When I was a kid, Mum would drive us to Ballarat every September school holiday to stay with Aunty Linda. The dry-stone walls west of Melbourne fascinated me: old and solid. Nothing added to hold them together – just stone on stone – and they’d stood for a century.

I understand now why they don’t fall. Every stone takes and gives load to the ones around it. On its own, each one is just a rock. Together, they’re a wall.

Years later, reflecting on a team I was working with, I thought of those walls again.

Matias leads an executive team of six. They meet fortnightly, and the tone is transactional. There’s so much happening across the organisation that without the discipline to hold the agenda, the meeting would run well over its two and a half hours. Nobody can afford that. It’s not adversarial. Collegiate, even. But it’s not expansive, and it’s not creative. If they were honest, most of them would rather be somewhere else

What a waste!

Six of the most capable, politically astute, broadly resourced thinkers in the organisation. Together for two and a half hours a fortnight (eighteen person-hours before travel) spent ticking things off a list.

The problems a senior team exists to solve are too big for any one of them. Too complex for any single division. That’s the whole point of putting them in a room.

An executive team is there to do two things no individual can. The first is to explore and decide the questions that are too big for one person alone – the ones that need the enterprise view, not six divisional ones. The second is to build the relationships that keep communication open and honest, inside that room and well beyond it.

A team that only works the agenda is a pile of good stones. Capable, valuable, and holding no load for each other or for the organisation. 

The wall doesn’t stand because the stones are good. It stands because they hold each other up and push against each other. Take away the pressure and it’s a pile of rocks.

What is your leadership team here to do that none of you could do alone – and when did it last do exactly that?