The hard thing about a leadership team that isn't working well is that it rarely announces itself. There's no memo, no moment where someone stands up and says the team has stopped functioning at the level the organization needs. It shows up in subtler ways that are easy to explain away individually and impossible to ignore once you see the pattern.
Research from the University of Zurich, drawn from interviews with more than 100 CEOs and senior executives, found that dysfunctional leadership teams are surprisingly common, and that many CEOs weren't aware their teams were struggling until researchers spoke to the executives who reported to them. The CEO's view and the team's experience were often entirely different pictures of the same room.
That gap in perception is itself one of the most reliable signs that something is wrong. But it's not the only one.
Decisions get made but don't get implemented
A leadership team that produces decisions that quietly dissolve is a team that has an alignment problem underneath what looks like a process problem. The meeting ends. Commitments are made. And then, over the following weeks, the commitments get revised, reinterpreted, or simply not executed, without anyone naming what happened.
This pattern almost always means that something real wasn't said in the meeting. People agreed to something they didn't actually agree to, because the cost of disagreeing felt too high in the room. The decision leaves the conference table but doesn't survive contact with the actual beliefs of the people who are supposed to carry it out.
The same issues keep coming back
Research by Joseph Grenny found that the health of a team can be measured by how quickly problems get solved. When the same topic appears on the agenda meeting after meeting, getting discussed and tabled and revisited without resolution, the team is not solving problems. It's processing them, which is a different and far more expensive activity.
The issues that recycle usually have a hard truth underneath them that nobody is willing to say out loud. The real constraint isn't the complexity of the problem. It's that naming the constraint honestly would require someone to say something uncomfortable about a person, a decision, or a direction. So the team orbits it indefinitely instead. This is one of the clearest signs that your team has a candor problem.
Leaders are solving problems that should stay below them
When the CEO and their direct reports are regularly pulled into operational decisions that should be made by the layer beneath them, that's a signal that something is wrong with how leadership is distributed across the organization. Either the executives aren't empowering their own teams, or they're not trusted by the CEO to make calls without sign-off, or both.
The clearest sign of this is a CEO calendar full of decisions that three people in the organization could make just as well. When everything requires the room, the room becomes the bottleneck, and the organization moves at the speed of the leadership team's availability rather than the speed the market requires. If this sounds familiar, the founder bottleneck piece covers exactly this pattern.
People are performing below their known capability
One of the most telling signals of a struggling leadership team isn't visible in outputs or metrics. It's visible in energy. The executive who used to push back in meetings and has gone quiet. The leader who used to bring ideas and now brings only updates. The person who's doing their job technically but has stopped doing the part of their job that required them to care.
Research from the University of Zurich found that in dysfunctional leadership teams, one of the first things that disappears is constructive challenge. Teams stop pushing on each other's thinking. Everyone starts nodding at everyone else's ideas. The surface looks harmonious and the underneath is either checked out or quietly adversarial, but never actually engaged.
The CEO is the only one who holds anyone accountable
When peer accountability disappears from a leadership team, the CEO becomes the sole enforcement mechanism for the entire organization. Every missed commitment, every underperformance, every dropped ball eventually makes its way to the person at the top. That's exhausting and it doesn't scale, but more importantly it's a signal: the team hasn't built the trust and the norms to hold itself responsible without the boss in the room.
Gallup found that accountability is the lowest-rated leadership competency across seven they measured, both in leaders' self-assessment and in the view of the managers who report to them. It's not that people don't want accountability. It's that they've never built the conditions that make peer accountability feel safe to practice.
What to do with this list
A leadership team can have one of these signs and be fundamentally healthy, going through a hard stretch, adjusting to new conditions, navigating something that will resolve. Two or three of these together, sustained over time, is a different situation. It's a team that has developed patterns of avoidance and workaround that are now load-bearing parts of how the organization operates.
The most important thing isn't the diagnosis. It's whether the team can have an honest conversation about what's actually happening. That conversation, if it can happen, is the beginning of everything else. If it can't happen, if the team can't sit in a room and name what isn't working, then the symptoms will keep returning until the conditions change.