Michael Sabbag

Not all conflict on an executive team is bad. Disagreeing over the right course of action is healthy and often necessary. It's when disagreement turns personal that trust erodes. But most teams don't stop at avoiding the personal kind. They stop having the healthy kind too. Here are 5 reasons executive teams avoid hard conversations even when everyone in the room knows the conversation needs to happen.

Your best executive hires rarely quit over money. They quit because somewhere along the way, they stopped having a voice. Here's the pattern I see over and over on executive teams: A leader joins excited to represent their function. They come in with ideas, a point of view, ready to shape direction and work with the team. Then reality sets in. They notice a handful of people actually make the decisions. Everyone else is in the room, but not really in the conversation.

I've worked with a lot of executive teams over the years. Some were struggling. Some were good and wanted to be great. Some were simply going through the motions. With all teams, there's a specific moment I look for. A moment that tells me a team is not just willing to talk about change, but ready to do the hard work of actually making it. This is the story of one of those moments. I was working with an executive team operating in a familiar pattern. Each meeting follow

Most senior leaders think accountability means following up until something gets done. It doesn't. That's micromanagement with a corner office. Real accountability, the kind that actually improves performance and strengthens executive teams, is built on trust. Without it, every check-in feels like surveillance and every question feels like an accusation. And the leaders you're trying to hold accountable spend more energy managing your perception of them than doing the act

Most dysfunctional executive teams aren't made up of bad people. They're made up of good people following a broken example. I worked with the executive team of a hospital where the CEO's leadership style was command-and-control. In team meetings, leaders only spoke when they needed to. Nobody offered ideas. Nobody challenged assumptions. Nobody collaborated. When those same leaders went back to their departments, they did exactly what they had just experienced. The resu

Most executive teams think they have a strategy problem. They don't. They have a priorities problem. And underneath that is a politics problem. I was brought in to work with the board of an organization that was eager to build their strategy. But before we could get to strategy, I needed to understand how this group operated. What I saw was a room full of talented, capable leaders. But each one focused almost entirely on their own point of view. Every conversation becam

Every leader knows trust matters. Very few leaders deliberately build it. Most executive teams assume trust will develop over time through shared experience, good intentions, and the occasional team offsite. Sometimes it does. But more often, teams go years operating at a fraction of their potential because nobody ever made trust an intentional practice. Here's what I've seen trust look like in action. I worked with a fast-growing technology company whose executive te