faster than one person can close them.
We worked with a franchise group where every executive was well-intentioned, every function was hitting its own KPIs, and growth was still slipping quarter after quarter. When the executive team sat down to review its business objectives, the strategy document was 15 pages of jargon. Each executive read it differently, and each function had built its own version of winning, so the versions didn’t add up to the outcome the CEO wanted.
None of the executives was doing a poor job, since each was doing their function’s job well. The executive team hadn’t been asked to act as one team on the business outcome first, so the work started with rebuilding the objectives from the business outcome down, in plain language, and asking the executive team to own them together.
Goal-setting systems can’t close this gap on their own. Our post on what OKRs assume about your leadership team covers what a leadership team needs before any system works well.
How do you build executive team alignment around shared outcomes?
You build executive team alignment by naming the executive team as everyone’s first team, setting business outcomes before functional objectives, and making cross-functional decisions the main work of executive meetings. You can start each of these three moves this week.
1. Name the first team out loud at your next executive meeting
Say it plainly: this is your first team, and your function is your second team. Then ask each executive one question:
“What changes for you if you take that seriously starting today?”
Write down each answer. It works as a real diagnostic, because the answers show where the resistance is, what each executive is worried about giving up, and where the shift will take the most work.
2. Build shared objectives from the business outcomes down
When functions set objectives first and hope they add up to a business outcome, they rarely do. When the business outcomes come first, and each function defines what it contributes, the pieces are built to fit. Here’s the sequence:
Pick your top three to five business outcomes for the next 90 to 120 days.
Write each one in plain language, tied to a customer or business result someone can measure.
Agree as an executive team on what each function contributes to each outcome.
Name every point where two or more functions have to work together to deliver it.
Produce one shared plan, owned by the executive team, and refer to it in every executive meeting that follows.
Functional objectives come after the business outcomes are clear, and the executive team builds them together. That replaces the common approach, where each executive drafts their function’s objectives alone and hopes the pieces fit. Where the plan crosses functions, the Decision Rights Map helps you give each shared decision one owner and one decision type.
Objectives set function first get drafted alone and rarely add up, while objectives set outcomes first start from three to five business outcomes and are agreed together in one shared plan.
3. Make cross-functional decisions the work of every executive meeting
Executive meetings move from updates to decisions when you build a practice for it. A McKinsey survey of more than 1,200 managers, published in May 2019, found that 61% said at least half the time they spent making decisions was ineffective. The finding is self-reported, and it matches what we hear from executive teams whose meetings are full of reports.
List the cross-functional decisions the executive team needs to make together this quarter.
Debate each one during the meeting, with every executive bringing their function’s context to the shared question.
Commit as a team, and put one name beside each commitment.
In the next functional team meeting, each executive explains the decision to their function, so every function hears the same decision.
The Meeting Standards Checklist gives every decision in the meeting a named type, and our post on decision ownership explains why each decision needs one owner.
What changes when executives act as one team?
When executives act as one team, executive meetings end in decisions, handoffs between functions hold, and the CEO stops being the only person connecting the functions. Functional leaders bring their context to shared decisions, and cross-functional initiatives move at the pace the work requires.
If nothing changes, the organization gets another quarter of well-led functions missing the business outcome. Executive meetings stay at the level of status reports, handoffs keep breaking, the CEO keeps connecting the functions alone, and functional leaders burn out.
Mickey said on UNLEASHED:
“Ultimately, what you want is an executive team that debates hard, decides together, and owns the business outcomes as one.”
She also said:
“Making the executive team your first team is a choice and you get to make it every single day.”
At your next executive meeting, watch how each executive shows up, function first or executive team first, and notice the ratio. That ratio tells you where to start. To see how each leader on the team leads today, the Leadership Competency Assessment measures it against clear leadership competencies, with input from the people who see their work.
Frequently asked questions
What is the first team in leadership?
The first team is the team a leader puts first when their responsibilities conflict. For an executive, it’s the executive team of their peers, ahead of the function they lead. Patrick Lencioni describes the idea in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. Executives who treat the executive team as their first team make decisions for the whole business before their own function.
How do you align an executive team on business outcomes?
Start with three to five business outcomes for the next 90 to 120 days, written in plain language and tied to a result someone can measure. Then agree as an executive team on what each function contributes, name every point where functions have to work together, and keep one shared plan that every executive meeting refers to.
Why do executive meetings turn into status updates?
Executive meetings turn into status updates when executives treat their function as their first team. Each one reports on their own work, and decisions that require trade-offs between functions get rescheduled or sent to the CEO. Listing the cross-functional decisions the team needs to make, and naming one owner for each commitment, gives the meeting real decisions to make.
What’s the difference between executive team alignment and cross-functional collaboration?
Executive team alignment is the executive team agreeing on the business outcomes and owning them together. Cross-functional collaboration is the work people across functions do to deliver those outcomes. Alignment at the executive level comes first, because when function heads disagree on what winning means, their teams have little reason to work together across functions.
Get your executive team deciding as one team
If every function is hitting its own numbers and the business is still missing its outcomes, start with a conversation about how your executive team works together. LoyaltyOps is a leadership development firm that develops individual leaders and leadership teams against clear leadership competencies, so performance improves across your organization.
Sources
Behnam Tabrizi, “75% of Cross-Functional Teams Are Dysfunctional,” Harvard Business Review, June 23, 2015. https://hbr.org/2015/06/75-of-cross-functional-teams-are-dysfunctional
Will Yakowicz, “The Simple Reason Your Team Members Don’t Work Well Together,” Inc., June 24, 2015. https://www.inc.com/will-yakowicz/simple-reason-75-percent-cross-functional-team-projects-fail.html
Aaron De Smet, Gregor Jost and Leigh Weiss, “Three keys to faster, better decisions,” McKinsey Quarterly, May 1, 2019. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organization/our-insights/three-keys-to-faster-better-decisions
Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Jossey-Bass, 2002.
Jim Collins, Good to Great, HarperBusiness, 2001.
General Stanley McChrystal, with Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell, Team of Teams, Portfolio, 2015.
UNLEASHED, “Every Executive Has Two Teams,” Mickey Anderson, September 10, 2026. https://youtu.be/TTXxza6jtHI