Who's in the Room?: How Great Leaders Structure and Manage the Teams Around Them

CHAPTER 4

Four Fundamental Conflicts at the Heart of Senior Management Teams

As we've seen in the previous two chapters, the sources of the dissatisfaction or vague disappointment with the effectiveness of the senior management team (SMT) on the part of leaders and team members don't lie in the psyche. The problem isn't faulty interpersonal dynamics within the team. It's also not the leadership style of the CEO. In fact the problem is rooted in a fundamental tension between the assumption that the SMT is, or should be, a decision-making body and the fact that the very nature of the SMT makes it largely ill suited to that task. As we saw in Chapter One, this tension often surfaces when the CEO and the SMT are dealing with a business case that ...