Most executives say they want cross-functional alignment. They deplore the silos, the turf wars, the competing priorities that fragment their organizations (and confuse their teams).

But walk into most C-suites and you'll witness a predictable pattern: the VP of Sales advocates fiercely for the sales team's budget, the CTO fights for engineering resources, the CMO defends marketing's headcount. Each executive champions their cause – and in doing so, they inadvertently create the very silos they claim to abhor.

Patrick Lencioni highlighted this challenge in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: Your “first team” is not the group of people who report to you. It's the group of people you sit at the table with and to whom you are accountable – your peers on the leadership team.

This is more than just a catchy concept; it's a fundamental reframe of where executive loyalty belongs. The hard truth is that you’ll always feel out of alignment until you start seeing your executive team as your first team.

What the Research Reveals

The evidence supporting this "first team" concept runs deeper than leadership folklore. Academic research on top management teams reveals several crucial insights:

• Executive teams function like any high-performing team, requiring the same attention to composition, coordination, and adaptive capabilities that we'd expect from elite military units or championship sports teams. The stakes are just higher.
• Shared leadership (where influence is distributed among peers) consistently outperforms strictly hierarchical models in complex, dynamic environments. When executive team members truly collaborate on decisions, rather than just “managing up,” the entire organization benefits from aligned, well-considered decisions and faster execution.
• Functional diversity without social cohesion creates an inverted-U curve in performance. Translation: your beautifully diverse executive team of finance, operations, marketing, and technology leaders can actually harm organizational performance if they lack trust, shared norms, and genuine collaboration.

And this is OLD NEWS! In Chester Barnard's 1938 classic The Functions of the Executive, he identified cooperation, coordination, and communication across the enterprise as the core executive functions. Nearly a century later, we're still learning this lesson.

The Mindset Shift That Changes Everything

Moving from functional loyalty to first-team alignment requires a fundamental shift in belief: "I serve the organization first, my function second."

This shift manifests in concrete behaviors:

• In decision-making, aligned executives debate on what's best for the business overall, not just what maximizes their departmental budget or headcount.
• In communication, they share information proactively and transparently across functions, rather than hoarding it to control narratives.
• In conflict, they engage directly with peers and hold each other accountable, making offers and requests, instead of avoiding difficult conversations or – worse yet – triangulating through the CEO.
• In prioritization, they co-create shared priorities that support aligned strategies, rather than competing for resources.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

In 1938, Chester Barnard made an observation: 

"Successful cooperation in or by formal organizations is the abnormal, not the normal, condition." 

Nearly a century later, this remains painfully true. The seamless executive team collaboration we imagine so easily is actually rare — and must be intentionally cultivated.

Modern research validates what Barnard intuited. A comprehensive meta-analysis concluded that "teams with a shared leadership structure tend to outperform those with a traditional vertical leadership structure." When leadership is distributed among executive peers rather than centralized in one individual, team effectiveness measurably improves.

This concept of shared leadership – defined by experts as occurring "when two or more members engage in the leadership of the team to maximize team effectiveness" – isn't just academic theory. It's the behavioral foundation of first-team alignment.

The Systemic Impact

When executive teams truly embrace the first-team mindset, the transformation cascades throughout the organization:

• Fragmented strategy becomes unified and executable. Instead of each function pulling in different directions, the entire leadership team co-owns a coherent path forward and can align their communications so everyone hears the same message.
• Turf wars transform into shared ownership of results. Executives stop protecting their domains and start working across their functions when challenges arise in the business, recognizing that silos are a self-inflicted team wound.
• Functional silos give way to genuine cross-functional collaboration. When employees see their leaders working well together, they will follow suit.
• Slow, painful execution accelerates into coordinated, enterprise-focused action. Decisions move faster because the executive team has already aligned on priorities and can consider trade-offs from a whole-company perspective, as input from each functional area has been shared with all to weigh when committing to action.

A Simple Diagnostic

How “first-team” is your mindset? Check yourself by rating yourself 1-5 on these statements:

1. I prioritize enterprise success over my function's wins.
2. I share information with peers proactively and transparently.
3. I'm willing to adjust my functional goals to support other ways to reach our company-wide strategy.
4. I hold my peers accountable – and welcome the same in return.
5. I view my direct reports as a team I lead on behalf of the company, not as "my" team alone.

20-25: You're a first-team champion
15-19: You're in transition
Below 15: Time to rethink your role and priorities!

The Path Forward

If you're an executive frustrated by silos, it's time to ask yourself: Which team are you playing for?

Because here's what most leaders miss: alignment depends on your peer team being your first team. Everything else – the cross-functional projects, the shared metrics, the matrix structures – is just window dressing if the executive team isn't truly aligned toward a better future.

Don’t treat your fellow execs like a group of individual contributors instead of what they are – your first team.