Why Generic Team Building Doesn’t Work for Senior Leadership Teams

Senior leadership teams I have worked with are not underinvesting.

Quite the opposite.

They invest heavily in strategy offsites. They invite inspiring keynote speakers to challenge their thinking. They take leadership development seriously, especially for middle management. And when teams are newly formed or going through a rough patch, they often allow space for team building.

All of this makes sense. None of it is wrong.

And yet, one thing is strikingly absent in most organizations. A deliberate way of strengthening the collective leadership effectiveness of the senior leadership team itself.

Not because leaders do not care. But because the modality itself is still relatively new.

The Investment Pattern and the Blind Spot

Most organizations invest around the senior leadership team.

• Strategy work focuses on direction and priorities.

• Keynotes stretch perspectives and energize thinking.

• Leadership programs aim to scale capability through the organization.

• Team building is used selectively, often as a response to visible friction.

What rarely gets addressed is how the senior team actually leads together on a day to day basis.

How decisions are made under pressure.

How trade offs are negotiated across functions.

How disagreement is handled when stakes are high.

How authority shifts depending on the issue, not the hierarchy.

The leadership team is treated as a forum, a reporting line, or a governance body.

Not as a leadership system in its own right.

What Makes Senior Leadership Teams Different

Senior leadership teams are not just teams with senior people in them.

They are fundamentally different because every member leads a system of their own. Power, authority, and identity are always in play. Success depends on collective judgment, not task execution. Tensions are structural, not interpersonal accidents.

When things do not work well, the issue is rarely motivation or intent.

It is the absence of shared ways of thinking, deciding, and acting together.

The Soccer Analogy: Where the Absurdity Becomes Visible

Imagine a professional soccer team like FC Barcelona or Liverpool FC.

These teams invest heavily in individual excellence. They invest just as deliberately in how players interact.

From early on, players are trained in positioning and spacing. In timing and transitions. In how responsibility shifts moment by moment. In when to improvise and when to stick to the pattern.

Interaction patterns are explicit. They are trained, reviewed, and refined continuously.

Now imagine Arsenal stepping onto the pitch and saying:

You are all exceptional players. Let us see what happens.

We would call that negligent.

Yet this is remarkably close to what happens in many organizations.

What Organizations Do Instead

In companies, we promote strong individual contributors. We put them together in a senior leadership team. We assume collaboration will emerge naturally. We intervene only when something feels broken.

Collective leadership is left largely to improvisation.

Team building becomes episodic.

Strategy work remains abstracted from real decision dynamics.

Leadership development focuses everywhere except where the most consequential decisions are made together.

What Senior Leadership Teams Are Actually Being Asked to Do

The work of a senior leadership team is inherently collective.

They must integrate competing priorities across the whole system. Make irreversible decisions with incomplete information. Hold tension without rushing to false clarity. Model how conflict, uncertainty, and accountability are handled.

These are not individual capabilities.

They are collective ones.

No amount of individual brilliance compensates for weak interaction patterns at the top.

The Missing Modality: Team Coaching

This is where team coaching comes in.

Team coaching is not facilitation.

It is not team building.

And it is not a series of one off interventions.

At its core, team coaching works with the leadership team as a system.

It focuses on how the team:

• makes decisions together

• handles disagreement and power dynamics

• balances short term pressure with long term responsibility

• notices and works with its own patterns under stress

Instead of working around the leadership team, team coaching works with the team itself, in real time and over time.

It makes interaction patterns visible.

It helps teams practice new ways of thinking and acting together.

And it builds collective leadership capacity that can be used beyond any single meeting or offsite.

Why Strategy Offsites and Team Building Cannot Carry This Load

This is not a critique of existing formats. It is a question of fit.

Strategy offsites clarify what needs to be done.

Keynotes inspire why it matters.

Team building improves how it feels to work together.

Team coaching, by contrast, focuses on how leadership actually happens when pressure is on.

How decisions are shaped, challenged, and owned.

How tensions are surfaced rather than avoided.

How the team stays coherent when complexity increases.

These formats are complementary. They are not interchangeable.

From Repair Work to Ongoing Practice

Organizations tend to invest in team dynamics when a team is new or when something is visibly not working.

In elite sports, training does not stop once the team is formed. And it does not restart only when things fall apart.

Collective effectiveness is treated as an ongoing discipline, not a repair job.

Team coaching supports exactly that. It treats collective leadership as something that can be learned, practiced, and strengthened over time.

Senior leadership teams are no different.

Naming the Opportunity

As complexity increases, the limits of individual leadership become more visible.

The real differentiator is no longer who has the best answers. It is which teams can think, decide, and act well together under pressure.

Team coaching offers a way to deliberately strengthen that capability.

The question is not whether senior leadership teams are investing enough.

It is whether they are finally ready to invest in the collective leadership capacity at the top of the system.