The executive committee is an operating system, not an organisation chart

The most expensive leadership problem in an organisation may be one that does not appear in any individual performance review. Each executive delivers against functional targets. Board materials are polished. Yet enterprise decisions are slow, cross-functional priorities stall and the CEO becomes the final arbiter of issues that should be resolved collectively.

This is not necessarily a failure of talent. It may be a failure of executive-team design. The committee that helped a business establish scale may not be the one best equipped to manage a more complex portfolio, integrate acquisitions, navigate regulatory scrutiny or accelerate an AI-enabled transformation. A successful team can become misaligned without any member becoming less capable.

For CEOs, the question is therefore not simply whether they have the right people. It is whether those people, with their current mandates and relationships, constitute the right leadership system for the next phase of value creation.

Five signals that the leadership model is losing effectiveness

The first signal is decision congestion. Matters that should be settled between functions repeatedly reach the CEO because authority, trade-offs or accountability are unclear. The second is strategic fragmentation: leaders agree with the corporate strategy in principle but allocate resources according to functional incentives.

A third signal is the absence of constructive challenge. Apparent harmony can conceal low trust, unresolved disagreements or a reluctance to question established assumptions. The fourth is a widening gap between the capabilities the strategy requires and those represented at the top table—for example, enterprise technology judgement, capital allocation, international execution or organisational change.

The fifth is an overdependence on the CEO. When every important connection runs through one individual, the committee has ceased to operate as a genuinely collective leadership body. These indicators deserve attention even when financial results remain strong: operating performance is often a lagging measure of leadership-system health.

Diagnose the system before replacing its members

Restructuring too quickly can destroy institutional knowledge and create uncertainty without addressing the underlying constraint. A CEO should begin by separating four questions: Is the strategy clear? Is the executive committee designed around the most important enterprise decisions? Are decision rights and incentives coherent? And do individual leaders have the judgement and capabilities required?

This distinction matters. If two functions continually collide, the answer may be a redesigned mandate rather than a new appointment. If executives are individually strong but cannot debate priorities openly, the intervention may concern team dynamics and governance. If a critical capability is genuinely absent, however, coaching or process changes alone will not close the gap.

A rigorous assessment looks beyond CVs and functional scorecards. It examines how decisions are made, how disagreement is handled, which leaders create enterprise value beyond their own remit, and where the organisation depends on informal workarounds. The aim is to understand the causes of friction before prescribing a solution.

Make the future strategy the reference point

The most useful leadership assessment starts with a forward-looking question: what must this business be able to do exceptionally well over the next three to five years? A company preparing for geographic expansion may need different executive-team capabilities from one focused on margin recovery, platform integration or portfolio simplification.

This is particularly important when a company has changed faster than its governance. New businesses, investors, technologies or regulatory demands may have accumulated around a leadership structure built for a simpler organisation. The resulting problem is not necessarily the number of executives; it is whether the collective team can allocate capital, resolve trade-offs and execute across boundaries.

The CEO should identify a small number of enterprise-critical decisions and test whether the present committee can make them with sufficient speed, evidence and accountability. That exercise often reveals more than a conventional review of reporting lines.

Choose the least disruptive intervention that solves the real problem

A leadership reset is not a binary choice between keeping everyone and replacing half the team. There is a spectrum: clarify mandates, redesign decision forums, change incentives, strengthen collaboration, develop successors, add a missing capability or make targeted appointments. The intervention should be proportionate to the diagnosis.

Where change is necessary, sequencing matters. Announcing a new structure before explaining the strategic logic invites speculation about personalities. A stronger approach links each decision to the future operating model, makes accountabilities explicit and preserves continuity where it remains an advantage.

The board has a role in testing the CEO’s rationale, especially when the proposed changes affect succession risk or the concentration of critical capabilities. It should challenge both inertia and unnecessary disruption—not substitute its judgement for the CEO’s on every appointment.

Questions worth taking to the next executive committee review

A practical review can begin with four questions. Which three enterprise decisions consume too much time or repeatedly return to the CEO? Where do functional incentives work against corporate priorities? Which capabilities will become essential in the next strategic phase but are weak today? And, if the team were being assembled for tomorrow’s business rather than yesterday’s, what would be different?

The value of these questions lies less in producing an immediate reshuffle than in exposing assumptions that rarely surface in formal performance discussions. Sometimes the answer is a new executive. Sometimes it is a new way of leading together. Confusing the two is costly.