What Is a Leadership Team? Why Junior Leadership Teams Struggle Most

Most groups called a "leadership team" are not actually a team. They are a collection of leaders who happen to report to the same person, each protecting their own patch, each measured on their own numbers. Call it what you want on the org chart. If nobody's success depends on anyone else's, it's a workgroup, not a team.

That distinction shows up at every level of an organization, but it hits hardest below the executive floor, where leadership teams get the least support and the most pressure.

What Is a Leadership Team?

A leadership team is any group of people who lead others and share collective accountability for a common outcome. That includes a company's Executive Leadership Team (ELT), the CEO and C-suite, but it far more commonly means something smaller and less visible: a group of team leads reporting to a first-line manager, a set of supervisors under one department head, or a handful of newly promoted managers who now, for the first time, have to lead people who used to be their peers.

If you're specifically researching the C-suite ELT, the acronym, and how executive teams get built and developed, that's covered in depth on our Executive Leadership Team Development page, including the framework we use with C-suite clients. What follows here is about the leadership teams that exist everywhere else in the org chart, and that get almost none of that same attention.

Why Junior Leadership Teams Struggle More Than Executive Teams

Executive teams get offsites, executive coaches, board scrutiny, and succession planning. Junior and mid-level leadership teams usually get none of that. They get a promotion announcement, a new job title, and an assumption that leadership is something they'll figure out on the job.

That assumption is where most of the dysfunction starts. A newly promoted team of first-line managers faces a genuinely harder set of problems than a C-suite does, for reasons that have nothing to do with seniority:

They're often still doing the job they were promoted from. A team lead who still owns individual deliverables alongside managing peers has divided loyalty built into the role itself. There's rarely enough separation from the work to actually lead the people doing it.

They're competing for the next rung, not collaborating on this one. At the executive level, the CEO has usually already been decided. Below that, a leadership team of newly promoted managers is frequently made up of people who are all, quietly, angling for the same next promotion. That incentive structure actively works against the kind of trust a real team needs.

They don't have the authority to enforce norms. A CEO can set a code of conduct for the ELT and back it with real consequences. A first-line manager leading a team of former peers often can't do the same without it reading as a power grab, which means dysfunction goes unaddressed far longer than it would higher up.

They get talked at, not developed. Most leadership training below the executive level is a one-off workshop, not the sustained coaching relationship that senior leaders take for granted. Inspiration without reinforcement fades within weeks.

What Actually Helps a Junior Leadership Team

The good news is that none of this requires waiting for a formal budget line or a C-suite-style program to start fixing. A few things move the needle quickly, even for a team of newly promoted managers with no dedicated coaching budget.

Name the divided loyalty out loud. If team leads are still doing individual work alongside managing others, say so directly rather than pretending the role is purely managerial. Naming the tension is the first step to managing it deliberately instead of it managing them.

Separate "who gets promoted" conversations from "how we work together" conversations. As much as possible, keep team meetings focused on collective outcomes, not individual visibility. If the team senses every meeting is secretly an audition, they'll never collaborate honestly in it.

Borrow authority instead of waiting to earn it. A first-line manager can't unilaterally set behavioral norms the way a CEO can, but they can get their own manager to co-sign a simple team agreement, which gives it real weight without the manager having to manufacture authority they don't yet have.

Invest in the leader of the leaders. The fastest way to improve a junior leadership team is usually not a team offsite. It's coaching for the person who leads that team, and this is exactly where coaching executive leadership and coaching junior leadership overlap: most of what a leadership team learns about how to operate, it learns by watching how its own leader operates.

Where to Go From Here

If the team you're building or trying to fix is one of the many leadership teams that exist below the executive floor, the practices above are the place to start, and it's exactly the kind of work I do with first-time and newly promoted leaders through executive coaching.

If the team you actually mean is the C-suite specifically, our Executive Leadership Team Development page covers the framework, process, and programs we use at that level.

It has been my privilege to work with leadership teams at every level, across 40+ countries. If you'd like to discuss what this could look like for your team, book a video call here.