Why the Health of Your Leadership Team Can’t Wait
- Russ Powell
- Mar 17
- 3 min read
Not long ago, I was running a session with a group of director-level leaders at a growing tech startup. The company was dealing with multiple crises, and partway through our conversation, something started to surface — quietly, indirectly — that had nothing to do with the crises themselves.
These directors had real complaints about their executive team. Things the C-suite was doing — and not doing — that were making an already difficult situation worse. But they weren't planning to say anything. The unspoken assumption was that they'd wait until the pain got so bad that the executive team had to notice.
That pattern may sound familiar. And it has a name.
Three Ways Leadership Teams Go Wrong
A recent Harvard Business Review article by Thomas Keil and Marianna Zangrillo, "Why Leadership Teams Fail," offers one of the clearest frameworks I've seen for what goes sideways at the top. Drawing on interviews with more than 100 CEOs and senior executives, they describe three patterns of dysfunction.
The Shark Tank. Infighting, turf battles, and political maneuvering. Meetings become battlegrounds. Decisions get made through power plays, not open discussion.
The Petting Zoo. The opposite — teams so polite and conflict-avoidant that weak ideas go unchallenged. Things look smooth on the surface. Underneath, the quality of thinking quietly deteriorates.
The Mediocracy. Complacency, siloed behavior, and a team that has stopped growing — often coasting on past success.
Different pattern, same result: the team becomes a drag on the business.
The Pattern I See Most
Of the three, I encounter the petting zoo most often in growing startups — and it's the sneakiest, because it doesn't look like a problem.
The team gets along. Meetings are civil. But nobody's pushing back. Proposals get approved without scrutiny. Performance issues go unaddressed. And the hard conversations that could move the company forward keep getting deferred.
That's exactly what was happening with those directors. They had legitimate concerns and the standing to raise them. But the culture around them had made it feel safer to stay quiet.
It took only a few Socratic-ish questions to shift that. Once they saw the cost of waiting, they decided to approach the executive team directly. It wasn't a revolution — it was a decision to stop absorbing friction that didn't belong to them. But that kind of shift rarely happens on its own.
Why It Matters More at Speed
Dysfunction at the top doesn't stay at the top. It radiates. Avoided conversations create confusion one level down. Over-politeness hides risk. Unclear expectations lead to dropped balls and low accountability.
In a stable company, these patterns might simmer for years. In a startup scaling fast, they compound quickly. Every month you wait, the habits get more entrenched and the cost of fixing them goes up.
What the Authors Recommend
The article doesn't treat all dysfunction the same — and that's what makes it useful. Shark tanks need stronger boundaries and clearer behavioral norms. Petting zoos need more candor, shared data, and enough trust that people can challenge each other without it becoming personal. Mediocracies may need deeper intervention, including reshaping the team itself.
Across all three, the authors point to a common root cause: a lack of clarity — strategic, operational, and behavioral — that leaves team members guessing about expectations, roles, and how their efforts connect to the bigger picture.
The Cost of Waiting
If leadership teams fail because leaders don't know how to disagree well, build trust, clarify roles, or hold one another accountable — then developing those capabilities isn't optional. It's not something to get to later, when things calm down. (Things don't calm down.)
I'd encourage you to read the full article. It offers a memorable framework and a useful reminder: strong leadership teams aren't built by accident. They're built through clarity, discipline, honest conversation, and ongoing development.
If your leadership team is feeling the strain, my foundational workshop, Leadership and the Middle Path, was created for exactly this kind of challenge. Designed by organizational development expert Chris Holmberg and used in 160+ startups and larger organizations, it helps leaders think more systemically, solve problems more collaboratively, and handle difficult conversations more gracefullly, with clarity and discipline.
Not sure whether this is showing up in your organization? Start with my Leadership Development Fit Quiz — a quick read on whether your managers or leadership team would benefit from focused development now rather than later.
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