The Opportunity Cost of Letting it Slide

When every decision routes back to one person, the rest of the room goes quiet.

“My CEOs will never buy off on this team coaching stuff,” she said across the table, more a statement of fact than a belief arrived at years ago.

A managing partner at a European mid cap private equity fund, she buys founder led businesses and scales them. She can see the merits of a team coaching intervention in the abstract, but not how to sell it to a portfolio company CEO.

“Go on,” I said.

“We back founder CEOs and they are one of a kind. They lead from the front to build things, which is why we buy their companies. They don’t want their leadership team second guessing them, and frankly nor do I.”

Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I understand the instinct. The driven founder who saw an opportunity before everyone else and backed themselves makes a compelling story. But it describes how a company got started, not how it sustainably scales. James Meindl called our habit of crediting a company’s fortunes to the person at the top the romance of leadership. We fix on the leader because the leader is the easiest thing in the room to see and hear.

So, when a founder keeps leading from the front despite having a strong leadership team in place, the cost does not show up on the CEO’s account. It shows up in the team around him who have stopped offering their best thinking.

I described a typical PE backed company scenario. The CEO, I will call him Daniel, founded and built it. Highly commercial, charismatic and decisive; evidently the main reason the fund invested.

His Senior Leadership Team also looked strong on paper. But every decision seemed to route back to Daniel, so over time they gave up on challenging him. His COO had spotted a potential supply chain issue and raised it twice, then let it drop as it fell on deaf ears. By the time it reached the board it had cost a full quarter’s growth. Daniel had silenced no one. He hadn’t needed to. The COO had quietly accepted that his boss’s judgement was the only one that mattered.

Then I let a couple of questions hang in the air:

•          What does it cost when seasoned executives stop bringing their best thinking?

•          What risks are left undiscovered because the culture of constructive challenge and candour has disappeared?

I detected a wry smile as she processed these provocations. Then silence.

Then I asked another:

•          What would it take for this team to work as one?

Neither party is the problem here. The CEO over functions, the SLT under functions, and in that reciprocity each keeps the other in place and it drags on performance. This isn’t about managing him or activating them. It’s a pattern that shifts only when you work the whole system to rebalance the agency within it.

An effective team coaching intervention would not put Daniel in the dock, nor ask his team to suddenly find their voice or raise their volume. It surfaces the bargain they have all struck without anyone naming it, along with the perception gaps between the CEO and his colleagues. That’s the work for the team to lean into.

It won’t fix itself, and it won’t be solved in a one off workshop. It takes time and a tolerance for discomfort. But the return shows up fast, the moment a team starts saying out loud what it has been swallowing.

She still wasn’t sold. “A CEO like Daniel won’t go near this without proof.”

Fair, I said. So don’t sell him anything yet. Just run a simple diagnostic. Next time you meet one of your CEOs, ask when a member of his team last changed his mind. Then ask the team the same question. The distance between those two answers is your evidence. It costs you nothing to run.

The only question is whether you would rather find it now or read it later in the exit multiple?

Read next: The Hedgehog and the Rhino on the silent contract inside teams that will not surface conflict.