At Work with The Ready 30. Extended Leadership Teams: Set Up to Fail Yet Expected to Lead
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Jul 14, 2025 Extended leadership teams often struggle with translating strategy into action while managing chaos and competition. The hosts uncover the challenges these teams face, including power dynamics and misaligned incentives. They emphasize the need for empowerment to unlock systemic improvements and tackle generational tensions in the workplace. Collaboration among these teams is highlighted as crucial for organizational effectiveness, with shared responsibility playing a key role in overcoming traditional hierarchical barriers.
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Extended Leadership Team's Paradox
- The extended leadership team is often the layer where strategy goes to die and potential energy is wasted.
- This group bears a weird pull of too many tasks, making their outcomes less effective than possible.
Sacrificing Middle Layer Harmony
- The C-suite often maintains superficial harmony at the expense of chaos below, leading to dysfunction in the coordination layer.
- Extended leadership teams fail to operate as cross-functional peer groups, causing stalls in execution.
Vertical Structure vs Horizontal Work
- Vertical power, compensation, and structure fiercely contradict horizontal cross-functional work required of extended leadership teams.
- This mismatch creates silos, peer competition, and breakdown in cooperation across functions.