Why Strong Senior Leadership Teams Plateau
Success can strand a senior leadership team, even when its members make strong decisions and deliver results. A team can be effective without achieving consistently high performance — and mistake one for the other.
Our research finds that how teams operate today strongly predicts how they will operate a year from now, unless something deliberately disrupts that pattern.
Strong results can reinforce existing ways of working, leaving few people questioning familiar habits. Without intentional change, senior leadership team performance can plateau even as competitors, challenges, and expectations continue to rise.
This report draws on a meta-analysis of more than 3,000 statistical relationships from longitudinal studies of more than 11,000 teams. We paired it with our experience working alongside senior teams and a review of development priorities across 12 senior leadership teams. Together, these findings point to a way to move beyond the plateau.
3 Research Insights for Improving Senior Leadership Team Performance
These 3 interconnected insights help explain what holds back senior leadership team performance — and where leaders can intervene to improve it.
- Behavior: A shift in how a team thinks matters only when it leads to behaviors the team consistently sustains.
- Conflict: Conflict rarely fades on its own. Avoidance allows it to persist until the team addresses it.
- Effectiveness: Every result feeds back into how a team works, making outcomes a signal leaders can use to understand and improve performance.
Each insight includes the research and experience behind it, a team in practice, and first steps to take.
How Senior Leadership Teams Sustain Performance Improvement
Lasting improvement in senior leadership team performance takes sustained effort. The 3 insights work together as connected points on the same climb, so progress on 1 steadies the other 2. Keeping all 3 active takes ongoing reinforcement by maintaining new practices, addressing conflict early, and treating results as signals for learning and adjustment.
The research points to regular checkpoints at roughly 10, 40, and 80 days. Teams can use these moments to assess where they stand, how it’s going, and where they’re headed.
What a senior team becomes is a reflection of how it’s led.
Download the Report
Download the Report
Access the full report to explore the research, real-world examples, and practical first steps for overcoming the patterns that hold back senior leadership team performance.
