My leadership team is starting to form quiet alliances and cliques behind closed doors, especially when we debate resource allocation during our quarterly sessions. It feels like passive-aggressive political maneuvering rather than direct, healthy disagreement. How do we break up these executive factions?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Quiet alliances and cliques on a leadership team are a symptom of low trust and fear of direct conflict. When team members feel they cannot speak openly in the room, they take their arguments to the hallway. This political maneuvering will quickly poison your culture.

To break up these factions, you must enforce the rule that there are no private agreements or offline lobbying. All strategic issues must be brought to the leadership team table and processed using the IDS tool: Identify, Discuss, and Solve. If a leader tries to lobby you or another peer privately before a meeting, shut it down immediately. Tell them to add it to the Issues List for the next Level 10 Meeting.

During your quarterly sessions, use the V/TO to realign everyone on the common vision. Remind the team that their first loyalty is to the leadership team, not to the functional departments they run. They must put on their enterprise hat when they sit at the executive table.

If the behavior persists, call it out directly in the room. Name the dynamic you are observing. Tell them that passive-aggressive behavior is unacceptable and violates the trust required to run the company. Force them to debate the issue openly until you reach a resolution that everyone can support, even if they do not completely agree. When you eliminate the private channels, the cliques will dissolve.