When the Senior Leadership Team Stops Leading: How Misalignment Slows Growth
You can tell a lot about a business by watching its senior leadership team under pressure.
Sometimes, the boardroom looks like it should: sharp, focused, united around a common purpose.
Decisions get made.
People leave energised.
There’s clarity about what’s next, there’s joy in the room, and a lighter footfall as people walk out ready to deliver.
Other times? It feels far less like a boardroom, and far more like a playground.
Leaders compete for airtime. Conversations circle. Sides form. People sulk, dig in, or go quiet. Instead of moving the business forward, the most senior people in the company burn energy on each other.
This isn’t about a lack of talent, or capability – far from it.
It’s about pressure.
Leadership churn, high stakes, and constant uncertainty push even experienced teams into survival mode.
Misalignment that was tolerable in good times starts to leak money in tough ones - through slower decisions, blurred accountability, and heavier execution.
The market demands performance, investors push harder, and the CEO ends up caught in the squeeze.
For CEOs, that means everyone looks to them for answers and reassurance. They’re expected to split up disputes and carry investor pressure, often when they themselves are running on empty.
For HRDs, it’s a different kind of load: they see the cracks first, become the confessional for frustrations, and are cast as the “other parent” in the room — expected to calm tempers without the authority to change the rules.
Left unchecked, the impact is real.
Decisions drag, projects stall, reputations wobble. Meetings that should take an hour sprawl into two, only for the real conversations to happen in the car park afterwards. The same issues keep resurfacing because no one feels truly heard. Energy gets wasted on side conversations and politics, while clients and investors start to question why execution lags behind ambition.
In today’s climate, the risk isn’t so much people leaving - with recruitment freezes, many won’t. The risk is people staying but switching off. You get presenteeism at the top: senior leaders who look busy but are emotionally checked out.
And when that happens in the SLT, it cascades through the business fast.
So what can you do? Here are three simple things that help steady the ship when pressure rises:
Name the behaviour, not the person. Shifting focus from “who’s difficult” to “what’s happening in the dynamic” keeps conversations constructive.
Slow the meeting to speed the decision. Giving everyone space to be heard reduces the circling and cuts down on the after-the-meeting lobbying.
Check the pressure valve. Ask openly: where is stress showing up in our behaviour? Often, just naming it reduces the heat in the room.
These steps can ease the load, but they won’t solve the systemic issue: misalignment. The problem isn’t capability. It’s that without a shared operating system, even the best leaders slip into personality clashes under stress.
That’s why at Meraki People, we use the 5Voices Framework. It gives SLTs a neutral language and structure that shifts the dynamic from refereeing to alignment - reducing friction, restoring trust, and unlocking faster, healthier decisions.
And here’s the thing: when alignment is restored, it isn’t just performance that improves. The atmosphere lifts. Energy returns. There’s joy in the room again - the signal that people are working as leaders, not children.
If this feels familiar, I’ve built a free SLT capability checker — a quick ready-reckoner to show where your team is strong and where the risks lie. You can find it here:
Because businesses don’t stall when the market gets tough. They stall when their leaders stop leading.
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Meraki People helps scaling businesses fix the “people stuff” that slows them down - culture, communication, leadership, and team dynamics.
We work with CEOs and HR leaders to reset senior teams, reduce friction, and unlock performance.