By Manfred Kets de Vries
In many organisations, the top executive team is described in heroic language. It is said to be the “strategic brain,” the “guiding coalition,” the “engine room,” the “place where the future is made.” These descriptions are comforting. They suggest that somewhere above the noise and confusion of organisational life, a group of mature adults sits around a polished table, calmly considering facts, debating alternatives, and making wise decisions in the common interest.
The reality is often less noble and considerably more theatrical. The executive suite may resemble less a strategic brain than a family dinner at which no one has forgotten what troubled them and no one is prepared to say directly what they would like to say. There are old wounds, sibling rivalries, territorial claims, whispered alliances, ceremonial smiles, and the occasional “murder” committed politely through a spreadsheet. In public, however, everyone speaks of alignment. In private, they sharpen their knives. The irony of it all is that the organisation depends on these people for its direction. And to add insult to injury is that they so often behave as if they had been cast in a farcical play without having read the script.
When a top executive team is not aligned, the damage travels downward with surprising speed. Non-alignment has many sources. They can be rivalries nursed over years, competing visions of where the organisation should go, or the familiar tension that erupts when high-potential newcomers are parachuted in to carry the company to its next phase. The unspoken question that then hangs in the air is whether the old guard is genuinely willing to make room. Often, however, they are not. Unable or unwilling to confront the threat directly, they find subtler instruments: the meeting to which the newcomer is not invited, the information that arrives too late to be useful, the quiet withdrawal of support that leaves a promising initiative stranded. And the new arrivals sense it immediately, even when they cannot name it. The result is not competition, which can be productive, but a low-grade organisational war conducted through omission and ambiguity. The consequence is paralysis dressed up as activity: everyone is in motion, but no one is going anywhere in particular.
Moreover, confusion at the top becomes real fragmentation below. One executive tells her people that growth is the priority; another insists that cost control is sacred; a third declares that innovation must be accelerated but quietly blocks the investment required to make it possible. The messages do not merely differ, they may contradict. And organisations, like individuals, cannot sustain contradiction indefinitely without finding ways to manage it. Middle managers learn to read lips rather than execute strategy. They become skilled at triangulation: Who said what to whom? Which directive carries the weight of genuine conviction, and which is merely political theatre? They hedge, they delay, they wait for the fog to lift. And mostly it does not.
Lower-level employees, denied access to the boardroom but acutely sensitive to its weather, become expert decoders of organisational signals. Who is really powerful? Which initiative has the CEO’s actual blessing, as opposed to the blessing he offers for the record? Which project is already dead but still being paraded around like a royal corpse dressed in fresh clothes, accompanied by a retinue too embarrassed to announce the funeral? They know. Employees always know. What they cannot do, in the absence of clarity from above, is to act. Energy that might have gone into execution goes instead into interpretation. The organisation becomes, in effect, a large apparatus for reading tea leaves: it appears resourceful, attentive, but entirely misdirected.
People sense when the senior team is divided; they may not know the details, but they smell the smoke. In response, they protect themselves through delaying decisions, seeking cover, forming camps, and avoiding accountability. Basically, they wait to see which senior executive is going to prevail. The organisation becomes like a court entourage, its energy redirected from customers and competitors toward internal weather forecasting.
The pathology of the summit
Executive teams are, by design, collections of alpha personalities. Most likely, each member has risen by being very good at something. It could be finance, operations, marketing, technology, IT, or whatever. Most likely, by the time they reach the C-suite, their identity is substantially fused with their domain. The CFO is not merely responsible for finance; he is Finance. The Chief People Officer does not merely oversee talent; she is the moral conscience of the organisation. The person in charge of marketing has a marketing symbol stamped on her forehead. The result is less a team than a confederation of rival principalities, each with its own flag, its own budget, and its own interpretation of what the company most needs.
What psychoanalysts would recognise here is the return of the defensive operation known as splitting: the primitive mechanism by which a complex whole is divided into fiefdoms of good and bad, mine and yours, us and them. Around this division gathers an array of well-camouflaged resistances: loss of control, fear of the unknown, concern about competence, loss of status, anxiety about job security, or even the worry that change will simply mean more work.
Turf fights express these manoeuvres with particular clarity. On the surface, they appear to be about resources, reporting lines, or digital territory. At a deeper level, they concern identity, status, recognition, and fear. The executive who says, “This function belongs under my area,” may also be saying, “Do not make me smaller.” To lose territory is to lose face; to share authority is, in the organisational imagination, to suffer a kind of diminishment. Thus a debate over customer data or supply chain ownership can become a disguised struggle over potency, legitimacy, and survival.
The top team often becomes a container for primitive depressive and paranoid anxieties that cannot easily be expressed. Executives are not expected to say, “I am afraid of becoming irrelevant,” or “I do not trust my colleague,” or “I suspect that this transformation will expose my limitations.” Since these feelings cannot be said out loud directly, they return in displaced forms: procedural objections, excessive requests for data, sudden concerns about governance, noble speeches about “protecting the enterprise,” or the sudden need for an exceptional taskforce to look into obscure matters. Sometimes these concerns are legitimate. Sometimes they are a camouflage worn by anxiety.
When these concerns become prevalent in a top executive team, passive-aggressive behaviour can be particularly corrosive because it preserves the appearance of civility while destroying the substance of collaboration. Passive-aggressive executives do not openly oppose. Instead, they “forget” (if that is the right word) to follow up. They agree in the meeting and undermine afterward. They praise the initiative but assign their weakest people to it. Eventually, the team becomes trapped in a comedy of manners where the real message is always in the subtext. “A very interesting proposal” means “over my dead body.” “Let us reflect further” means “I will bury this in committee.” “I fully support the direction that is suggested” means “I have already called three board members to get their support for blocking this proposal.”
Decision paralysis is the natural child of this kind of organisational sabotage. When executives do not trust one another, decisions become dangerous. They are no longer simply choices, but political acts, symbolic victories, possible betrayals. People ask for more analysis not because analysis is needed but because analysis is safer than making a commitment. The organisation enters the swamp of perpetual pre-decision. Task forces multiply. Steering committees steer nothing. PowerPoint decks reproduce like rabbits. At the heart of this paralysis is often the inability to mourn, to really deal with the transformation that’s necessary; to accept that there is a need to “unlearn” certain behaviour patterns.
Going into a new direction requires sacrifice. It may imply one market rather than another, one structure rather than another. Something has to go. Some disappointments are inevitable. But many executive teams want to move on without loss. They wish to preserve every option, please every constituency, and offend no powerful person. This is the tragic fantasy: that the organisation can move forward while everyone keeps everything.
Furthermore, there is another even more dramatic, and more insidious mechanism by which misaligned teams manage their collective anxiety: scapegoating. Where passive aggression is covert and decision paralysis is inert, scapegoating is active. It is the team’s way of locating its failure in a single body, expelling that body, and resuming business as if the problem has been surgically removed. It is, in both its primitive and its organisational form, a ritual of false resolution.
When teams are under pressure, they often stop focusing on the real work and start organising themselves around blame. Instead of asking, “What is our part in this problem?” they look for a common enemy. And top executive teams are not an exception. A team may appear united, but its unity may be built around blaming one person, one department, or one region. That kind of unity feels reassuring for a while, but it prevents the team from facing its own conflicts and responsibilities.
The enemy is usually a peer: the CFO who “doesn’t get the vision,” the CHRO who “isn’t commercially minded,” the COO who “has not been paying attention to the corporate culture. The team’s grievances, which are often genuinely diffuse and structurally rooted, crystallise onto these figures. They become the explanation for everything that is not working. Their removal becomes the fantasy cure.
In psychological terms, in scapegoating unwanted feelings like fear, incompetence, envy, guilt, and aggression, are expelled from the group and lodged in people who are then induced, subtly or not, to carry them. Once this has happened, these scapegoats are no longer seen in their full human complexity. They become labeled of having a “negative attitude.” They become seen as “not being team players.” Or they become “the old culture.” The label simplifies reality and relieves the top team of self-examination. After all, nothing creates temporary unity like a common enemy.
What makes this kind of behavior particularly treacherous is that scapegoating at the executive level is rarely experienced as such. It may be viewed as performance management, as a way of assigning accountability: “making the hard call.” The board is briefed on the departure with a narrative of a person being a strategic misfit; the press release speaks of the executive “pursuing other opportunities,” or “wanting to spend more time with the family.” No one, possibly including the CEO, consciously acknowledges that the real function of the exit was to discharge collective anxiety rather than to address a genuine performance deficit. The tragedy of these scapegoats is that they often carry something real: a legitimate critique of the team’s dysfunction, a discomfort with the prevailing consensus, a willingness to name what others find undiscussable. These are not typically the issues that organisations like to deal with.
The dark comedy is what happens after. The scapegoat departs. There is a brief period of relief, even elation; the team experiences what seems like a holiday, freed temporarily from internal conflict by the shared pleasure of having located its problems elsewhere. And then, with a regularity that should by now surprise no one, the dysfunction reconstitutes itself. New scapegoats are identified. The cycle resumes. Sadly, organisations that have been through three or four “transformational leadership changes” in a relatively short period are often not engaged in transformation at all; they are engaged in a form of repetition compulsion. They are merely enacting the same psychic drama with a rotating cast.
A mature executive team, however, learns to treat scapegoating as a warning signal. Whenever blame becomes too neat, too emotionally satisfying, or too unanimously held, the team should pause. The more seductive the accusation, the more important the reflection: What are we avoiding by agreeing so quickly? What part of the truth has been assigned to the accused person? What would we have to face if the scapegoat was not available? And the CEO has a particular responsibility here. After all, the rot starts at the top. When the top team begins to speak as if one person or one function is the entire problem, the useful question is not “How do we get rid of the problem person?” but “What is this person representing on behalf of the system?”
The inner theatre of the C-suite
To understand why these dysfunctions persist with such tenacity, one must look not only at incentive structures or governance failures, although both matter, but at the psychological dynamics each executive brings to the table. The C-suite is charged with what might be called the “inner theatre” of its people: the internalised scripts, the unresolved attachment patterns, the constellation of needs and fears that each member of the top team has carried since long before they learned to read a balance sheet.
The executive who cannot delegate is not merely inefficient; she is, in some interior drama, re-enacting a world in which to hand something over was to lose it forever. The colleague who refuses to share information is reconstructing a world in which resources were scarce and generosity was exploitation. The CEO who avoids conflict at the top, who mistakes harmony for health, is often someone for whom the family dinner table was a minefield, and who has spent a career becoming extraordinarily skilled at surface management.
These patterns intensify at the top because the stakes are higher, the egos are larger, and the external feedback loops are weaker. Middle managers get corrected. CEOs get accommodated.The higher one rises, the more people tend to repeat their experience rather than improving it. What might have been a manageable neurotic tendency lower in the hierarchy becomes, at the summit, like organisational weather. It is pervasive, ambient, and affecting everyone below.
What can be done
The most honest thing one can say about interventions at this level is that they are difficult, partial, and often resisted. The very defenses that make top teams dysfunctional also make them resistant to the reflection that might change them. An executive who has succeeded for twenty years through force of will and narrowly focused execution is not likely to welcome a facilitator suggesting that his certainty might be a defence against anxiety. The armor that got him to the top is the last thing he intends to remove. And yet. Something can be done.
The first requirement is conceptual clarity about what a top executive team actually is or should be. A true top team accepts that it has shared work, shared accountability, shared risks, and shared obligations to reflect on how it operates. Its members are present not only to represent their functions, but also to act in the interest of the whole, a distinction that sounds obvious but is, in practice, routinely ignored. They should recognise that leadership is, above all, a team sport. To assess whether members of the “A” team possess complementary qualities and can operate in this way, multi-party feedback within a coaching setting may be a useful first step.
Executive team coaching, practiced with rigour and without the flattery that so often corrupts it, can create the conditions under which this shift becomes possible. It can surface what has gone undiscussed, confront what has been carefully avoided, and help a group of individually capable people discover that genuine teamwork produces something more than the sum of its parts. But this requires clarity about what such an undertaking actually is. It is not therapy. It is not a team-building exercise in the motivational-poster sense, meaning no ropes courses, no trust walks. It is a disciplined, sustained intervention in which the members of the team, helped by the received 360-degree feedback examine their own functioning: how decisions are actually made, which topics are systematically avoided, whose voices carry weight and whose voices are quietly discounted, and what collective anxieties drive the
team’s blind spots, including the scapegoating maneouvres that are periodically dressed up as performance management. A serious team intervention names the elephants in the room. It insists on hearing about the undiscussables.
The way to get there is also the creation of reflective space, protected time, carved out of the operational tempo, dedicated to something other than mere operational matters. The discussion needs to become a symbolic container: a setting safe enough that difficult truths can be spoken without triggering immediate defensive retaliation. This is harder to create than it sounds. In most organisations, the ordinary executive agenda is often too crowded and too contaminated by operational pressure to allow for anything of the kind. Authentic conversations rarely emerge between agenda item seven and agenda item eight, especially when item nine is “cost synergies.” To build a genuinely high-performing team, its members need protected time to examine not just the business but how they are conducting the business together, a distinction most executive calendars refuse to honour.
Reflective space, it should be said, does not mean therapeutic indulgence. It means disciplined attention to experience, to pattern, to what is actually happening in the room. It means creating conditions in which an executive can say: I experienced that decision as a breach of trust. Or: I notice we have avoided this subject for six months. Or: I agreed in the meeting and left with serious reservations, and I handled that badly. Also, given what I now know about you, given what the 360 feedback has shown, I now understand why you were behaving in this manner.
These are not soft conversations. Soft skills, as anyone who has tried to practice them under pressure knows, tend to be the hardest skills. It is considerably easier to announce a new capital investment than to say to a peer across the table: I do not believe you are acting in this organisation’s best interest. The modalities of intervention vary. It can be done through structured facilitated dialogue, peer coaching triads, shadow consulting in which an experienced practitioner attends working sessions and reflects back what they observe. What does not vary is the precondition. It requires time, honesty, and a CEO genuinely willing to be examined alongside everyone else. That last condition is, more often than not, the binding constraint.
The cultural complication
Here the prescriptive comfort of the above process must be qualified. What constitutes authentic discussion is not universal. It is encoded in culture, both national and organisational, and the mismatch between intervention design and cultural context is among the most reliable sources of failure in this work.
In high-context cultures like Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, much of the Arab world, and significant swaths of corporate life in Southern Europe, what looks like passive aggression to a Northern European or the American eye is often something more structural: an elaborate grammar of indirect communication in which disagreement is expressed through form rather than content. To push these teams toward “authentic directness” as might be practiced at a Dutch offsite is not liberation; it is the imposition of one culture’s pathology-management style onto another’s relational architecture.
Similarly, scapegoating takes culturally specific forms. In high power-distance cultures, the chosen scapegoat is typically selected from below the CEO level, sparing the senior hierarchy self-examination. In consensus-oriented cultures, the designation may be achieved with exquisite indirectness. There will be no confrontation, simply a withdrawal of energy until the targeted person concludes that departure is their own idea. In individualistic, high-performance cultures, scapegoating is more overt: the language of accountability provides perfect cover for the expulsion of organisational anxiety.
Corporate cultures create parallel constraints. A company that rewards heroic individualism will struggle to build collective leadership. A firm that punishes mistakes will not get candour. A founder-led organisation may confuse loyalty to the founder with loyalty to reality. Top team coaching must therefore be done in a culturally intelligent way. The task is not to impose one style of openness but to help the team develop a language for truth that can be tolerated in its specific cultural setting. The question is not “Why are these people not more direct?” but “How can difficult truth be spoken here without unnecessary humiliation?”
The CEO as architect, or obstacle
No discussion of top team alignment can avoid the central variable: the CEOs. Chief executives are not merely participants in the team’s dynamics; they are, to a degree that is frequently underestimated, their principal author. The team reflects a CEO’s tolerance for conflict, their capacity for genuine listening, their relationship to their own anxiety. Where CEOs are defended, the team will be defended. Where they are curious, the team has permission to be curious.
Some CEOs unconsciously encourage misalignment by creating rivalry. They split the team into favorites and outsiders, reward individual performance over collective leadership, or enjoy being the only person who sees the whole picture. Such CEOs may complain that their team is fragmented while secretly benefiting from the fragmentation. Divide and rule protects this type of CEO from being challenged by a genuinely united team, but it infantilises executives, who begin competing for parental approval rather than acting as co-custodians of the institution. Other CEOs collude with dysfunction by avoiding it. They suffer from decision paralysis. Thus, they hope that intelligent people will “work it out.” This is rather like hoping that a group of cats will organise a symphony if left alone with violins. Intelligence does not eliminate envy, fear, ambition, or resentment; it often makes these forces more sophisticated. The CEO who avoids naming destructive dynamics, who permits the team to discharge its anxiety through the ritual expulsion of a colleague rather than insisting on collective self-examination, has taught the team a lesson it will not easily forget, meaning that problems can be solved by finding someone to carry them.
What genuine alignment requires of the CEO is psychologically demanding: the capacity to hold complexity without resolving it prematurely; to let the team struggle with a problem rather than providing the answer; to model the vulnerability that authentic discussion requires; to distinguish between conflict that is productive friction and conflict that is dysfunctional repetition; and to insist on enterprise-first behaviour, rewarding executives not only for the performance of their own areas but for their contribution to the collective agenda. The CEO must also protect the team from false harmony. Lack of visible conflict may indicate fear or resignation, not necessarily maturity. The CEO who cannot say, “I may have contributed to this confusion,” will struggle to build a team that owns its part in collective dysfunction.
This is not primarily a matter of technique. It is a matter of character. CEOs who have never examined the ways in which their own anxieties shape the team they lead will redesign, re-organise, and re-incentivise their way through one misaligned team after another, puzzled each time by the familiar wreckage.
A comedy of manner that we cannot afford
There is something ironic about watching the most powerful people in an organisation, people who have, individually, demonstrated remarkable capability and resilience, unable to function together as a unit. The tragedy is in the consequences: strategic incoherence, cultural toxicity, talented people driven out by the ambient tension that misaligned top teams produce. The comedy is in the gap between the official story and the lived reality: the noble mission statement and the Tuesday morning meeting where nobody says what anyone actually thinks, where the scapegoat is being prepared and the knives are being sharpened, and everyone agrees that what the organisation most needs is better collaboration.
The corrective is not simple, and anyone who sells it as such is selling something else. It requires CEOs who have done enough inner work to understand that their team’s dysfunction begins, in significant measure, with their own. It requires the courage to resist the scapegoating impulse, to recognize that the colleague being collectively constructed as the problem is more likely a symptom of the system than its cause, and that removing him or her will produce not necessarily a resolution but a recasting. And to prevent such a thing from happening, it requires sustained investment in reflective practice, not as a one-time offsite but as an ongoing discipline. It requires cultural humility about what authentic dialogue means in different contexts. And it requires, above all, a tolerance for the discomfort that genuine alignment, as opposed to its performance, actually involves.
Alignment is not complete agreement. It is the hard-won capacity to disagree productively, to hold tension without fragmenting, to keep the organisational whole in view even when the parts are pulling apart. It pertains to the ability to manage this tension. But when a top team develops the courage to examine itself, to ask not only “What should we do?” but “How are we functioning together, and what are we collectively avoiding?”—it can become something more than an arena for disguised warfare. It can become a place where authority is shared, scapegoating is named and avoided, conflict is made useful, and decisions are taken with both realism and commitment. This may require executive coaching, reflective space, 360-degree feedback systems, cultural sensitivity, and CEOs willing to hold the mirror steady. And that mirror is not always flattering. But without it, the executive team may continue its tragicomic performance: smiling in alignment, fighting in silence, changing actors every few years, and wondering why the organisation does not move.