A top stressor facing global leaders everywhere
I spent 15 months asking executives in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the US, “What keeps you awake at night?” It’s no surprise that many talked about the looming effect of tariffs, sanctions, hitting growth targets, and managing costs. And there was no shortage of references to the accelerating impact of AI and the threat of an economic recession. But one of the top five themes seemed surprisingly basic. Executives repeatedly expressed concern about their senior leadership teams. Can I rely on them to manage the unending volatility facing us? Do they have my back? Can we move beyond endless debates about prioritization and timing and execute?
A similar finding is reported in Boston Consulting Group’s new report “What (and Who) is Keeping CEOs Up at Night.” The top executives of the largest companies ($5+ billion) say that alignment with their senior leadership teams is among their top five stressors. They rank this as significantly more difficult than managing their boards or workforce at large. CFOs and COOs in particular, are viewed as a significant threat by many of today’s CEO.
We’ve never had more advanced technological tools at our disposal. Our geo-political situation is more fragile than it’s been in decades yet one of the biggest challenges keeping senior leaders awake at night is surprisingly human. How do we improve the way we work together?
What exactly is it about their senior leadership teams that keeps executives awake at night and what solutions does the latest research on global leadership have to offer them?
Individual skills are essential but insufficient
The leadership challenges described by the executives we surveyed was not a lack of skill. Overall, they’re confident in the capabilities of their team members and many described the rigorous process they use before someone joins the senior leadership team. The challenges are more about interpersonal friction and the absence of coordinated effort across the team.
One CEO of a $7 billion logistics firm said, “I meet with my CFO before our executive team meeting to ensure we’re aligned. She confirms alignment and helps me fill in the missing pieces. Then we get into the team meeting and she pummels me with questions.” He welcomes the challenge but he doesn’t understand why she doesn’t raise her questions in private. Waiting to ask them in the broader meeting feels like a breach of trust.
Many executives describe spending an inordinate amount of time with their teams re-litigating decisions already made. And senior leaders working away from headquarters repeatedly voice frustration with having limited influence over enterprise-wide shifts in direction and priorities. A Singapore-based executive with a US tech company said “I leave board meetings in [San Francisco] with clarity. By the time I land in Singapore, my inbox is filled with urgent emails that indicate everyone is moving in different directions.”
The typical solution for improving senior leadership collaboration is focused on helping each leader become more self-aware and collaborative. This includes things like personality assessments, emotional intelligence sessions, and team building activities. This is where much of our work on cultural intelligence (CQ) has focused for the last two decades. We’ve helped leadership teams apply CQ to strengthen communication, build trust, and improve rapport, all of which matters. But even the most politically savvy, emotionally and culturally intelligent leaders can’t successfully navigate crisis situations together without an organizational culture built for managing risk and coordinated movement. A CFO approaches a decision very differently than a CMO. A leader in APAC may prioritize consistency, while a leader in the US pushes for speed. Leaders and organizations need an approach that anticipates where friction will emerge and systemic interventions for working through polycrises together strategically. The research offers some guidance.
Two ways to strengthen senior leadership team collaboration
1. Predict where friction will emerge
One reason senior leadership teams create so much stress for CEOs is that uncertainty and risk exacerbate the differences in leaders’ assumptions and behaviors. Repeated debates, lack of follow-through, and different assumptions stem from different ways we’ve been socialized to respond to a crisis. Some of our latest research on global leadership effectiveness, however, allows executives and teams to predict where friction is most likely to emerge and leverage it as a competitive advantage.
Stemming from research with nearly 4,000 leaders across 27 countries, we know that leadership teams are most likely to experience friction in five areas:
Power: Collisions regarding authority and decision-making
Risk: Misaligned approaches to uncertainty
Identity: Conflicting perspectives on autonomy
Speed: Different views about how quickly to move
Messaging: Disagreements surrounding clarity and transparency
These five dimensions, which we call PRISM, provide a shared language for the behaviors that create the most team friction, as well as providing a way to predict where misalignment will most likely emerge based on the situation at hand. The PRISM dimensions allow leaders to understand and adapt to the varied micro-cultures that exist within every organization and team. Instead of asking why a colleague is being difficult, teams can identify what differences are shaping a situation and anticipate how to manage them. The shift does not eliminate the tension, but it makes it visible and helps to de-personalize it before it becomes an interpersonal barrier to execution.
When approaching a high-stakes decision, a senior leader might ask:
• Where do we expect differences in risk tolerance?
• Who needs input before we move?
• How do we need to align on pace and messaging?
This simple discipline surfaces differences early with the possibility that the differences may sharpen the decision rather than stalling it. Leadership teams that do this consistently move with greater coherence, not because they think alike, but because they know where and how they will differ.
2. Build a culture that enables better decisions under pressure
The other critical way to strengthen how leadership teams work together under pressure is to move beyond individually centered interventions to culture-wide ones. I’ve never been a big fan of systems, policies, and procedures. Traditionally, my view has been to hire talented people who have good judgment and let them do their thing. But everyone taking their own approach to decision making, risk assessment, and timing can quickly lead to confusion and inefficiency. Systemic interventions shift the burden from individual effort and capability to organizational design, so that the company itself develops the capability to respond to polycrises and uncertainty.
Here’s what it might look like for a leadership team to collectively develop a capacity for risk and uncertainty:
Instead of ad hoc meetings that solicit input on the spot, implement structured mechanisms for gathering and integrating feedback. This might mean requiring brief, written input from key stakeholders before a decision meeting, ensuring that concerns are surfaced without relying on who is most vocal in the room. The CFO who waited to ask her questions may have needed time to process the CEO’s recommended direction.
Instead of asking leaders who work outside headquarters to increase their visibility and rapport with those at the center, build processes that explicitly bring in regional perspectives earlier. Define when and how input from those closest to customers, regulators, and local conditions is incorporated, rather than shaping the decision at headquarters and expecting regional leaders to insert themselves at the right moment.
Instead of relying primarily on off-sites and team building sessions to improve collaboration, establish a limited number of councils that explicitly solicit different perspectives before decisions are finalized. These councils, made up of diverse stakeholders and markets, can be used to surface competing views of risk, timing, and execution from a variety of functions, markets and departments.
The most effective leadership teams build a culture that is designed for volatility by embedding a few disciplined practices like these into collaboration, risk assessment, and decision-making. In environments shaped by geopolitical shifts, regulatory uncertainty, and rapid technological change, the culture of the organization starts with the senior leadership team and becomes a critical part of how organizations manage risk.
Intelligent Leadership Teams
Intelligence, in its simplest form, is the ability to recognize patterns and act on them. Cultural intelligence extends that capability to reading cultural patterns and using them strategically. While cultural intelligence has traditionally been measured and developed at the individual level, it can also be developed at the team and organizational level. This is the next frontier for leaders operating in complex, global environments.
Culturally intelligent leaders are essential. But their impact is limited without a shared, predictive logic for anticipating where friction will emerge (PRISM) and a few culturally intelligent systems that shape how decisions are made, risk is interpreted, and different perspectives are integrated. Organizations that develop this capability build leadership teams that not only understand complexity, but act on it with coherence. In a world defined by geopolitical volatility, economic pressure, and rapid technological change, not only does this become a competitive advantage, it just might help CEOs get a better night of sleep.
