Does Your C-Suite Really Operate as a Team?

The best guitarist, drummer, keyboard player, and singer don’t necessarily make the best band. That’s because individual skills don’t ensure stellar group performance. New research suggests the same holds true for top executive teams. Companies are hiring the best functional experts to be their chief marketing officer, chief financial officer, and so on, but when these senior executives come together, they don’t necessarily gel as a unit. They don’t identify primarily as members of the C-suite team, their goals are often misaligned, and they aren’t always evaluated on collective results. That needs to change.

That’s the conclusion reached by Gartner, the global research and advisory firm, after investigating how well top executives work across disciplines. Researchers conducted two surveys—one of 200 U.S.-based CXOs and another of 303 global CEOs and 153 other global senior executives during 2023 and 2024. Their findings were surprising: Just 31% of C-suite executives considered their peers in the C-suite to be their primary team. According to their analysis, most CMOs identified primarily with the marketing team, CFOs with the finance group, and so on. Although it may seem like a subtle thing, the author concluded that it contributes to behaviors and dynamics that create dysfunction and underperformance. This is concerning, especially given that the same research found that only 34% of CEOs think their C-suites are prepared to handle the challenges companies are facing.

“Most C-suites operate as a group of independent leaders rather than as a unified team,” the author writes. In part, that’s because companies base promotions on individual skills and performance without sufficiently considering how well an executive will work across functions or as a member of the executive leadership team. And they often compound the disconnect by asking CXOs to meet performance metrics specific to their function. “Business unit success doesn’t always equate to collective C-suite success,” says Rachel Juley, a director in the Gartner HR practice and the study’s lead author.

Gartner argues that chief human resource officers (CHROs), who are the most attentive to and skilled in dealing with team dynamics, should take the lead to solve this problem. The research suggests that C-suite interactions often go off track because individual leaders are overemphasizing or underemphasizing typical core leadership behaviors of executive teams such as collaboration, conflict resolution, decision-making, executive learning, and influence. A CMO who overemphasizes collaboration, for instance, may try to involve too many departments in decision-making, working hard to build consensus but taking too long to make decisions, leading to delays in, say, new product launches or ad campaigns. A CHRO should monitor whether members of the top team are over- or underemphasizing the core leadership behaviors and compare notes with the CEO to identify persistent patterns.

Beyond keeping an eye on how top executives interact, Gartner recommends three actions to improve how the top team works together:

Create a mitigation plan when necessary. Gartner identified seven intervention tactics that successful CHROs use when an executive’s behavior undermines collaboration. They range from mild to intensive and include networking (the least aggressive intervention), peer coaching, executive coaching, reassignment, and dismissal (the most aggressive).

Networking, for example, creates opportunities for C-suite members to exchange information with peers at other companies; an executive with a deeper network, the thinking goes, is likely to have more collegial relationships and more resources to compare notes with or turn to for advice. Because encouraging senior leaders to network is neither disruptive nor heavy-handed, it’s a good first step to improve people’s behavior.

Executive coaching—hiring an outside consultant to provide an individual with objective feedback, a sounding board, and a formal plan for development—falls near the middle of the spectrum. This tactic is moderately disruptive (and expensive), so companies should use it only when negative behaviors are severe or repeated frequently. The most aggressive tactic is firing the executive, and naturally, companies should use it as a last resort.

Continually evaluate the team’s collaboration and capabilities. Building a successful leadership team requires more than hiring the right people, informally monitoring their behavior, and providing a few timely interventions. It requires deeper ongoing evaluation, with a focus not only on executives’ individual performance but also on whether they have what it takes to support the broader C-suite as the company’s strategies evolve. Unfortunately, organizations focus mostly on capabilities when they make hiring decisions. And once executives are on board, they continue to be measured on individual performance instead of how well they’re working with peers or how their skills align with new needs. Gartner recommends that companies create a formal process with a regular cadence to evaluate C-suite collaboration and capabilities.

Evaluations should be conducted immediately if signs of trouble appear, such as a spike in employee turnover, a sudden drop in financial performance, or a steep productivity decline. “These triggers create an ideal opportunity for CHROs to ask the CEO, ‘Do we have the right talent within the C-suite?’” the author writes. If a gap exists between the top team’s capabilities and what’s needed for success, the CHRO and CEO should talk about whether one or more roles require an upgrade.

Establish mutual goals. To break down silos and get senior leaders working as a true team, companies should set shared goals at the start of each fiscal year—ambitious goals that C-suite members are accountable for together. Alignment like this helps leaders focus on what they need to accomplish as a group. According to the author, those goals should lead to a short list of strategic priorities for the whole organization. “Establishing mutual goals creates a shared sense of purpose in the C-suite,” Juley says. “A shared purpose leads to sustained, collective high-performance by your leadership team.”

And although the CHRO should focus most intently on building successful dynamics within the C-suite, CEO participation is critical throughout this process. At too many companies, “the CEO hasn’t set one unifying C-level goal, just individual business unit goals,” Juley says. “It’s the CEO’s job to ensure that the mechanisms are in place for everyone to contribute to and accomplish that goal.”

About the research: “CHRO Strategies to Elevate C-Suite Performance” (Gartner white paper, 2025)

“We Want What’s in the Best Interest of the Team, Not the Department”

Kim Mota is the chief human resource officer at Barracuda Networks, a cybersecurity company that has seen a high level of C-suite turnover in the past two years. She spoke with HBR about the unique steps Barracuda is taking to ensure its leadership team collaborates well. Edited excerpts of the conversation follow:

What is Barracuda’s approach to building a collaborative C-suite?

It starts during the hiring process. At Barracuda every C-level executive interviews every finalist C-level candidate. At other companies, when I hired a C-level executive, finalists interviewed with only a small subset of the C-suite, and we didn’t take into consideration whether they had good chemistry with executives from other departments. At Barracuda we created a scorecard for hiring executive candidates, and many of the categories are related to chemistry. For instance: Can I see myself working with this executive, and can they work with me? Then we’ll meet as a team before we decide. Except for our CEO and CFO, the rest of the C-suite has been with us for less than two years, so much of the team has been hired using this process.

Can you give us an example of someone who scored poorly?

We had two final candidates for a role. One showed an arrogance that didn’t fit our team’s chemistry. He was qualified and intelligent, but he was less humble than the rest of the team. We emphasize that everyone in the C-suite, and at the company, needs one another to succeed. We want what’s in the best interest of the team, not the department. We shouldn’t treat one business unit as if it’s more important than others. We shouldn’t even have the mindset that we run separate units. Obviously, we hired the other candidate, who displayed humility and a focus on teamwork.

Collaboration seems easy when things are going well. But what about when the company is struggling?

We had to do two rounds of layoffs this past year. Our C-suite executives sat in a room together solving the problem as a single team. At other companies, the CIO would have deflected blame from the IT department, or the CMO might have blamed the sales department. Everyone would have tried to protect their direct reports by emphasizing the failures of other departments. We didn’t do that.

How often does Barracuda’s C-suite meet?

We have virtual meetings every week. We meet in-person at least once a quarter, usually before board meetings. We make it a point to ask about one another’s families and to share personal updates. We want our team to build rapport, and we’re happy to dedicate time to it. This is a common team-building approach for departments and small teams. But I’ve never seen it on the executive level.

How has Barracuda dealt with tension within the C-suite?

Direct and head-on is how the executive team deals with tension at Barracuda. When there is tension, I encourage the executive team to have conversations with the other person, so the issues don’t continue to grow. If one leader doesn’t feel they are making progress, I will have a very direct conversation with the exec as well. In most instances when I have had to have that type of conversation with a member of the executive team, up to and including my CEO, the message was received, and the other person was appreciative for the direct and honest feedback. We’re a team here at Barracuda, we’re family, we all want each other to succeed. We don’t have time for tension or conflicts.

Copyright 2025 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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