If There’s No Interdependence, There’s No Team
Why leadership teams often mistake structural problems for trust problems.
I was working with a CEO who was frustrated with his leadership team. Individually, they were strong, but the organisation wasn’t moving.Each function was performing well. But at the enterprise level, priorities were competing, decisions were slow (or quietly revisited outside the room), and work that required coordination kept stalling.
When the team came together, you could see why. Meetings were dominated by updates. There was plenty of discussion, but very little real decision-making. They were operating as a group of capable individuals running their areas well, rather than as a team leading the organisation.
The CEO’s instinct was that this was about trust. Build stronger relationships, create more openness, and collaboration would follow.
That’s a very common assumption. In practice, it’s often the other way round.
Trust and strong relationships are usually the result of how the work is set up — not the starting point.
Many leadership teams spend enormous energy trying to improve relationships while leaving the underlying work design untouched. But if leaders are still primarily rewarded, measured, and pressured at a functional level, the system quietly pulls them back into silo behaviour.
In this case, there was very little genuine interdependence. There wasn’t enough work that actually required them to think and act together. So meetings defaulted to updates, functions optimised locally, and the organisation paid the price.
The shift came from a simple question:
“What do we actually need to own together?”
That led to three things:
– clarity on where the team genuinely needed to operate as a team
– clearer boundaries on what could stay within functions
– shared accountability for enterprise outcomes, not just functional ones
The conversation changed surprisingly quickly. Less reporting, more decision-making, and more ownership of what mattered across the organisation.
Not because personalities changed overnight. But because the work itself started demanding more collective thinking and shared responsibility.
If there’s no real interdependence, there’s no real team.
And interdependence doesn’t just happen — you have to design for it.
