Do you have a leadership team or a team of leaders?
Do you have a leadership team or a team of leaders?
No-one warns you about the team of leaders trap.
It looks healthy. It’s built on trust and strong relationships. But it's brittle.
It’s what happens when as a leader you have brilliant one-to-one relationships with each person…but the relationships between them are strained or almost non-existent.
Everyone seems connected, but underneath, the team is quietly fragmenting.
The uncomfortable pattern I've seen
(and honestly once unwittingly created):
When a leader doesn’t actively build a team, the team stops collaborating with each other and starts calibrating around the leader.
Unseen at first. Each person is warm, open, honest…with you.
They tell you what’s hard.
They trust you with the truth.
They want your approval, clarity, connection.
But when they get in a room together?
The dynamic changes. You can feel it.
It's a tiny stiffness, everyone watching your response instead of each other, people shape their words to stay in your favour, protecting their bond with you rather than strengthening the bond between them.
It’s subtle, but palpable.
They’re trying so hard to please you, they forget they’re supposed to work with each other.
The truth?
If you're not intentionally building a leadership team, you probably don't have one.
If you're in a team where the leader accidentally reinforces the gap by being the hub everything runs through, it looks like trust. It can feel like alignment. But it’s really dependency - and that can fracture when the pressure hits.
Great leaders know the real leadership isn’t the connection you build with each individual.
It’s the connection you enable between them. You can’t just launch and leave.
Your steadiness creates safety, but their interdependence creates results.
A team will only challenge, support each other, and collaborate deeply when they’re not consumed by managing you.
So if you’ve ever sat in a meeting thinking:
'Why do they talk so openly to me but not to each other?'
You’re not imagining it.
It’s not that they don’t trust each other, they’re trying to navigate you.
The good news? Fixing it isn’t about being more charismatic, assertive or inspiring. It’s about being more intentional. You already have incredible executives who respect you, decisively running their own functions, driving results.
Your job is to nurture a collaborative leadership team:
⏸️ Step out of being the emotional epicentre
⏸️ Build connection between them
⏸️ Be present and self aware:
what's your ‘inside job’ that’s impacting?
⏸️ Create space for shared purpose and priorities
⏸️ Model the behaviour you expect
Then what?
Perhaps awkwardly at first, connection happens.
Not because the team is suddenly perfect, but you step away from being the gravitational pull that kept them apart.
In that space, you can be more you. They can be more them.
Leadership isn’t about being the centre, it's about creating the conditions where you no longer need to be.
Be the balance.
