A leadership team can contain capable people and still struggle to make a decision together. Each person protects a function, the difficult conversation happens afterwards, and the founder ends up settling the same issue again.
Before assuming you need different people, look at how the team works.
Look at the behaviour in the room
Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team describes a progression from an absence of trust through fear of conflict, weak commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to collective results. It gives leaders a language for discussing patterns they may recognise.
The useful question is specific: when did we last disagree openly about an important decision, and what happened afterwards? A general statement that “we trust each other” is less revealing than the team’s behaviour when someone admits a mistake or challenges a plan.
Look at what each person brings
Lencioni’s Ideal Team Player model adds three qualities: humility, hunger and people smarts. Here, “smart” concerns awareness of others, rather than technical intelligence. Used thoughtfully, the model can support development conversations about how people contribute to a team.
A capable functional leader may still find it difficult to put the company’s priorities ahead of their department’s. That is worth discussing in concrete terms. Labels are less useful than examples of what the role requires.
Start with one unresolved decision
Choose a recent decision that did not hold. Ask each leader what they understood had been agreed, where they disagreed and what they did next. Listen for the gaps between the meeting and the behaviour that followed.
Then agree one change for the next decision. It could be surfacing disagreement before closing the discussion, or making the owner and deadline explicit. Observe whether it helps.
Frameworks: Patrick Lencioni and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team; The Table Group’s Ideal Team Player resources.