My leadership team members fight hard for their respective departmental budgets and teams, but treat enterprise-wide issues as someone else's problem. How do I get my executives to view the leadership team as their primary team?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Your executives are suffering from the second team syndrome. They view their functional department as their first team and the leadership team as an administrative committee they report to once a week. This dynamic breeds tribalism, territorial budgeting, and strategic gridlock.

Cracks at the executive table show up as massive canyons across frontline staff. If your VP of Marketing cares only about lead generation volume while your VP of Operations is drowning in low-margin fulfillment, the business will burn cash while your leaders high-five each other over localized metrics.

To correct this, you must explicitly reset expectations around the First Team concept. The leadership team is every executive's primary team. Their departmental staff is their secondary team.

Start by restructuring how you run your weekly Level 10 Meeting™. Ban departmental reporting. The Level 10 Meeting is designed to address company-wide Rocks, the organizational Scorecard, and enterprise IDS®. When an operational bottleneck emerges on the Scorecard, make it clear that solving it is the collective responsibility of the leadership table, not a private punishment for the department head.

Tie leadership performance and compensation directly to company-wide financial goals, such as operating profit and company Rocks, rather than insular department metrics. If the business misses its overall financial target, nobody on the leadership team wins, regardless of whether a single department hit an isolated quota.

When leaders understand that their primary job is enterprise stewardship, their posture shifts. They stop protecting departmental headcount and start allocating resources to wherever the company needs traction most.