There is a moment, in the life of most executive teams, when the arguing stops. It is generally received as good news. The team has matured, people say. We have finally aligned.
Sometimes that is exactly what has happened. More often, something else has, and the two are almost impossible to tell apart from the outside — and, alarmingly, from the inside as well.
The two teams that look identical
Consider two executive teams. Both hold meetings that run to time. Both reach decisions without rancour. Both present a united front to the board, and both are described, by people who work for them, as aligned.
In the first, the argument has already been had. It was had thoroughly, it was had in the room, positions moved, and the team arrived at a conclusion that everyone can now defend because everyone genuinely participated in constructing it. The calm is the residue of a completed process.
In the second, the argument has been abandoned. Two people learned some time ago that pressing their objection cost more than it returned. A third stopped raising a structural concern after it was twice acknowledged and twice not addressed. The calm is not the residue of a process. It is the absence of one.
From the boardroom these teams are indistinguishable. From the chief executive's chair they are very nearly indistinguishable, and this is the part that should trouble anyone occupying that chair — because the outward signatures of a high-functioning team and the outward signatures of a team that has given up thinking are, embarrassingly, the same signatures.
The outward signatures of a high-functioning executive team and the outward signatures of a team that has stopped thinking are the same signatures. Short meetings. Rare disagreement. Decisions reached and held.
What is actually being disagreed about
When executive disagreement does become visible, it is almost never about what it appears to be about.
The stated subject is resource allocation, or strategic priority, or the operating model. The actual subject is generally one of three things: who has authority over what; how much risk this organisation is prepared to carry; or an unresolved history between two people that predates the current disagreement by several years and has attached itself to a convenient present-day vehicle.
This is why the standard interventions do so little. A facilitated away-day addresses the stated subject with great professionalism. It produces genuine warmth, a set of shared values and a photograph. It does not go near the actual subject, precisely because the day has been designed to be constructive — and raising the actual subject would not be constructive, at least not in the first hour.
The team returns having enjoyed one another's company, with every substantive fracture entirely intact, and now carrying the additional burden of having publicly committed to being aligned. The next disagreement is therefore even harder to voice, because voicing it now also means breaking a promise.
The cost, which is paid three levels down
An executive team that cannot disagree in the room disagrees somewhere else. Decisions are relitigated in corridors. Implementation slows for reasons that are always plausible and never quite convincing. The same item returns to the agenda in a slightly different costume.
And the organisation reads it. It reads it quickly, and it reads it accurately, long before anyone at the top will name it. People three levels down stop escalating decisions upward, because they have learned that a decision entering the executive team is a decision entering a war. They hedge. They build local optima. They wait.
Velocity collapses across every function simultaneously, and the collapse is attributed to market conditions, or to the systems programme, or to a resourcing gap — to anything, in short, except a conversation that two directors have not been able to have for three years.
Restoring the capability
Disagreement in an executive team is not a hygiene problem to be managed down. It is the mechanism by which a group of capable people produces a decision better than the best individual decision available to any of them. Remove it and you have not removed friction; you have removed the only thing that made the group worth assembling.
Restoring it is not a matter of asking for challenge. Asking for challenge produces nothing, because it costs the chief executive nothing to ask and everything to receive, and the team knows the difference.
It is restored the way it was lost: by demonstration. Take a decision the team reached comfortably. Ask the person most likely to disagree with it to make the strongest possible case against it. Listen. And then, at least once, in front of everyone, change your mind.
The team is not listening to what you say about disagreement. It is watching what happens to the person who does it.
Laszlo Cser is the founder of Vantaris Consulting, an executive leadership advisory practice working with organisations whose executive decisions carry significant commercial, operational or reputational consequence. More essays.