A senior leadership team can look aligned from the outside while operating very differently in the room. The strategy has been agreed, everyone can repeat the priorities, and the executive meeting happens every week. Yet decisions are reopened after the meeting, functions protect their own agendas, difficult issues are discussed in smaller conversations afterwards, and people further down the business receive different versions of what matters most.
We see this most often when a business has grown faster than the leadership team has changed the way it works together. The individuals may all be capable and committed, but the team itself has never been designed with the same care as the functions each person leads. The cost appears elsewhere in the business through competing priorities, slower decisions and information that is filtered before it reaches the room.
The evidence supports that distinction. CIPD's evidence review 'High-performing teams: An evidence review' (published 31 May 2023) found that trust, psychological safety, shared thinking, information-sharing, collective memory and reflection all have positive relationships with team performance. It also found that planned interventions such as team development, teamwork training, debriefing and team-level goal setting can improve effectiveness.
The CIPD evidence and case studies referenced in this article reflect the position as at 14 September 2026.
For an executive team, those findings are particularly relevant because senior leaders usually have high levels of authority, specialist knowledge and interdependence. They cannot do their jobs properly without one another, even when their organisational chart makes each function look separate. Improving executive team alignment therefore starts with something more practical than asking whether everyone gets on. The useful question is whether the team can think, decide, disagree and follow through together when the business needs it to.
What are the signs a leadership team is not aligned?
Misalignment rarely announces itself as a single dramatic problem. More often, it appears in the way ordinary leadership work gets done. Meetings run, decisions are made and everyone remains professional, but the organisation starts absorbing the cost of unresolved differences at the top.
One sign is that the same decision keeps returning to the executive agenda. The team appears to agree, but the agreement is not strong enough to survive contact with individual functions. A commercial priority is approved, then operational decisions continue as before because each leader has interpreted the priority differently or has not accepted what it requires from their own area.
Another sign is inconsistent communication below the leadership team. Employees hear one version of the strategy from one director and a different emphasis from another. Neither leader is necessarily wrong. The problem is that the team has not developed enough shared thinking about what the strategy means in practice. The review describes shared thinking as the extent to which team members interpret and communicate issues in a similar way. It found a large positive relationship between this kind of cognitive consensus and team performance.
A third sign is that difficult disagreement moves out of the meeting. Senior leaders are polite around the table, but the real conversations happen one-to-one afterwards. That can create the appearance of cohesion while reducing the quality of the decision. A team does not need constant agreement to be aligned. It needs enough trust and psychological safety for disagreement to be expressed while there is still time to use it.
“Our intention has always been for our team to feel like they can be themselves at work” - Aliya Vigor-Robertson, Founding Partner, JourneyHR.
We would also pay attention to decisions with no clear owner, recurring tension between functions and priorities that expand without anything being stopped. None of those proves dysfunction on its own, but repeated patterns usually show that the team has not agreed how strategy will become coordinated action.
Case study: Google found that how teams work mattered more than team composition
Google's Project Aristotle tested whether effective teams were mainly the result of having the right people in the room. After studying 180 teams across the organisation and a wide range of variables, Google's researchers concluded that how people worked together mattered more than team composition. Psychological safety emerged as the most important factor, alongside dependability, structure and clarity, a sense that the work matters and a belief that it makes a difference.
That does not mean individual capability is unimportant. It means an executive team cannot recruit its way out of poor ways of working. Bringing another impressive leader into a group where disagreement is unsafe, priorities are interpreted differently or information is held inside functions simply adds another capable person to the same operating problem.
How should an executive team agree priorities?
When people ask how should an executive team agree priorities, the temptation is to focus on the annual strategy day. In our experience, the harder work comes afterwards. A priority is only useful when the team has a sufficiently shared understanding of what it means, what it does not mean, who owns the next decision and what will receive less attention as a result.
The review is helpful here because team-level goal setting has a large positive effect on performance. It also notes that team goals can strengthen planning, cooperation, communication and morale. Importantly, reflection influences how effective those goals are. A goal that is agreed once and never examined again can become disconnected from what the team is actually doing.
For an executive team, agreeing priorities should therefore include the trade-offs. If growth is the first priority, what investment follows from that? If margin improvement matters more this quarter, which initiatives will slow down? If leadership capability is a business priority, how much time are directors expected to put into it? Teams often believe they disagree about strategy when they actually disagree about the cost of the strategy.
We find it useful for senior teams to test each priority against the same practical points: the outcome required, the decisions that should change, who owns the work, where other functions depend on it and what would trigger a review. Working through those points often exposes differences that a slide headed 'strategic priorities' will not. Where the team needs to connect those choices to capability, structure and leadership priorities, our People Strategy service can help turn the business direction into a practical people plan.
The aim is not to produce complete uniformity of thought. Executive teams need different expertise and different perspectives. Alignment means the group can reach a decision with a clear understanding of the reasoning and then act consistently once that decision has been made.
Case study: Peabody aligned its people function after a merger
Following its 2022 merger with Catalyst, housing association Peabody needed to bring two people teams together and align its approach with local business needs. CIPD's case study 'Transforming the HR operating model: Peabody' (published 5 June 2024) describes how the organisation mapped existing activity against business requirements and redesigned the function. Strategic partners were given responsibility for connecting local people plans with the wider corporate strategy, while specialist teams took on more transactional work.
This example shows alignment becoming visible through decisions about responsibilities and ways of working, rather than remaining an aspiration after a merger. Peabody clarified which work belonged where and gave its strategic partners more scope to work with business leaders. Although the case concerns the people function rather than the entire executive team, the lesson applies at senior level: shared priorities become credible when leaders agree how roles, decisions and resources will support them.
How do you improve trust in a senior leadership team?
Trust in a senior team is sometimes discussed as though it is mainly about personal relationships. Relationships matter, but the evidence points to something broader. The review distinguishes between cognition-based trust, where people assess one another's reliability, integrity and competence, and affect-based trust, which concerns the emotional judgement people make about those qualities. Both matter because a senior leader needs to believe that colleagues will handle information properly, follow through on commitments and say what needs to be said when the decision is difficult.
Trust becomes even more important when tasks are highly interdependent, authority is distributed across the team, people hold different specialist knowledge, the group works virtually or the members have little history together. Executive teams frequently meet several of those conditions at once, which is why trust problems at senior level can affect the quality and speed of decisions so quickly.
If you are asking how do you improve trust in a senior leadership team, we would start with behaviour rather than a trust exercise. We would look at whether information arrives early enough for colleagues to use it, whether commitments are followed through, whether somebody can challenge the chief executive without the room becoming defensive, and whether missed commitments are addressed directly rather than absorbed by everybody else. When a leader changes their position after a discussion, explaining why also matters because colleagues need to understand the reasoning behind the change.
“They trust the behaviour, not the statement. Always.” — Sue Shaw, Founding Partner, JourneyHR.
Psychological safety sits alongside trust but is not identical to it. The review describes psychological safety as the belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, so people can speak or act without expecting embarrassment, rejection or punishment. It found a moderate to large positive relationship with team performance. For senior teams, this matters because some of the highest-value contributions in the room are the ones that interrupt a comfortable consensus.
Case study: The Ministry of Justice used coaching to strengthen trust across its executive team
CIPD's case study 'Case study: MoJ embarks on landmark HR Leaders Development Project' (published 2 May 2024) shows trust being addressed through coaching and development. The case study reports that the approach enabled more honest conversations across the executive team and increased trust, helping leaders make better-informed decisions and become clearer about how they wanted to work together.
The useful part of this example is that trust was connected to work. The conversations supported strategic decisions and the way leaders operated together, rather than treating trust as a separate cultural exercise. That is normally where we see the strongest value in senior-team development. The relationship work has a purpose because the team has decisions it needs to make better. The Ministry of Justice example also shows why one-to-one development can sit alongside team work; our Executive Coaching service gives senior leaders a confidential space to work through the individual behaviours and decisions that affect how they contribute to the wider team.
Case study: Deloitte made speaking up and learning from mistakes a leadership priority
A November 2024 case study from the Centre for Leadership (CfL), 'Why Deloitte has prioritised psychological safety training', describes Deloitte's work to make open debate, constructive challenge and learning from mistakes more normal in teams. Deloitte developed a 25-hour leadership course with CfL, and the case study reports that more than 100 partners and leaders had taken part. One IT delivery director described learning that his direct communication style could discourage colleagues from contributing, even when he personally welcomed disagreement.
The value of the example is that psychological safety was translated into observable leadership behaviour. Leaders were encouraged to seek feedback, make room for quieter perspectives and respond constructively when mistakes were discussed. The case study describes an approach to leadership development, not proof of a measured improvement in executive-team performance. For senior teams, the practical lesson is that trust depends partly on what leaders do in the moment when somebody challenges them or admits an error.
Why information-sharing matters to executive team alignment
Leadership teams can spend a great deal of time talking without sharing the information that would materially improve a decision. The difference often comes down to whether each director arrives as the representative of a function or as a member of an executive team that happens to bring functional expertise.
The review found that information-sharing is a strong predictor of performance across team types and sizes. It also identifies collective memory, sometimes called a transactive memory system, as important. In practical terms, this is the team's understanding of who knows what and where expertise sits. When that understanding is strong, the team can use its combined knowledge rather than repeatedly solving the same problem from separate functional viewpoints.
For a senior team, the implication is practical. Leaders do not need to become experts in one another's functions, but they do need enough shared context to understand the evidence behind a recommendation and where a decision crosses functional boundaries.
This is why an executive meeting made up entirely of updates can feel busy without improving alignment. The higher-value conversation is usually about decisions that require several perspectives, assumptions that need testing and dependencies between priorities.
Why reflection is part of high performance, not time away from it
Executive teams under pressure tend to protect delivery time and reduce reflection. The logic is understandable because there is always another decision waiting. The evidence suggests, however, that teams benefit when they periodically examine how they are working together, particularly their shared goals, communication and collaboration.
The review also found support for structured debriefing. The strongest debriefs are focused on learning and development rather than judgement, consider specific activities or incidents rather than making general assessments, and use more than one perspective or source of evidence. That gives senior teams a useful alternative to the vague question 'How are we doing as a team?'
A better review might examine one important decision and work through the evidence the team had at the time, the assumptions that proved accurate or inaccurate, the points people hesitated to raise, and the places where execution slowed down. The team can then agree what it would repeat and what it would change next time. Keeping the discussion tied to a specific piece of work makes it easier for experienced leaders to examine their own contribution honestly.
When does a leadership team need external facilitation?
External facilitation is not necessary every time an executive team disagrees. Healthy disagreement is part of senior leadership, and a team that can work through difficult questions itself should continue to do so.
The threshold changes when the team has become part of the problem it is trying to solve. If the same issues return repeatedly, trust has deteriorated, the chief executive cannot participate fully because they are also expected to facilitate, or the group needs to address behaviour that nobody inside the team can challenge neutrally, an external facilitator can create a different kind of working session.
The review found that team development activities can improve trust, cohesion, communication and performance. It also found stronger results in some conditions, including when the initiator is external to the team, management supports the work, the focus stays on the group, and the intervention addresses both team goals and interpersonal relationships. Corrective work aimed at tangible problems can be particularly effective.
That last point is important when deciding when does a leadership team need external facilitation. The clearest reason is usually not that the team would like to become 'higher performing' in the abstract. It is that a real business issue is exposing the way the team currently works: a merger, stalled strategy, repeated decision conflict, loss of trust, a new chief executive, rapid growth or a significant change in structure.
Good facilitation should make those issues easier to work on, not replace the team's responsibility for them. The facilitator can structure the discussion, surface assumptions, make disagreement easier to examine and keep the group working on the issue it has agreed to address. The decisions still belong to the leadership team. Where an external structure would help the group work through a live business issue, JourneyHR's Board + Executive Team Facilitation service is designed around the specific decisions, relationships and behaviours that need attention.
How JourneyHR can help
We work with founders, boards and senior leadership teams when the way the team is operating has started to affect the wider business. Sometimes that is visible in unclear priorities or slow decisions. Sometimes the issue is trust, communication or a leadership team that has grown quickly and never had the chance to agree how it wants to work together.
Our Board + Executive Team Facilitation work starts by understanding the business challenge rather than assuming the answer is a generic leadership programme. We speak with the relevant leaders, establish what needs to change and design the work around the decisions, relationships and behaviours that are getting in the way. JourneyHR also supports organisations through executive coaching, organisational design, 360-degree feedback, People Strategy and leadership development where those are part of the wider requirement.
Sometimes one facilitated session is enough to reset priorities or address a specific tension. Where the issue has developed over time or the organisation itself is changing, the work may need to continue for longer. We would rather establish that at the start than prescribe a programme before we understand the requirement.
If your executive meetings are repeatedly revisiting decisions, leaders are giving different messages to the organisation, or the team is avoiding the conversation it knows it needs to have, it is probably worth looking at what is happening before another planning cycle begins.
Get in touch: Board + Executive Team Facilitation | Contact JourneyHR
Final thought
A high-performing executive team is not defined by constant agreement, friendship or the absence of difficult conversations. The evidence points to a more useful set of conditions: trust, psychological safety, shared understanding, information that moves across the team, clear goals and the ability to reflect on how the group is working.
For a growing business, the important part is what those conditions make possible. Senior leaders can disagree without creating factions, use one another's expertise without protecting territory, make a decision and communicate it consistently, then revisit it when the evidence changes rather than because the original disagreement was never resolved.
Executive alignment is therefore less about getting everybody onto the same page once. It is about building a way of working that keeps the team able to think and act together as the business changes.
FAQs
How do you improve executive team alignment?
Start with the work the executive team must do together. Clarify the small number of shared priorities, agree what each priority changes in practice, identify decision ownership and make cross-functional dependencies explicit. The review indicates that shared thinking, information-sharing, trust, reflection and team-level goal setting are all associated with stronger team effectiveness. Alignment improves when those behaviours are built into real decisions rather than discussed separately from them.
What are the clearest signs a leadership team is not aligned?
Common signs include the same decisions returning to meetings, priorities being interpreted differently by each function, inconsistent messages being given to employees, unclear ownership, unresolved tension between leaders and important disagreement moving into private conversations after the meeting. No single sign proves misalignment, but repeated patterns usually indicate that the team needs greater clarity about priorities, decision-making and how it will work together.
How should an executive team agree priorities?
The team should agree both the desired outcome and the trade-offs required to achieve it. Each priority needs a clear owner, an understanding of which functions depend on it, the decisions that should change because of it and a point at which progress will be reviewed. The review's evidence on team-level goal setting suggests that specific shared goals can improve team performance and support planning, cooperation and communication when teams also reflect on progress.
How do you improve trust in a senior leadership team?
Trust improves through repeated evidence that colleagues are reliable, competent, honest and safe to disagree with. Senior teams can strengthen it by sharing information early, following through on commitments, addressing missed expectations directly and creating enough psychological safety for people to raise risks or challenge assumptions. Structured reflection and development can help, particularly when conversations stay connected to real business decisions rather than becoming abstract exercises.
When does a leadership team need external facilitation?
External facilitation becomes useful when the team cannot productively facilitate the issue for itself. That may happen when the same conflict keeps returning, trust has reduced, the chief executive needs to participate rather than chair the discussion, or a merger, leadership change or strategic reset has exposed unresolved differences. The review found that external involvement can strengthen team development interventions, particularly where the work addresses tangible problems and combines team goals with working relationships.
