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According to Deloitte’s 2022 Global Leadership Study, ineffective senior leadership teams cost global businesses approximately $1.5 trillion in lost productivity and missed opportunities.

Recent McKinsey research reveals that organisations with misaligned senior leadership teams experience: – 37% lower revenue growth – 48% lower employee engagement – 60% higher turnover at critical leadership levels

Gartner’s Leadership Performance Benchmark indicates that the average cost of replacing a senior executive is $250,000, with productivity loss during leadership misalignment reaching up to 35% of potential output.

The brutal mathematics of leadership dysfunction:

• Estimated annual organisational performance hit: 22-25% of total potential earnings (Harvard Business Review, Leadership Alignment Report 2023)
• 73% of executives struggle to align their leadership team’s strategic objectives (MIT Sloan Management Review)

One diagnostic I recently conducted as part of our Senior Leadership Team Accelerator Programmeexposed a chilling truth:

Most senior teams aren’t teams at all. They’re a collection of high-performing individuals playing an elaborate game of organisational ping-pong.

Key Symptoms of a Dying Leadership Team – with real-world examples:

1. Constant Firefighting Over Strategic Thinking: I worked with a utilities leadership team that spent 80% of their executive meetings discussing current month’s operational issues. One leader told me, “We’re so busy putting out fires, we can’t see the forest burning around us.” They were so consumed by daily emergencies that their 5-year strategic plan collected dust, while competitors were reimagining the entire industry.
2. Communication Through Fragmented Chains: A tech company I coached had 9 different communication channels. Executives were sending critical updates via email, Slack, WhatsApp, and text. During one crisis, a crucial decision was missed because no one knew which platform carried the final communication.
3. Zero Collective Accountability: One leadership team played an elaborate blame game. When a major product launch failed, each executive pointed fingers elsewhere. “Marketing didn’t brief us correctly,” said operations. “Finance didn’t allocate enough budget,” claimed marketing. No one stepped up to own the collective failure or solution.
4. Reactive Decision-Making: Another team we coached only made strategic decisions after major incidents. One leader candidly shared, “We don’t plan. We respond.” When a critical compliance issue emerged, they scrambled, spending 3 times more resources than if they’d proactively addressed potential risks.
5. No Dedicated Strategic Planning Time: A private equity leadership team told me they “didn’t have time” for strategy sessions. Their solution? Quarterly two-hour meetings squeezed between operational reviews. The result? Surface-level discussions, no deep strategic thinking, and missed market opportunities.

Your leadership team isn’t just a group. It’s your organisation’s central nervous system. When it fails, everything fails.

Are you brave enough to diagnose your senior leadership team’s real performance?

References: – Deloitte Global Leadership Study, 2022 – McKinsey Leadership Performance Research, 2023 – Gartner Executive Replacement Cost Analysis, 2023 – Harvard Business Review Leadership Alignment Report, 2023 – MIT Sloan Management Review Strategic Alignment Study, 2023