10 Warning Signs Your Executive Team Is Dysfunctional (And What to Do About It)

If you have ever walked out of a leadership team meeting feeling more frustrated than when you walked in, you are not imagining things. Something is actually broken.

Executive team dysfunction is one of the most common and most costly problems in organisations today. And it is also one of the least talked about. Research from the University of Zurich involving more than 100 CEOs and senior executives found that dysfunctional leadership teams are surprisingly common, yet leaders rarely discuss them openly. Many CEOs were not even aware their teams were struggling until researchers spoke to the executives reporting to them.

The data backs up what most leaders feel in their gut. Gallup's 2025 State of the Global Workplace report found that global employee engagement fell to just 21 percent, with lost productivity costing the global economy an estimated $438 billion. Manager engagement specifically fell from 30 percent to 27 percent, and 70 percent of the variance in team engagement is attributable to the manager. When dysfunction sits at the top, it cascades through every layer of the organisation.

Patrick Lencioni's work on the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which has sold more than three million copies worldwide, identified the foundational patterns that make teams fail: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. More recent research by Thomas Keil and Marianna Zangrillo, published in Harvard Business Review, identified three distinct patterns of executive team dysfunction: the Shark Tank (excessive competition and political maneuvering), the Petting Zoo (extreme conflict avoidance), and the Mediocracy (complacency and coasting on past performance).

I work with executive teams, school leadership groups, and boards across Australia, the US, the UK, Singapore, and beyond. Over the years, I have seen the same warning signs repeat themselves in organisations of every size and sector. The patterns are remarkably consistent. The good news is that once you can name what is happening, you can start to fix it.

Here are the signs your executive team is dysfunctional, what causes each one, and what to do about it.

1. Meetings Feel Like a Waste of Time

This is usually the first symptom that something is wrong. If your leadership team meetings feel flat, unproductive, or like something everyone endures rather than values, you have a problem.

Dysfunctional team meetings tend to follow a predictable pattern. They are dominated by status updates. The same two or three people do most of the talking. Controversial topics are avoided. Decisions are either not made or made without genuine buy-in. People leave the meeting and immediately have the real conversations in hallways, offices, and private messages.

Lencioni calls this artificial harmony. It looks like collaboration on the surface, but underneath it is avoidance. Keil and Zangrillo's research found this pattern so common they gave it a name: the Petting Zoo. Everyone is nice to each other, but no one challenges anything, and nothing actually improves.

What to do about it: Separate your meeting types. Stop mixing status updates, decision-making, and problem-solving into one meeting. Have a short daily or weekly check-in for updates. Use a separate tactical meeting to address real issues. And hold a monthly or quarterly strategic meeting where the hard conversations happen. When you change the structure of your meetings, you change what your team talks about. For more on this, read 29 Simple Strategies on How to Improve Team Dynamics.

2. The Real Conversations Happen After the Meeting

This is the hallmark of a team that lacks trust. If your executives are having sidebar conversations with you individually to raise concerns they would not raise in the group, your team is not actually a team. It is a collection of individuals who report to the same person.

Research from Next Step Partners found that this pattern, where leaders seek private alignment with the CEO rather than addressing issues openly, fuels silos, erodes trust, and weakens decision-making. One CEO they worked with discovered that her CFO and COO were privately complaining to her about each other while nodding along in meetings. By allowing each leader to come to her separately instead of insisting they resolve things together, she was inadvertently fueling the dysfunction.

Keil and Zangrillo call this behaviour a sign of the Shark Tank pattern. When team members go around each other to win favour with the CEO, or question plans after they are agreed upon, the team's collective intelligence is wasted.

What to do about it: Stop being the mediator. When a team member comes to you with a complaint about a peer, your response should be: have you talked to them about this? If the answer is no, that is the first step. Your job is to create the conditions where honest conversation happens in the room, not in your office afterward. This requires genuine vulnerability-based trust, which is the foundation of everything else.

3. Your Team Avoids Conflict at All Costs

Most people hear the word conflict and assume it is destructive. But the absence of healthy conflict is far more dangerous than the presence of it. When an executive team cannot disagree productively, they cannot make good decisions.

Lencioni's model makes this clear. Fear of conflict sits directly above the absence of trust on his pyramid. Teams that cannot trust each other enough to be vulnerable will never engage in the kind of honest, passionate debate that leads to better outcomes. Instead, they settle for bland consensus that nobody is truly committed to.

The Workplace Peace Institute's 2024 State of Conflict survey found that 29 percent of employees attributed workplace conflict to dysfunctional leadership and a lack of open communication. When leaders model conflict avoidance, it becomes the culture. And conflict among senior leadership and executives accounted for 20 percent of all reported workplace conflict incidents.

What to do about it: Name the elephant in the room. Healthy conflict is not about personal attacks. It is about passionate, unfiltered debate about ideas. As the leader, you need to give explicit permission for disagreement and then model it yourself. Try opening a meeting by saying: I need everyone's honest opinion on this, especially if you disagree with where we are heading. If you want to go deeper on this, my book Step Up or Step Out was written specifically to help leaders navigate these difficult conversations. You can also read 25 Crucial Tips for Handling Difficult Conversations.

4. Decisions Get Made but Nothing Changes

This is the commitment problem. Your team sits in a meeting, discusses an issue, apparently agrees on a direction, and then nothing happens. Three months later, the same issue is back on the agenda.

The reason this happens is that the agreement was not real. People nodded along because they did not want to fight about it, not because they genuinely committed to the decision. Lencioni calls this the lack of commitment dysfunction. Without honest debate first, teams cannot achieve genuine buy-in. And without genuine buy-in, there is no real commitment.

This is particularly insidious because it looks like alignment. Everyone seemed to agree. But the tell is in the execution. If decisions do not stick, your team has a commitment problem, which almost certainly means they also have a conflict problem, which means they have a trust problem.

What to do about it: At the end of every decision, go around the table and ask each person directly: are you committed to this? Not do you agree, but are you committed. There is a difference. Commitment means I will actively support this decision even if it was not my preferred option. Document the decision, the owner, and the deadline. Review it in the next meeting. The cadence of accountability starts with clarity of commitment.

5. Nobody Holds Each Other Accountable

In most leadership teams, accountability flows in one direction: from the CEO downward. Peer-to-peer accountability is almost nonexistent. Leaders will tolerate missed deadlines, poor performance, and broken commitments from their peers because calling it out feels uncomfortable.

Lencioni identified avoidance of accountability as the fourth dysfunction. When team members are not truly committed to decisions, they feel they have no right to hold others accountable. And when they do not hold each other accountable, standards drop. Your best people notice this first. They see mediocrity being tolerated and they either disengage or leave.

The cost is staggering. The Gallup data shows that disengaged employees are not just unproductive. They actively drag down the people around them. At the executive level, this effect is multiplied across entire divisions and functions.

What to do about it: Build peer-to-peer accountability into your operating rhythm. Use a simple scorecard that tracks each executive's commitments and review it together. When something is off track, the team discusses it, not just you. This is hard at first, but once a team experiences the cadence of healthy accountability, they never want to go back to the old way. For a deeper dive on this, read How to Have That Difficult Conversation with an Employee.

6. Ego Trumps Team Results

The fifth and final dysfunction in Lencioni's model is inattention to results. This is where team members prioritise their own department's success, their personal reputation, or their career advancement over the collective results of the leadership team.

You see this when executives fight for budget and headcount for their own area without considering what is best for the organisation. You see it when someone defends a failing initiative because admitting it failed would look bad. You see it when people focus on looking good in meetings rather than solving real problems.

Keil and Zangrillo's Mediocracy pattern often produces this outcome. When a team becomes complacent and lacks a compelling shared goal, individual self-interest fills the vacuum. Leaders start optimising for their own metrics rather than the organisation's mission.

What to do about it: Establish one or two clear, measurable, collective goals that the entire leadership team owns together. Not departmental goals. Team goals. When the team wins or loses together, individual ego becomes less relevant. Publicly track progress against these goals and celebrate collective wins, not individual heroics.

7. You Have a High Performer Who Is Toxic

Nearly every dysfunctional executive team has at least one person who delivers results but damages the team in the process. They shut down discussions. They undermine peers. They resist anything that was not their idea. And they get away with it because the numbers look good.

Research from Next Step Partners found that tolerating toxic high performers is one of the most common and most costly mistakes CEOs make. A senior leader at one mid-sized technology company consistently refused to engage with team discussions and blocked operational changes because of his past success. The CEO tolerated it because of his track record. By the time the CEO intervened, innovation had stalled and team momentum had suffered.

What to do about it: Results without relationships destroy teams. Make it clear that how someone leads is as important as what they deliver. Set explicit behavioural expectations alongside performance targets. If someone is unwilling to change, you may need to make a difficult decision. Keeping a toxic leader in place sends a message to every other team member about what you actually value. Read 35 Vital Steps to Prepare for Conflict with a Difficult Employee for practical guidance on navigating this.

8. New Initiatives Die Quietly

In a healthy team, ideas move through stages: someone identifies a problem, someone proposes a solution, the team evaluates it, someone rallies people around it, and others execute and complete it. In a dysfunctional team, ideas get stuck. They are raised in one meeting, discussed vaguely, and never mentioned again.

This often happens because of a gap in how the team works together. Patrick Lencioni's Working Genius model identifies six types of work that every team needs to complete the full cycle: Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanising, Enablement, and Tenacity. When a leadership team has gaps in these stages, work stalls at predictable points.

A team full of big-picture thinkers and idea generators but with no one who naturally drives execution will start many things and finish few. A team heavy on execution but light on questioning and innovation will grind efficiently on the wrong priorities.

What to do about it: Have your team complete the Working Genius assessment. It takes minutes and reveals exactly where your team has natural energy and where you have gaps. As a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, I have seen teams transform when they finally understand why certain types of work feel so hard. The solution is not to hire new people. It is to design your workflow so the right people are doing the right work at the right stage. For a full overview, read The Six Types of Working Genius Book Summary.

9. People Are Burning Out Despite Working Hard

Burnout at the executive level is reaching crisis proportions. Research shows that 56 percent of leaders face burnout, and a burned-out executive costs more than $600,000 to replace when you factor in recruitment, training, and lost productivity.

But here is the insight most people miss: executive burnout is often a symptom of team dysfunction, not just individual overwork. When trust is low, people spend energy on self-protection instead of real work. When accountability is absent, the most conscientious leaders compensate by doing more themselves. When conflict is avoided, problems persist and create chronic stress.

The Working Genius model explains another dimension of this. When people spend significant time in their areas of working frustration rather than their areas of genius, they burn out faster regardless of workload. A leader forced to spend all day in detailed execution when their genius is in ideation will feel drained even if they are technically working fewer hours.

What to do about it: Address the team dysfunction first. No amount of wellness programs will fix burnout caused by a broken team. Then look at whether your executives are in roles that match their natural strengths. The Working Genius assessment is the fastest way to diagnose this. Read 100 Proven Tips for Working Genius in the Workplace for practical application.

10. You Feel Lonely at the Top

This might be the most telling sign of all. If you are the CEO, principal, or senior leader and you feel like you are carrying the organisation by yourself, your team is not functioning the way it should.

A healthy leadership team shares the burden. Members challenge the leader constructively, take ownership of problems without being asked, and drive initiatives forward without constant oversight. When the leader feels isolated, it usually means the team has not built the trust required for genuine partnership.

One of the most powerful things Lencioni teaches is the concept of the first team. Your leadership team should be the first team every executive belongs to, not their department. When executives see their departmental team as their primary loyalty, the leadership team becomes a political arena rather than a genuine team.

What to do about it: Have an honest conversation with your team about the first team concept. Ask each person: which team do you see as your primary team? The answer might surprise you. Building the leadership team into a genuine first team requires intentional investment, usually through regular offsites, shared goals, and facilitated conversations about how the team actually works together.

The Real Problem Behind Every Dysfunctional Executive Team

If you have read this far, you have probably recognised your own team in at least a few of these signs. That is normal. Almost every executive team has some degree of dysfunction. The question is whether you are willing to address it.

The patterns described above are not random. They cascade. Lencioni's pyramid makes this clear. Without trust, there is no healthy conflict. Without conflict, there is no commitment. Without commitment, there is no accountability. Without accountability, results suffer. You cannot fix accountability without first fixing commitment. You cannot fix commitment without first fixing conflict. And you cannot fix any of it without first building trust.

The most effective way to address executive team dysfunction is to bring the team together for a dedicated session outside the normal rhythm of work. An offsite or retreat creates the psychological safety and focused time needed to have the conversations that get avoided in regular meetings. For a comprehensive guide to Lencioni's framework, read 183 Tips to Build Your Team: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Summary.

What to Do Next

If you are a CEO, principal, or senior leader recognising these signs in your own executive team, here is where I would start.

Step one: Be honest with yourself about which signs apply to your team. Rate each one on a scale of one to ten. The ones that make you most uncomfortable are probably the ones that need the most attention.

Step two: Pick the one sign that is causing the most damage right now and address it directly with your team. Not all ten at once. One.

Step three: Consider bringing in an external facilitator for a team offsite. Not because you cannot lead your own team, but because you are part of the system. An outside perspective changes the dynamic entirely.

I work with executive teams, school leadership groups, and boards to facilitate exactly these kinds of conversations. Whether it is a Working Genius session to understand how your team actually gets work done, a Five Behaviours workshop to build team cohesion, or a strategic offsite to get your leadership team aligned, I can help.

If any of this resonates with what you are experiencing, I would love to have a conversation. Email me at jonno@consultclarity.org and let us talk about what is really going on with your team.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I know if my executive team is actually dysfunctional or just going through a rough patch?

Every team goes through difficult seasons. The difference between a rough patch and genuine dysfunction is persistence and pattern. If the same issues keep surfacing over months or years, if the same interpersonal tensions never resolve, and if team performance is consistently below what you would expect given the talent in the room, you are looking at dysfunction rather than a temporary dip.

What is the fastest way to diagnose executive team dysfunction?

The two most effective diagnostic tools I use are the Five Dysfunctions of a Team assessment and the Working Genius assessment. The Five Dysfunctions assessment reveals where your team is stuck on trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results. The Working Genius assessment shows where your team has gaps in the actual work cycle. Together, they give a complete picture in under an hour.

Can we fix dysfunction without an external facilitator?

Sometimes. If the dysfunction is mild and you have a strong, self-aware leader who is willing to be vulnerable first, you can make progress internally. But for moderate to severe dysfunction, an external facilitator is almost always more effective. The reason is simple: you are part of the system. Your presence changes how the team behaves. An external facilitator creates a different dynamic that allows conversations to happen that would not happen otherwise.

What is the biggest mistake CEOs make with dysfunctional teams?

Avoiding the problem. Most CEOs know something is wrong. They feel it in every meeting. But addressing team dysfunction feels risky because it requires vulnerability, and vulnerability feels dangerous when trust is low. So they focus on strategy, or structure, or process, anything tangible rather than the relational dynamics that are actually the root cause.

How long does it take to turn around a dysfunctional executive team?

It depends on how deep the dysfunction goes and how committed the leader is to change. Teams with mild dysfunction can see significant improvement after a single offsite with follow-up. Teams with deep-rooted trust issues may need six to twelve months of consistent effort, including regular facilitated sessions, coaching, and deliberate changes to meeting structures and operating rhythms.

What role does the Working Genius play in fixing team dysfunction?

Working Genius addresses a dimension of dysfunction that most frameworks miss entirely: misalignment between how people are wired and the work they are doing. Many leadership teams are full of talented people who are burned out and frustrated not because of interpersonal issues but because they are spending too much time in their frustration areas. The Working Genius assessment reveals this pattern quickly and gives teams a practical path to realigning work.

Is team dysfunction more common in certain types of organisations?

It is common everywhere, from startups to global corporations to schools and nonprofits. The University of Zurich research found dysfunction across industries and organisation sizes. However, it tends to be particularly acute during periods of growth, leadership transitions, and organisational change when established patterns get disrupted and new relationships have not yet developed trust.

Who is the best facilitator for dysfunctional executive teams?

The right facilitator depends on your specific situation, but look for someone who uses diagnostic tools rather than generic workshops, who has experience working with senior leadership teams specifically, and who will tell you the truth rather than just make everyone feel good. As a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and the author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold globally), I specialise in helping executive teams have the conversations they have been avoiding. Reach out at jonno@consultclarity.org.

About the Author

Jonno White is a leadership consultant, Certified Working Genius Facilitator, keynote speaker, and the author of Step Up or Step Out. He works with CEOs, principals, and boards across Australia, the US, the UK, Singapore, and beyond to build leadership teams that are cohesive, aligned, and high performing. Jonno hosts the Leadership Conversations Podcast with over 230 episodes reaching listeners in more than 150 countries and is the founder of The 7 Questions Movement, a global community of over 6,000 leaders.

Next Read

If this article resonated, read 75 Essential Keys to Mastering the Five Behaviors for a comprehensive guide to turning Lencioni's model into real behaviour change in your leadership team.