You hired them because they’re exceptional at what they do. Marketing. Finance. Operations. Legal.
But here’s the problem: being great at their function doesn’t mean they’re great in the room together.
Leo Bottary, founder of Peernovation, draws a sharp line between a cross-functional team and a dysfunctional one. The difference? Whether your leaders can close the door and put on what he calls the “enterprise hat.”
“You need people who are going to do what’s right for the business,” Bottary says, “which might mean saying, ‘Hey, marketing is going to take a hit this year, but that’s what’s needed to move the business forward.'”
That’s a hard conversation. Most C-suite teams avoid it. Departments protect their budgets, their headcount, their turf. And the CEO ends up refereeing instead of leading.
The harder truth is that some of those seats might not be filled with the right people — or filled at all. Vistage Master Chair Irina Baranov sees CEOs struggle with a handful of critical hires over and over: CFO, Head of HR, COO, and now Head of AI.
“Whether those positions are vacant because someone left or they have never been filled, a company can really struggle,” she says. “A CEO can really struggle.”
And if you’re the visionary who’s spending every day running operations because you haven’t built that team? Baranov is blunt: “Your company may never grow beyond a few million in revenue.”
Your C-suite should be the inner circle that makes you better — the people who challenge your thinking, carry the weight of execution, and care more about the enterprise than their own department. If that’s not what you have, it’s the first thing to fix.
Building the right team is the hardest job a CEO has. It helps to have a room full of people who’ve done it. Let’s talk.