There are several distinct warning signs that senior leaders are not operating as an effective team.

Real meetings happen in the hallways, bathrooms or in people’s individual offices. They are not having the discussion around the table together. If you were to film the actual meeting, you would not hear the important topics and discussion. You would not see constructive conflict. You would hear quiet, and you would see a lot of head nodding and people leaving the meeting and then having real conversations.

People lobby for position before or after the meeting. They do not expect to have a real discussion around the table, so they concentrate on their own agendas and they do everything they can to line up people for an agenda prior to the meeting.

Meeting agendas and meeting outcomes show that they are not talking about the hard or important issues. It is a warning when agendas and outcomes show that they are taking care of business, but they are not going deeply enough into the things that are truly significant that are either helping or derailing them.

Decisions are revisited. They talk about an issue and we think we have made a decision, but week after week or month after month, we are coming back to the same topic.

There are a number of big reasons why senior leadership teams struggle in the context of team building, and they are tied to human nature.

Conflict avoidance – It is hard to address the elephants in the room. Addressing them takes courage and requires candor, and it is daunting when you do not really know how people are going to react. It is easier to not talk about them. A relatively extreme example involves a board we were invited to help. They wanted to make progress and I learned of an issue they had been stuck on for two years. When I asked how they typically make decisions, they said they voted. When I asked if this particular topic had come up for vote, the answer was no. The reason it had not come up for vote was because they knew they did not have consensus, so they kept avoiding putting it on the agenda. Conflict avoidance is huge.

Time – Talking about the real issues requires time. We take on too much. We are always pressed for time. The important issues are not always the urgent issues, so we rush to the urgent thing without talking deeply enough about the meeting material to resolve issues that stand in our way.

Resistance to collaboration – Senior leaders struggle with team building when they resist collaborating with their cohorts to co-create solutions. We have some senior leaders who have an impression that they must bring the answer, and if they do not have the answer, they let the issue rollover and they will let it roll over for quite a while. In reality, collaborative sharing and even showing vulnerability, as in, “I need your help. Let’s go forward on this,” is an indication of really good leadership.

Relationships – Many senior leaders do not spend enough time on one-on-one connections with people to instill in them the feeling and belief that they matter, that they are connected to the work and that their voice counts.