From a Collection of Leaders to an Enterprise Leadership Team

The Situation

A newly-appointed president inherited a newly-formed leadership team composed of two distinct groups. The first group included long-tenured leaders with deep organizational history. The second group consisted of executives hired from outside the organization to accelerate change. On the surface, the team appeared to function well. Relationships were positive. Meetings were cordial. Conflict was minimal. However, beneath that polish, the team was not operating as a true enterprise leadership team.

The Challenge

Leaders remained primarily oriented to their individual functions. Business goals were discussed, but not jointly owned. Most disagreements, tradeoffs, and decisions were escalated to the president rather than worked through collaboratively within the team. As a result, progress slowed, accountability diffused, and the president became the primary mediator of issues the team should have been solving together. Recognizing that getting along was not the same as leading together, the president asked LDW to partner with him and the L1 team over time, not for a one-time intervention, but for sustained leadership team coaching.

The LDW Solution

Having previously assessed the president and several leaders on the team, LDW joined the organization as a long-term advisor, working alongside the President, the HR leader, and the L1 team over a 12-month period. The work focused on three core areas. First, building trust and interdependence by helping leaders move beyond functional loyalty toward shared enterprise accountability. Second, making the unspoken discussable by surfacing tensions, assumptions, and unresolved issues that were quietly constraining team performance. Third, providing targeted feedback and coaching for the president to help him understand his impact on the team, strengthen his influence, and intentionally shape team norms, decision dynamics, and collective ownership. Rather than using an off-the-shelf approach to team effectiveness, LDW tailored the work to the business context, the personalities around the table, and the specific leadership challenges facing the organization.

What Changed

Over time, the team’s behavior and effectiveness shifted in meaningful ways. Leaders began addressing challenges directly with one another instead of escalating them upward. Meetings evolved from polite updates to real dialogue and shared problem solving. Team members increasingly leaned in to support one another, taking collective responsibility for enterprise outcomes rather than deferring to the president to resolve tension or make difficult decisions. What had once been a collection of functional leaders became an enterprise leadership team operating with shared ownership of the business.

Impact

• Leadership team effectiveness improved, as reflected in team assessment data showing stronger trust, clearer accountability, and more productive dialogue
• Decision quality and speed increased as fewer issues were escalated to the president, and more were resolved collaboratively within the team
• Escalations declined significantly, freeing the president to focus on strategy rather than serving as the clearinghouse for unresolved conflict
• Observable leadership behaviors shifted, including greater candor, more direct peer to peer challenge, and increased willingness to share resources across functions
• Followership of the president increased significantly, with team members demonstrating greater alignment, commitment, and confidence in his leadership
• Enterprise ownership increased, with leaders consistently prioritizing shared business goals over functional optimization

These changes showed up not only in assessment data, but in day-to-day operations, including how meetings were run, how decisions were made, and how leaders supported one another under pressure.

Client Voice

“LDW stayed in the work with us. The result was a leadership team that challenges each other, owns outcomes together, and leads as an enterprise rather than in silos.”
— President, $4B global molecular diagnostics organization