Leadership team
A leadership team only earns the name once it has real decision rights, real disagreement in the room, and real accountability afterwards - a group of senior people who meet weekly is an org chart, not a team.
Boxes trace the shift from a group of senior people to a team with real decision rights and accountability.
Reach for this when…
- Meetings are civil but decisions made in the room get quietly undermined afterwards.
- Nobody's sure what the leadership team actually decides versus what gets escalated further up.
- The team agrees too easily and the results don't match the confidence.
How to run it
- Define the team's purpose and mandate: what only this group decides.
- Get the composition right: the roles and range of perspective the mandate needs.
- Agree how you decide: consensus, majority, or one person with input.
- Build real dialogue: make disagreement in the room expected, not awkward.
- Hold each other accountable for what was agreed, in public.
A worked example
Situation. Sara Al-Qahtani runs Falcon Freight Solutions, a logistics company in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, whose five-person leadership team never disagreed openly in meetings, then quietly undermined decisions afterwards.
Applied. She named the problem out loud and set an explicit rule: no decision closes until someone has argued the other side of it in the room.
Result. Fewer decisions got reversed after the meeting. One COO left, saying he preferred how things used to work, which Sara read as the rule doing its job, not failing.
The catch
Getting the composition and decision rights right is the easy part on paper; getting a group of senior people to actually disagree honestly in the room is a culture problem, not a structure problem, and no framework fixes that by itself. It also assumes the team has real authority - if every decision gets overridden above them, none of this matters.
If your leadership team agrees on everything, it isn't aligned, it's silent.