Executive developmentRebuilding Trust & Cohesion Across Fractured Executive Team
12 Senior Leaders — 2 Workshops — 95% Readiness
The Situation
An owner-run live events company in Europe asked for help with team cohesion before its 8th annual event season. Five co-owners formed the executive team, and seven senior leaders ran production and operations. The company had grown from a small independent event into a large annual production. The people running it described the strain from personality clashes and lack of psychological safety. They asked for support to rebuild trust and cohesion for the full leadership team.
The Discovery
Before designing anything, I held confidential one-to-one interviews with all 12 members of the executive and senior leadership teams. The team also completed The Table Group's Five Behaviors team assessment.
The interviews pointed to different ways of viewing the same struggle, both leadership style differences, and a governance model the company had outgrown. The five co-owners held equal stakes, but their contributions differed widely. No one had defined what the executive role required in scope or decision rights. Several patterns followed from that gap:
Without agreed decision rights, the executive team often reopened decisions it had already made, and the person who pressed hardest usually settled the outcome. The team called its process democratic, but in practice persistence decided.
People who disagreed often stayed quiet to avoid a heated reaction. The team read this as respect for strong personalities. In the interviews, people described it as fear.
The senior leaders had become largely self-sufficient. That looked like strong ownership, but it had grown as a defense against changes of direction from above, and it had cut off information in both directions.
Recognition rarely reached the people running production.
The assessment data matched the interviews. Holding all team members to the same standards scored 2.10 out of 5, inside the instrument's low band. Acknowledging weaknesses and apologizing both scored 2.20. The team scored 4.00 on discussing important and difficult issues but 2.60 on resolving conflict before moving on. The team could raise hard topics, but it rarely resolved them. In the culture questions, 6 of 10 respondents named unclear priorities as a barrier to commitment. Five of 10 said they did not trust the team to follow through.
This changed the program. Trust workshops for the full team would not hold while the executive team's own structure kept producing the friction. So I added a working session for the co-owners and ran it before any full-team work.
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“Doing this together has been great: the process is often more permanent than the detailed results. To identify and discuss patterns is the most important foundational work that stays with us during difficult moments. I think solving these patterns was the most effective way to activate a general spirit of cooperation toward a shared goal.”
The Solution
Executive team session. The five co-owners worked through their decision-making and communication in a session built on Lewis Deep Democracy, a method for surfacing the fears and values beneath a stated position. The session introduced separate decision modes for different kinds of decision. One key distinction was between unanimity, where everyone fully supports the decision, and consensus, where everyone rates it 3 or above on a 0 to 5 scale and can live with and commit to it. The co-owners left with a four-week process for defining what the executive role requires and what each person would commit to.
Between sessions. I gave the executive team a reusable discussion protocol so they could work through contested decisions without a facilitator. It covers agreed decision criteria, 0 to 5 voting with stated reasons, and rotating facilitation.
Full-team workshop. Eleven people met for a 2.5-hour virtual session. We reviewed the assessment results together, focusing on the team's strongest items, its weakest items, and the items where people saw the team very differently. Small groups each took one of the five behaviors and wrote practices for it. Every practice left the room with a named owner, responsible for defining what good looks like and speaking up when the team drifts.
The Results
After the executive session, all five co-owners ranked workload distribution and role clarity as their top priorities. That was the structural issue discovery had identified.
The full-team workshop produced 12 team practices, each with a named owner. They included a standard close for every meeting (what we decided, who owns it, by when), set time in team meetings for what went well, and asking one clarifying question before reacting to a problem. And they create a Decision Protocol with what mode is to be used for which kinds of decisions (like unanimity, consensus, or decision-owner with consultation). This allowed for greater autonomy and trust across the important decisions being made throughout the year.
After the following event season, one executive shared that "This year, the production felt significantly different, thanks to the time we invested with you in pre-production to better understand each other."