After working with hundreds of clients over the years, I’ve seen more than a few patterns in leadership teams, and I can spot most of them fairly quickly now. That isn’t good or bad: humans are semi-predictable. Any psychologist will tell you every person is an individual, and also that humans have baseline tendencies we see again and again. In a business context, that means certain team dynamics are probable, even if never inevitable.
In leadership teams the pattern can be a little more specific. In almost all cases, you have a handful of people in the room, each of whom is there because they excelled in a particular area. That can be marketing, law, finance, operations, talent – whatever the discipline, they did it well enough to put them on a path to the C-suite. What makes that room work (or not) is whether each of those leaders learns to use their specialty differently once they arrive.
The challenge isn’t lack of expertise, obviously. It’s about how they work together to get to the solution. Because in the C-suite, it’s often not about a single right answer. It’s more about understanding the possible risks and potential rewards. That’s perhaps one important distinction: the decisions aren’t right or wrong. They are at best, well-informed.
An easy example: a CEO sees revenue declining and puts it to the team. The CHRO talks about compensation, either reducing it or defending it. The CMO offers insights about ad budgets. The COO looks at efficiency. All of it is useful. None of it produces a decision. The challenge is each of those experts must evolve from leading with their individual expertise to using executive judgment. They need to look not down their own vertical but across a view that can see the whole board. They don’t have to have the answer; they do need to have a useful lens that leverages their expertise.
In the C-suite, the problem solving is the answer.
I am not saying that these executives should wander far outside their lane. You don’t want everyone to try to have an opinion on everything. (That’s just replacing one problem with another.) Instead of changing the specialist insight, you adjust how the expertise gets leveraged at the top.
Most specialists measure themselves downstream of their own function. For someone in charge of talent the questions might be: Did we make the hire? Right experience, on time, within budget? And most leaders who make it to the top executive team did those things well. That’s what got them into the room. The executive question is the one after it: is the company functionally better for that hire? This isn’t about people throwing themselves under the bus.
For a leader who is deeper in the vertical, success is mostly defined within their specialty. So if you make your sales quota, or your hire goals, or your operational KPIs, you are largely not asked to opine or own anything outside of those deliverables. At the C-suite level it’s about expertise leading to insight. Maybe that wasn’t the right hire. Does the organisation need to provide that person with training, a coach, other resources? Or even was that hire a mistake – not as judgment of who requested the hire, or who vetted the candidates, or both. Because this isn’t about whose job it is, but what is best for the company.
That lens is uncomfortable, because it requires partial ownership. That means participating in decisions not fully within one’s control yet not entirely disowning the outcomes either. Accepting some ownership of the full execution rather than the portion on your side of the handoff is the C-suite lens. Because it’s no longer about what is good for the Talent team, or Marketing team, but the company. And that’s almost never a single-discipline solution.
Executive judgment asks for strong expertise … and broad accountability
Shared ownership and diffused accountability are not the same. Mindset is about sharing a broader responsibility for the company when finding solutions. But that isn’t the same as having ownership over execution, process and deliverables. You want your head of talent thinking about how their team can help the company get better even if the solution isn’t their job. But you don’t actually want them running sales.
It’s also worth saying that the contribution has to be rewarded when it happens. People won’t raise the uncomfortable observation if the reliable consequence is inheriting the problem. Nor should the room reward someone claiming a piece of someone else’s outcome to signal seniority. Both of those are about status rather than the decision. What you want is a team where the observation is safe to make and doesn’t function as a land grab. This is about a corporate culture around problem solving: a process to reveal the right set of inputs for the most informed decision.
Where judgment shows up: how to ask the right questions
Organisations invest heavily in developing expertise, and comparatively little in developing judgment — partly because it’s harder to measure, and partly because people get promoted on the strength of the expertise they’ll now have to use differently.
So: think about the last three strategic decisions your team made. How much time went into debating the solution, and how much into challenging how the problem had been framed? When your specialists speak, are they supplying answers from their domain, or the pattern their domain lets them see?
Your next-generation leaders will get identified as future executives largely on what they deliver now – just as the current team did. That’s the reality to get on the path to the room. But the shift in how to think inside the room can be practised long before the invitation arrives. And that includes applying what we know to build an organisation, instead of simply delivering an outcome. That isn’t easy — but it is how strong leadership teams will thrive.
