In my work with executive leadership teams over the years, I’ve realized that the best teams are not a picture of perfect harmony, but of healthy conflict—open discourse, debate, disagreement, and yes, saying it as it is. None of it is for show. It’s the only way the work holds up under real pressure.
That’s what makes Gallup’s latest research so revealing. Only 18 percent of employees strongly agree they trust their organization’s leadership. Fewer than one in five say they feel enthusiastic about the future of their company. When leaders trade honesty for appearance, trust erodes—and performance follows.
In my recent conversation with Patrick Lencioni—author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, The Motive, and The Ideal Team Player—we explored why leadership has shifted from cool to noble, from reward to responsibility. This time, we turned inward: what happens inside executive teams when that responsibility fades.
Lencioni didn’t hesitate. “The absence of vulnerability,” he said. “That’s where it starts. Everything else—the lack of conflict, the false harmony, the slow decisions—flows from that.”
Two decades after The Five Dysfunctions was published, the framework still works because human nature hasn’t evolved.
The Trust Deficit at the Top
Nowhere is the absence of trust more visible than in executive teams. They hold the highest stakes yet avoid the hardest truths. The higher the level, the thicker the armor.
I’ve seen this armor take predictable forms: the CFO who speaks only in financial language to avoid emotional exposure. The COO who buries conflict in process redesigns. The Chief Strategy Officer who treats every disagreement as a question of data, not judgment. Each defense mechanism is professional, even sophisticated—and each one slowly suffocates the team’s ability to function.
I’ve worked with leadership teams that looked perfectly aligned—polished slides, shared talking points, mutual respect in public. But the real conversations happened later, in side meetings and hallway whispers. Decisions stalled, progress parlayed, and every discussion circled back to issues no one would name aloud.
Another team, by contrast, talked endlessly. Everyone had a voice, every idea was welcomed, and meetings ran long. It looked democratic, even healthy, until you realized nothing moved forward. They had dialogue but no direction. What changed for that group wasn’t another off-site—it was a set of clear, behavioral guiding principles. But those couldn’t emerge until they faced the truth of their own avoidance. The guiding principles themselves were simple—five behavioral commitments, nothing aspirational. ‘We challenge decisions before they’re made, not after.’ ‘We name tensions in the room, not in the parking lot.’ What mattered wasn’t the language. It was that they’d finally admitted they needed rules for something that should have been natural.
Lencioni has written about this precise moment of leadership truth: “The leader of a healthy organization must be vulnerable enough to admit mistakes, ask for help, and accept feedback.”
He put it even more bluntly: “If the CEO is motivated by comfort, power, or ego, you’re done. The organization can’t get healthy from there.”
As he often reminds leaders, teams don’t drift toward dysfunction—they protect it.
The Myth of Perfect Alignment
The idea that executive teams should think alike is comforting but unrealistic. Direction needs coherence, but total agreement usually means someone stopped speaking up.
Lencioni has said that real clarity can’t be manufactured through slogans or slide decks. “Alignment and clarity,” he wrote, “cannot be achieved in one fell swoop with a series of generic buzzwords and aspirational phrases crammed together.”
The strongest teams I’ve seen operate through visible, respected tension. Finance pushes for discipline. Strategy pushes for expansion. Risk pushes for protection. Culture pushes for capacity. Together they form an internal ecosystem of checks and balances.
Call it necessary misalignment or structured divergence—it’s what keeps a company honest. The work isn’t to erase difference but to make it safe.
“If the leadership team isn’t a team,” Lencioni said, “the organization can’t be one.
Theranos gets remembered for the science. The deeper story is how the executive team worked. They moved in tight formation around the founder’s vision, and inside that formation disagreement became risky. Meetings turned into staged confirmations. Doubt carried consequences. By Lencioni’s lens, the full stack of dysfunction was there: no trust, no conflict, no real accountability. The failure people talk about in the lab was already underway in the boardroom—long before the headlines—when leaders stopped telling the truth to one another.
Executive behavior multiplies downward. When the top team loses coherence, the entire system learns to mimic its caution.
Lencioni has often written that when trust is strong, conflict transforms. “When there is trust,” he explained, “conflict becomes nothing but the pursuit of truth.”
And the reward for that truth, he reminds us, is organizational health. “The single greatest advantage any company can achieve,” Lencioni wrote, “is organizational health.”
Those two ideas—truth and health—connect directly with Gallup’s research. They’re not soft metrics; they’re what make trust and accountability visible. Lencioni’s model continues to offer a reset button: trust built on vulnerability, conflict without hostility, commitment through voice, accountability through care, and results anchored in collective good.
Experiments for Executive Teams
Most executive teams don’t need more frameworks. They need interruptions—moments that jolt them out of performance and back into honesty. These experiments come from my work with leadership teams that finally broke through their own politeness. Each one is practical, perhaps a little awkward, and echoes what Lencioni has urged for years: make conflict productive, not personal.
1. Replace the Annual Off-site with a Vulnerability Audit
Skip the goal-setting decks. Ask one question instead: What are we pretending not to see? Gather responses anonymously, then talk about them together. The air gets thick fast—but so does trust. In Lencioni’s view, the absence of vulnerability is where every dysfunction begins. Truth-telling, not team-building, is the real starting point.
2. Conduct a No-Slide Meeting
Once a quarter, meet with no decks, charts, or slides. Just a whiteboard and conversation. When presentation armor drops, status weakens and clarity strengthens. What’s left is dialogue, not performance. Lencioni often reminds leaders that alignment without real conversation is choreography, not commitment.
3. Hold a Conflict Rehearsal
Assign two executives to argue a live issue from opposite sides. Everyone else observes—not to decide who’s right, but to watch how disagreement happens. It’s an instant diagnostic for a team’s tolerance for tension. Lencioni calls this “productive discomfort.”
4. Practice the 10-Minute Autopsy (and the Pre-Mortem)
After a major decision, take ten minutes to ask: What did we miss? What signals felt unsafe to name?
Then go one step earlier. In my conversation with Gary Klein, the decision scientist who pioneered the pre-mortem, he said great teams imagine failure before it happens. They ask, “It’s a year later and this went wrong—why?” The question changes the tone. It makes reflection routine instead of rescue.
Teams that normalize both—the short, honest autopsy and the forward-looking pre-mortem—turn reflection into rhythm. Lencioni’s take aligns: accountability without reflection turns into performance management, not growth.
5. Rotate the Chair
Once a month, let someone other than the CEO lead the meeting. Not to test facilitation, but to shift power. When the top seat moves, so do voices. So does listening. Lencioni has said healthy teams “flatten power to strengthen ownership.” That simple rotation changes what courage sounds like.
6. Create a Red Team for the Next Big Decision
Before you green-light the next initiative, assign two executives to test it—hard. Their job isn’t to block; it’s to challenge. Disagreement handled in daylight prevents dysfunction in the dark. Lencioni reminds us that conflict, when built on trust, is a form of care.
None of these experiments work if the CEO isn’t willing to go first. In every team I’ve seen break through, the shift began when the most senior leader admitted uncertainty, named a mistake, or asked for help. Lencioni has been unequivocal about this: “The leader must be the first one to be vulnerable,” he told me. “If the CEO won’t go there, no one else will.” Vulnerability doesn’t cascade up—it only cascades down.
Alignment looks clean in strategy documents. But in rooms, it often masks the things people aren’t ready to say out loud.
Lencioni said it best: “If the leadership team isn’t a team, the organization can’t be one.” And as Gary Klein reminded me, discernment—the ability to see around corners—only exists when people are brave enough to imagine what could go wrong.
Teams that make it through disruption rarely look calm. They argue, surface the mess, and let tension do its job. Lencioni concluded: “Great leadership teams don’t hold back with one another. They are unafraid to air their dirty laundry. They admit their mistakes, their weaknesses, and their concerns without fear of reprisal.”
That kind of honesty never feels comfortable. It clears the fog. It gives leaders a real sense of the ground they’re standing on. Most executive teams don’t need more alignment sessions or new language. They need a place where the truth can survive the meeting. When that happens, everything else—trust, accountability, direction—has a chance to breathe again.