Written by Client Director Sarah Oates, Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?.
Most organisations search for advantage in product innovation, technology or market position. But one of the most powerful – and often overlooked – sources of advantage sits much closer to home: The Executive Team itself.
Because the real question isn’t how strong your leaders are individually.. The question is whether your Executive Team performs better together than they do alone. And the stakes are higher than most C-suites acknowledge: McKinsey research finds that companies whose top executive team is genuinely aligned and working effectively together are almost twice as likely to achieve above average financial results.
The Executive Team as a Performance Accelerator
A high performing Executive Team doesn’t just make good decisions. It accelerates the effectiveness of the entire organisation – setting the tone, the priorities and the culture for everyone below.
But here’s what makes executive team development uniquely challenging: these are typically your most experienced, capable, opinionated leaders. The very habits that made each of them excellent as individuals can work against the team operating as one. And unlike misalignment further down the business, dysfunction at the top doesn’t stay contained. It cascades into every priority call, every resource decision, every signal your people receive about what actually matters.
When a team is aligned around a clear goal and operating with shared intent, several things happen:
- Decisions are made faster and with greater confidence
- Priorities become clearer across the business
- Leadership behaviours become consistent and visible at scale
But when that alignment is missing, even the best strategy struggles to gain traction. Misalignment at the top inevitably cascades into confusion, duplication and friction throughout the organisation.
→ Read: How to break down team silos and boost performance.)
The Principle Behind High-Performing Executive Teams
At Will It Make The Boat Go Faster, the work we do with Executive Teams draws on the transformation story of our co-founder Ben Hunt-Davis.
Ben was part of the British Men’s Eight rowing crew that won Olympic gold at the 2000 Summer Olympics. Just two years earlier, they were ranked seventh in the world – eight talented individuals who weren’t yet a great team.
To have any chance of winning, they needed to become more than talented individuals. They had to become a truly high performing team. The breakthrough came when they aligned around a single guiding question:
Every decision, training choice and conversation was measured against that question. The result: Absolute clarity and collective focus.
And that same question works just as well in the boardroom as it does on the water. What’s the equivalent for your Executive Team?
What High-Performing Executive Teams Have in Common
Across organisations, the Executive Teams that consistently outperform tend to share three common principles.
1) A Goal the Whole Team Owns
High-performing executive teams unite behind a single, bold shared ambition – what we call a ‘Crazy Goal’. This is an objective ambitious enough to demand something genuinely different from the whole team, not just from each function in isolation.
Without it, executive teams drift, each leader prioritising functional success over company performance. You can have a team of talented leaders without having a talented leadership team.
→ (For further reading on this, see how winning executive teams stay aligned and focused.)
2) Focus on Performance, Not Just Results
Results appear on the scoreboard. Performance is what creates them. Teams that obsess only about results often find themselves reacting to outcomes after the fact.
By contrast, teams that continually ask: “How can we perform better?” – create the conditions for stronger results to emerge.
Most Executive Teams are far better at measuring results than they are at understanding the performance that drives them.
3) Working Together as One
Individually capable leaders don’t automatically create a collectively effective team. The teams that genuinely outperform tend to operate with real trust – enough for honest debate to happen without it becoming political. Decisions are clear and don’t collapse into slow consensus loops. Leaders hold themselves accountable for the whole organisation, not just their function. And crucially, they’re able to debate fully, decide together, and then be united outside the room. That last point is rarer than most executive teams would care to admit.
Further reading:
→ How to build a high-performing team that actually delivers results
→ High performance leadership doesn’t happen by accident – it happens by design.)
When did someone last genuinely challenge a decision in an Executive Team meeting – and what changed as a result? When did someone last change their mind in your executive team meeting – and what did it cost them to say so?
The Critical Question
So here is the question for any C-suite to consider: If your competitors had your strategy tomorrow, would your executive team still give you the edge?
Strategies can be copied. Products can be replicated. Technology advantages rarely last forever.
But an Executive Team that is genuinely aligned, focused on performance and working together effectively creates something far harder for competitors to match.
So if you feel the biggest untapped opportunity in your business isn’t the plan itself, but how your executive leadership team development executes against it, it may be worth starting a conversation about it and what it could unlock.
A Question for Leaders:
When was the last time your Executive Team stepped back to focus on how it performs together, not just what it delivers?
If you’d like to explore how we could help your executive team cut through the noise and get to what really matters, we’d love to hear from you.
