Hi Reader,
At this point, the data is hard to ignore. Research from organizations like the Center for Creative Leadership and Harvard Business Review continues to point to the same conclusion: organizations with high-performing executive teams significantly outperform those without them. They see stronger execution, healthier cultures, and better long-term results.
And yet, only a small percentage of executive teams are actually operating at that level.
One reason is surprisingly simple: many executive teams are not composed in a way that allows them to function optimally. Put more plainly, they are just too large.
Over time, executive teams often grow as organizations add leaders, functions, and complexity. The intention is usually from positive intentions such as inclusion and improving communication.
But eventually, the group becomes too large to operate with the clarity, efficiency and shared accountability that high-performing teams require. Executive team composition is not just an organizational chart decision. It is a systems design decision that shapes how leadership happens across the organization.
The Power of a Smaller Executive Team
There’s a reason executive team size matters so much - it fundamentally changes how the team operates.
Smaller executive teams create the conditions for deeper connection, stronger dialogue, and clearer accountability. People are much more likely to know each other with greater depth. Conversations become more honest. Decisions happen in the room instead of outside of it. The team can engage in candid dialogue, where they wrestle through tradeoffs together, and move forward with greater clarity and alignment.
As executive teams grow larger, these advantages slowly erode. Meetings drift toward updates and information sharing rather than collective leadership and decision-making. The very things that make executive teams effective, shared ownership, trust, clarity, and accountability, become harder to sustain.
Having worked with hundreds of executive teams, we've found that the ideal executive team size for most organizations is four to seven people.
Shared Work Defines a Team
Executive teams see their impact increase when the individuals in the room are collectively responsible for stewarding the organization’s strategy, culture, and results together. In other words, their most important work is deeply shared.
This is where many organizations unintentionally lose effectiveness.
As executive teams grow larger, it becomes more challenging to maintain focus on an essential set of priorities. The group may still gather together, but not everyone is operating with the same degree of interdependence or enterprise-level accountability. Over time, the meeting can begin to function more like a coordination forum than a true executive team that's moving big strategic goals forward.
High performing executive teams are defined by shared responsibility and shared accountability for the most meaningful outcomes.
Clarifying Who Should be on the Team
When organizations begin rethinking executive team size, the wrong question often appears first: Who should be included? A better question is this: What are the smallest number of roles needed to steward our strategy, culture, and financial health at the highest level?
One of the clearest ways to evaluate this is to look at the connection between a role and the organization’s strategic priorities and most critical KPIs. High-performing executive teams require significant levels of interdependence and shared accountability.
Here is a set of criteria to help clarify who should be on the team:
- Enterprise-Level Ownership: Do they carry responsibility for outcomes that impact the organization as a whole, not just a single department or function?
- Strategic Influence: Are they directly responsible for shaping and advancing the organization’s most important priorities and long-term direction?
- Collective Accountability: Are they expected to share responsibility for enterprise-wide results, even when those outcomes extend beyond their specific area?
- Enterprise Mindset: Can they consistently think and act in the best interest of the organization as a whole, not just advocate for their own function?
- Interdependence: Does their role require ongoing collaboration, coordination, and problem-solving with others on the executive team?
- Decision Role: Do they play a meaningful role in shaping and making decisions that affect the broader organization?
No leader will embody all of these perfectly, but collectively these criteria help clarify whether a role truly requires enterprise-level executive team involvement.
And What About the Leaders Not in the Room?
One of the reasons executive teams become too large is because leaders understandably want key people in the room hearing the same information at the same time.
But inclusion and effective executive team design are not always the same thing. Sometimes the healthiest structure is not the one that includes the most people in the room. It is the one that creates the clearest ownership, strongest alignment, and highest level of shared accountability.
That does not diminish the importance of leaders outside the executive team. In fact, healthy organizations often require multiple leadership teams operating throughout the organization, each with different levels of shared work and accountability.
But this is important: those teams are much more difficult to build if the executive team itself is not healthy and aligned first. The executive team sets the tone and operating norms that ripple throughout the organization. How that team communicates, handles conflict, makes decisions, and collaborates together becomes a model others tend to follow.
That’s why executive team health matters so much. It is not just about improving one team. It is about strengthening the leadership system of the organization as a whole.
Why We Avoid Making the Shift
Most leaders feel this tension before they act on it. They recognize that the executive team may be too large or not quite the right mix, but they hesitate to make a change. The hesitation is rarely about logic. It’s usually about perceived relational harm.
Leaders worry about how the shift will be received, whose feelings may be hurt, or what message the change might send throughout the organization. So instead of right-sizing the executive team, near-term discomfort wins out.
The challenge is that the cost does not disappear. It simply shows up elsewhere: slower decisions, reduced clarity, weaker alignment, and less ownership across the organization. Getting to a smaller, empowered executive team is not always easy. But the discomfort involved is often temporary, while the long-term gains can be substantial.
Final Thought - Communicating the Shift
When changes to the executive team are needed, how leaders communicate those changes matters as much as the decision itself. In fact, if people seem frustrated, it's more likely they don’t understand the change rather than they don’t agree with the change.
The conversation should focus less on who is “in” or “out” and more on creating the structure needed for the organization to operate effectively moving forward. Leaders can anchor the message in the future vision of the organization and the level of clarity, ownership, and coordination required to achieve it.
Too many organizational restructures happen without enough context or explanation. When that happens, trust erodes and people begin filling in the gaps themselves. Clear communication helps people understand that the goal is not exclusion. Take just as much time creating your communication message as you do deciding on the executive team composition.
-Shaun & Joe
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Drawing from decades of experience stepping into complex, often broken organizations, Phyllis shares practical insights on breaking down silos, building trust, addressing dysfunction early, and creating shared ownership at the leadership level.
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