You walk back from the leadership meeting and tell your team you fought for them — kept their headcount, defended the roadmap. They look relieved. And somewhere underneath, you notice the small cost of having had to fight at all.

That cost has a name. Patrick Lencioni asked a question that still cuts: which group is your first team — the people who report to you, or your peers around the leadership table? Most leaders quietly answer the first. Their fellow execs become something else: a negotiating venue, a place to advocate for “their” people. Everyone agrees the company comes first; almost no one experiences the leadership team as the team.

What makes this so durable is that no one says it out loud, and yet it teaches itself. You optimize for your function, your peers feel your wins as their losses, and they protect their own — a single round and the game is set. The exec team becomes a parliament of constituencies, and the silos the rest of the org fights through get quietly built in the room above them. A pattern I see across companies: cross-functional friction three levels down is almost always downstream of a leadership team that never agreed to actually be a team.

So try a structural move, not a vibe-change. On one item on your next leadership agenda, before anyone speaks for their function, ask: “If we were one team running one company — not delegates from five — what’s the call?” Make people answer from there first.

When did you last leave a peer meeting and feel everyone in the room had actually been on the same team?