A group that only reports in sequence and never decides together is a meeting, not a team, whatever the calendar entry says.
Why it matters when the plan changes
A plan that runs across functions needs its owners to make trade-offs together, which requires that they have shared work rather than adjacent work. Research published in Harvard Business Review found that only 9% of managers can rely on colleagues in other functions and units all the time, a gap that a leadership group failing to operate as a team leaves unaddressed. Where the group has none, every cross-functional decision escalates to the chief executive, who becomes the only integrating mechanism in the organisation and the bottleneck for its plan.
The tension is that most senior people are rewarded for their own area. Asking them to prioritise a shared outcome over their own function runs against how they are measured, so the behaviour has to be designed for rather than requested. The same research found only 11% of managers believe their company's strategic priorities are resourced, the visible result of trade-offs never made collectively. A charter not reflected in incentives produces an hour of agreement a month.
In practice
An executive group meets weekly. Each member reports on their function, questions are asked, and the meeting ends. No decision requiring two of them to trade off has been made in the room for a year; those go to the chief executive individually. The group is a reporting forum and the plan needs an integrating one.
Evidence
Reliance runs high within a line and low across functions, which is what a leadership group failing to operate as a team leaves unaddressed.
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull, Why Strategy Execution Unravels and What to Do About It, Harvard Business Review (2015)Most managers do not believe stated priorities are resourced, which is the visible result when trade-offs are never made collectively.
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull, Why Strategy Execution Unravels and What to Do About It, Harvard Business Review (2015)
What it cannot tell you
Establishing whether a leadership group functions as a team says nothing about the quality of its decisions or the strategy it is deciding on. A group can hold shared work and joint accountability and still choose badly. It also assumes the plan requires integration; for genuinely independent businesses under one holding structure, coordination may be the right structure, not teaming.
Questions
Shared work that none of them could do alone and that they are jointly answerable for, plus a forum where trade-offs between their areas actually get settled. Without both, the group is a set of individually accountable people who happen to meet on the same morning.
No. A holding structure of genuinely independent businesses may need coordination rather than joint work. The failure is assuming the group is a team when the plan requires it to be, or running expensive team development where a reporting forum was sufficient.
Every cross-functional trade-off escalating to one person. Research by Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull found only 9% of managers can rely on colleagues in other functions and units all the time, which is the reliance gap a chief executive ends up personally covering, and why the calendar becomes impossible.
Its dynamics can. What resists development is the incentive structure: if each member is measured on their own function, asking them to prioritise a shared outcome runs against how they are judged. Changing the measures usually does more than changing the behaviour directly.
A strategy that crosses functions cannot be executed by a group that never makes cross-functional decisions together. Harvard Business Review reporting in 2015 found only 11% of managers believe their company's strategic priorities have the resources needed for success, the visible cost of trade-offs each function makes on its own.