Most senior leadership teams don’t set out to be dysfunctional.
In fact, in almost every leadership offsite or coaching engagement I’ve supported, the people around the table are deeply committed, hard-working and genuinely want to make a positive contribution. They are not, in my experience, bad actors operating from Machiavellian shadows or plotting political games.
And yet.
Despite that good intent, many senior leadership teams – perhaps most – end up entangled in unhealthy dynamics. What plays out can look like politics, turf wars, siloed decisions, cliques, or inconsistent leadership behaviour. Communication slows or gets filtered. Trust drops. Energy fades. The wider organisation feels the gap – even when no one names it.
So what’s really going on?
Most dysfunction doesn’t arrive with a bang. It creeps in. A hundred small moments of non-closure. That time someone didn't speak up, or let something slide. The eye-roll that went unacknowledged. The conversation that didn’t happen after a challenging board meeting. The shift in roles or structure that no one quite named. The good intention misunderstood.
Left untouched, those moments accumulate. What follows is often the subtle stuff:
A slowly hardening story about someone else's motives
A growing belief that “it’s just not worth raising”
A strategy conversation that feels more like positioning than collaboration
Decisions that drift from intention to implementation without ownership
In short: the leadership team starts to look like a group of highly competent individuals who share a table but not a collective centre of gravity.
The real challenge is not a lack of capability. It’s the weight of the unresolved. Trust – that essential condition from which high performance grows – is often eroded not by betrayal, but by accumulation. What’s left unsaid. What gets assumed. What gets interpreted without checking.
This is where our wonderfully human brains can trip us up:
Fundamental attribution error – where we judge others by their behaviour and ourselves by our intentions.
Confirmation bias – where we see what we expect to see, and miss evidence to the contrary.
Self-trust inflation – we tend to trust ourselves more than others, often without realising it.
Deferred honesty – waiting for someone else to name the thing first.
Add a layer of organisational change, resource pressure, or increased visibility – and that unspoken tension starts to show up in performance, decision quality, and team energy.
Most senior teams have good intentions: to lead well, act in the best interests of the whole, and work collaboratively. But intention isn’t enough.
Where things fall apart is in the gaps:
Say–do gap: what we say we value vs how we actually show up
Transmit–receive gap: what I think I communicated vs what you actually heard
Alignment–action gap: what we agreed in the room vs what happens after we leave
And when these gaps aren’t acknowledged, we tend to fill them with stories. Usually unhelpful ones.
That’s why almost every high-quality leadership model starts with trust. It’s not a soft idea – it’s the core operating condition for performance.
Trust doesn’t mean constant agreement or perfect cohesion. It means psychological safety to disagree without punishment. It means consistency between words and actions. It means making the effort to check your story before you act on it.
Trust is not granted in advance – it is earned through repeated experiences of safety, honesty, reliability, and goodwill. And in senior teams, trust needs maintenance – particularly when the stakes are high and the pace is fast. Left alone, it degrades.
Most of what’s needed is not revolutionary. It’s relational maintenance.
Circle back. Don’t let unresolved moments fester. The meeting after the meeting is where repair often happens – make it real.
Close the loop. If something didn’t land well or didn’t happen as planned, bring it into the light. Integrity lives in completion.
Get curious. When you're triggered or tempted to withdraw, ask what else could be true.
Name the drift. Many teams feel the discomfort but no one wants to be the one to raise it. Be the one.
Look for patterns, not blame. Ask: What’s happening here, and what are we contributing to it?
None of this requires grand gestures. It requires deliberate moments of alignment – the kind that slowly rebuild trust and reinforce the sense of shared purpose.
Senior teams are made up of humans. That’s both the problem and the possibility.
When people say “it’s political at the top,” they’re often describing what happens when misalignment, story-making, and fear go unexamined. It doesn't mean the people are manipulative – it means the relational system hasn’t been stewarded.
But the good news is this: when even one member of an SLT begins to model clarity, curiosity, and courage – things begin to shift. Trust becomes a renewable resource. Conversations open. Teams cohere.
It’s not easy work. It’s leadership work.
Where have you noticed a relational gap in your leadership team that hasn’t been closed?
What would it take to circle back to one of those moments – and what story might you need to let go of to do it?
If trust were a decision based on experience, what recent experiences have you contributed to – and what experience do you want others to have of you?
If any of this feels uncomfortably familiar – or quietly hopeful – I’d be glad to help. I work with senior teams to reconnect trust, close the gaps, and lead together with more alignment and less noise.
Matt helps leaders and teams develop their mindset and resourcefulness so they can relate productively, communicate effectively, and navigate challenge, change and complexity with confidence.
Through coaching and training, he empowers leaders with better choices and more options for progress - building better leadership from the inside out.
Curious what that could look like for you or your organisation? Let’s talk.