What’s the Right Size for Your Senior Leadership Team?

The size and makeup of your senior leadership team quietly determine how fast decisions get made, how honestly issues are addressed, and how well strategy turns into execution. In this episode, I break down how to design a leadership team that actually works.

Why Leadership Team Design Matters

• As the senior leadership team goes, so goes the rest of the organization.
• The right size and composition of the team directly impact:
  • Decision quality and speed
  • Accountability for execution
  • Culture across the organization
• Leadership team effectiveness cascades downward through every level of the business.

The Three Core Responsibilities of a Senior Leadership Team

• Enterprise-Level Decision Making
  • The team exists to make decisions that affect the entire organization.
• Ownership of Results
  • The team must own both the decisions and the execution that follows.
• Culture Leadership
  • The senior leadership team sets the tone for behavior, trust, and standards.

The Most Common Problem: Leadership Teams That Are Too Big

• Oversized leadership teams are far more common than teams that are too small.
• Size issues are structural, not about individual performance or talent.
• Even strong leaders can struggle when the team structure is wrong.

How Oversized Teams Slow Decision Making

• Too many voices lead to:
  • Excessive discussion
  • Unnecessary agreement instead of real debate
  • Decisions that take far longer than they should
• Decisions that should take 20 minutes often take an hour or more.
• A key test:
  • What decisions would be worse or stall if this person were not in the room?
  • If someone is there merely to be informed, they should not be on the senior leadership team.

Trust and Relationship Breakdown in Large Teams

• Smaller teams:
  • Build trust faster
  • Surface conflict earlier
  • Resolve issues more directly
• Larger teams:
  • Require more time to build psychological safety
  • Encourage political behavior
  • Avoid difficult conversations
• A warning sign:
  • “Meetings after the meeting” where real issues are discussed privately.
• If brutal honesty can’t happen in the room, the team is likely too big or misaligned.

When Strategic Conversations Become Tactical

• The wrong team composition causes:
  • Strategic discussions to derail into operational details
  • Conversations to stall around excuses or past constraints
• Some leaders lack the ability or role clarity to think at the enterprise level.
• The result:
  • Slower progress
  • Weaker decisions
  • Missed opportunities

Risks of Leadership Teams That Are Too Small

• Missing key perspectives can lead to:
  • Poor or unrealistic decisions
  • Execution challenges
  • Lack of true ownership
• Example:
  • Excluding sales leadership may result in decisions that cannot be executed.
• Balance is critical:
  • Not everyone needs to be represented
  • But true owners of execution must be present

Who Truly Belongs on the Senior Leadership Team

• Members must enable brutal honesty about:
  • Strategy
  • Performance
  • Financials
  • Problems and failures
• Anyone who limits honest discussion does not belong on the team.
• Members should:
  • Shape enterprise-level decisions
  • Own outcomes
  • Be accountable for execution through their teams

The Two-Team Leadership Model

• A highly effective structure used by many organizations:
  • Senior Leadership Team
    • Small
    • Decision-focused
    • Enterprise-level strategy and talent discussions
  • Extended Leadership Team
    • Broader group
    • Focused on alignment, execution, and buy-in
• Example approach:
  • First portion of leadership meetings reserved for senior leadership only
  • Extended team joins later for communication, input, and execution alignment
• Benefits:
  • Faster decisions
  • Stronger trust
  • Better succession planning
  • Increased transparency without overcrowding the core team

Inclusion Without Overcrowding

• Inclusion does not require a permanent seat at the senior leadership table.
• Extended leadership teams:
  • Build bench strength
  • Engage high-potential leaders
  • Improve execution without slowing strategy

Final Challenge for Leaders

• Ask yourself:
  1. What enterprise decisions does this team own?
  2. Who must be in the room for those decisions to be strong and owned?
  3. Who is on the team out of habit rather than necessity?
• Leadership team design must be intentional.
• Structure shapes speed, trust, and execution across the entire organization.

Thanks for listening!

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  Transcript
  

   

   

  [00:00:00] 

  As the leadership team goes, so goes the rest of the company. So what I wanna talk about in this episode is the makeup of your senior leadership team. Who should be on the team? Who should be off the team? How do you know if the team’s too big or too small? The right size and the right members of that senior leadership team can make all the difference.

  In the world is to whether that team is effective and how that effectiveness or lack of effectiveness cascades down through the organization. 

  So let’s talk first a little bit about the role of the senior leadership team. The senior leadership team exists. To, I think, [00:01:00] do three major things. Number one, the senior leadership team exists to make enterprise level decisions.

  Number two, the senior leadership team exists to own the results of those decisions and the execution that flows from it. And number three, the senior leadership team exists to drive culture. So it’s about decisions, it’s about results, it’s about culture. It’s not there to inform the members of that senior leadership team.

  No one should be on that senior leadership team because they need to know what the senior leadership team is talking about. There are problems caused if a senior leadership team is too big and problems caused if it’s too small and the right people aren’t on the team. 

  And I’m gonna start with some of [00:02:00] the problems that are caused by too many people on the senior leadership team.

  And I’m gonna start there because I see that problem way more often. Then I see the problem of not having enough people or enough of the right people on the senior leadership team. And let me be clear, I’m not talking about quality of people here. You can have the perfect size and representation on your senior leadership team, but if you don’t have.

  Members of that leadership team that are performing. I don’t care if you have the right size,it’s not gonna work. But that’s not what we’re talking about here today. Here I’m talking a little bit more about structure and what types of people should be on and off, not really talking about performance.

  I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about that on a dozen or more other. Podcast. So, so I wanna start with problems caused by it being, by the team being too big. And I’ve [00:03:00] absolutely been in situations where, and I’m thinking of one in particular where the CEO, is really a fan of a flat organization. The CEO likes a lot of people reporting directly into him and.

  Without commenting on that specifically and whether that makes sense or doesn’t make sense. We wound up in a situation where their senior leadership team was made up of 17 individuals. And, ah, that’s just too big. That’s just too big. 98% of the time, that’s just too big. when a leadership team is too big, there is too much discussion.

  You’ve got 17 people around the table. They all wanna be heard and they should be heard if they’re sitting around the table. So there’s just too much discussion. it slows decision making and I wanna. Unpack that. It [00:04:00] impacts trust and relationship building amongst the team. And when the team’s too big, there are important conversations that just don’t happen.

  So let’s unpack all that. How does it slow decisions? Well, as I said, if you’ve got too many people around the table and they all want input as they should. There, there is just too much, not just too much discussion, but too much unimportant discussion. Too much of people, you know, frankly agreeing with each other, as opposed to real discussion.

  Diving deeper into the issue, if someone is not required to make. Or materially shape an enterprise level decision. They shouldn’t be on the leadership team. and in those senior leadership team meetings, decisions that should take 20 [00:05:00] minutes, wind up taking an hour when there’s 17 people in the room and you just can’t afford that.

  Lack of velocity in decision making and that frustration around the room. So I want you to ask yourself, when you think of your leadership team, who must be involved for decisions to be high quality? Who must be involved for those decisions to be owned and executed. And I don’t mean that everybody who executes on a decision needs to be in the meeting.

  That would lead to dozens of people in your senior leadership team meetings and on your senior leadership team. but who owns the execution? Who is truly accountable? For the execution. one way to think of it, kind of a practical question is when you think of the members of your leadership team, what decisions would be worse or stall if this [00:06:00] person were not in the room?

  And if the answer to that question is, well, they need to be in the room because they need to be informed of the decision, or it would be helpful for them to hear what went into the decision. That’s not a leadership team role or a leadership team member. That means they should have be, should be informed after the meeting, but they don’t need to be in the meeting.

  So again, the key question is what decisions would be worse or what decisions would stall if this person were not in the room? And if that’s the case for enterprise level decisions, it’s a great case to have them in the room, but they’re not there to be informed. So number one. Too many people, wrong people on the leadership team slows decision making.

  The other thing it slows is the building of trust and relationships on the [00:07:00] leadership team. Smaller teams build trust faster. Smaller teams surface conflict earlier. They resolve issues more directly. Larger teams need more time to build safety. Everyone doesn’t feel comfortable with everyone in the room.

  That room tends towards more political behavior. One of the ground rules that I set for every leadership team I work with is brutal honesty. Well, when you have too many people in the room or sometimes different levels of people in a senior leadership team meeting, there are key discussions that don’t happen.

  the hardest conversations very often are avoided. Because there’s certain people in the room that you’re not comfortable having that conversation. You know, with them [00:08:00] sitting in the room may maybe it needs, maybe it’s a conversation about them or their team that you are not comfortable having. You know, this is a problem one.

  One of the ways you know this is a problem is when there’s a lot of kind of meeting after the meeting when there’s things that can’t be said in the meeting because there’s certain people there that shouldn’t be. So you have the meeting after the meeting to talk about those things. So the way I want to coach you to think about it is if your senior leadership team can’t have hard conversations in real time, it’s probably too big or better said, they’re probably members of that senior leadership team that don’t belong.

  Third thing that happens when you’ve got too many people in the room and or the wrong people in the room, is that strategic conversations become very [00:09:00] tactical in the interest of making sure that all teams are represented. Sometimes there’s members of that senior leadership team that don’t have the ability to think strategically.

  I did a kickoff meeting. With a senior leadership team of one of my clients, and after the morning of the first day, and it was a two day session. After the morning of the first day, I had to get together with the owner and the CEO and. Figure out how we were gonna spend the next day and a half, because there were members in the room that just slowed down.

  Every strategic conversation, in fact, didn’t slow it down. they, it screeched to a halt as every strategic conversation became a tactical conversation about why they couldn’t do it or what happened yesterday. So. If the wrong [00:10:00] people are in the room, we’re gonna slow conversation. We’re gonna avoid hard conversations.

  We’re not gonna be able to have strategic conversations, and the bottom line is we’re gonna make the wrong decisions or may not make decisions at all. So. We’ve talked about problems with too many people in the room. 

  let’s talk about some of the problems if key people are missing from the room. And I see this less often, but I do see this if the team is too small and or there’s key people missing from the room, well, bad decisions may get made.

  If whoever is in charge of sales is not in the room. You may make decisions that impact sales that don’t make any sense, that can’t really be executed on, so the wrong decisions might get made. There may be lack of [00:11:00] ownership for decisions. Now, you’ve gotta be careful here because you can’t have too many people in the room.

  You can’t think, well, everybody’s gotta be represented, so I need them in the room. But if you have too few people in the room or not enough people in the room, you don’t get ownership for those decisions. You don’t get ownership for the execution of those decisions. So when we think about, and kind of summarize this to who should be in the room.

  Number one, the people in the room should allow brutal honesty about anything related to the business. Whether it’s a key strategy, whether it’s visibility, [00:12:00] transparency around the numbers, whether it’s problems going on in the business, we need brutal honesty about anything related to the business. If there’s anybody on your leadership team that holds you back from that brutal honesty, they do not belong on the leadership team.

  Again, who should be in the room? People should be in the room. If they are an important part of enterprise level decision making, they may not be the people who actually are responsible for all the actions coming out of those decisions. And in fact, in companies of any significant size, they won’t be, but they need to be the people that own the actions that can come back to that leadership team table and be held accountable.

  For the actions of themselves and their teams. 

  Now, This could be a struggle. So one of the solutions that I’ve seen that [00:13:00] it could be super helpful is kind of a two team model, two leadership team model. And while one size, you know, is not gonna fit all one. Powerful structure that I’ve seen is a senior leadership team and an extended leadership team.

  So the senior leadership tebel, blah, senior leadership Tebel. Did I just say that the senior leadership team should be small rather than large decision focused enterprise level.

  And then the extended leadership team may be broader. It may be some high potential members, you know, one level down from an organization or maybe everybody one level down from an organization. It’s a broader [00:14:00] audience and a broader membership, and it’s focused less on enterprise level decisions. And more on alignment and execution.

  So I’ll give you an example from one of my clients that I worked with where we would have two day quarterly leadership team meetings. And for the first day and a half, we were focused on the difficult decisions, brutal honesty, strategic conversations, assessing talent. Within the organization, including talent from the extended leadership team, that was the senior leadership team.

  And then for the afternoon of the second day, we brought in the extended leadership team. The senior leadership team [00:15:00] then presented and discussed their findings, their key findings over the first day and a half. What key decisions did they make? What priorities did they decide upon? And by the way, there were certain discussions that happened in the first day and a half that were not appropriate for the extended leadership team.

  The job of that. Afternoon of the second day was to get input from that extended leadership team because they certainly had important input to get ownership and buy-in and make sure they, the extended leadership team knew what they needed to know, owned what they needed to own, bought into what they needed to buy into, because they were the ones really leading a lot.

  Of the action and the execution around those decisions and those plans. So [00:16:00] having both a senior leadership team and an extended leadership team relieves the pressure to overload that senior leadership team, but at the same time, it builds bank strength. Sometimes the next senior leaders, very often, the next senior leaders come from.

  High potential, high performing extended leadership team members. It increases transparency where you are sharing more information with that senior leadership team and you are engaging, especially engaging the high potential team members. So The key message from that idea of the senior leadership team and the extended leadership team is that.

  Inclusion doesn’t require a permanent seat on that senior leadership team table. If you find that decisions are slow, [00:17:00] if you find conversations are not had in an honest way, if you find conversations,trend towards the tactical versus the strategic, you might have the wrong people in the room. S

  o, in closing, my challenge to you is to look at your senior leadership team and ask three questions.

  Number one, what enterprise decisions does this team own? Number two, who must be in the room for those decisions to be made, to be strong decisions and to be owned? And then the last question, which may be a tough one, is who is on your senior leadership team, you know, out of habit rather than out of necessity?

  Design your leadership team intentionally because the leadership team structure, [00:18:00] shapes, speed, trust, and execution across the entire organization. Hope that all helps you. Hope it gives you something to think about. You know, I always say if you want a great company, you need a great leadership team. I hope I help you get there, or at least closer to there today.

  Talk soon.