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Is Your Executive Team Really a Team? 

Does your C-suite truly function as a team? If not, your company is probably underperforming. 

That’s the conclusion of some new research from Gartner that we’re publishing in the upcoming November/December issue of the magazine. We wanted to share it early with HBR Executive subscribers. 

Highly effective executive teams tend to produce outsized results. These days, companies are dealing with a complex and rapidly evolving business environment that requires cross-enterprise thinking. Collaboration is especially critical. 

But few executive teams seem to be meeting the challenge. C-suite leaders still tend to focus excessively on their functional roles, and not enough on enterprise-wide leadership, according to the Gartner research.  

To be sure, that functional expertise wins leaders a seat at the executive table. But once they’re there, they need to rebalance their responsibilities to collectively address potentially destabilizing challenges like AI. Otherwise, companies are likely to underperform and, in the direst scenarios, slide toward irrelevance.   

“You can’t step into an executive title and continue to play mostly a functional role,” says Rachel Juley, a director at Gartner and the lead author of the study, which was based on surveys of 500 global CXOs. “There are high-stakes consequences for organizations that don’t get this right.”  

Only 31% of executives in Gartner’s study identified the C-suite as their primary team. Most CMOs primarily identified instead with their marketing team; most CFOs with the finance group; and so on. That means most executive teams are operating essentially as a group of independent leaders rather than as a unified team. 

Gartner believes that this can dramatically limit an organization’s ability to identify and execute on the transformational changes that need to take place. 

But it’s possible to move the needle. Here's Juley’s advice on the steps you can take:  

Much of this goes against our natural instincts. We’re comfortable focusing on our areas of expertise and on the day-to-day work that drives the core business. But transformational change requires a different form of engagement, and the executive team needs to make that its top priority.

How to Spark—and Steer—Disruptive Innovation 

Disruption doesn’t have to be something that happens to your business—it’s something any leader can prepare for and shape. 

That’s according to Scott D. Anthony, clinical professor of strategy at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and author of Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World. 

In our latest HBR Executive Masterclass, Anthony draws on decades of research and practice to identify five learnable behaviors that great innovators share—skills that anyone can build through conscious practice. He also offers real-world examples of how these behaviors lead to transformative innovation. 

In a world where every industry faces constant reinvention, Anthony’s message is: You can’t sit on the sidelines and wait for clarity. 

with Lew Frankfort, former CEO of Coach 

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