How to Build a High-Performing Leadership Team: A CEO’s Guide

Your business can only grow as fast as your leadership team allows it to. This is one of the most consistently overlooked truths in business — and one of the most expensive lessons a CEO can learn too late.

You can have the best strategy, the right market timing, and strong product-market fit. But if the team around you isn’t performing at the level the business needs, everything slows down, decisions get muddled, and accountability disappears. Building a high-performing leadership team isn’t a nice-to-have — it’s the foundation on which sustainable growth is built.

This guide explores what separates average leadership teams from exceptional ones, the most common mistakes CEOs make when building their senior team, and the practical steps you can take to create a leadership group that multiplies your impact rather than limits it.

What Does a High-Performing Leadership Team Actually Look Like?

Before you can build one, you need a clear picture of what you’re building towards. High-performing leadership teams share several consistent characteristics — and most of them have nothing to do with individual brilliance.

The best senior teams operate with collective accountability. They don’t just own their own functions — they own the success of the business as a whole. A CFO who only cares about finance, or a COO who only cares about operations, is a functional manager — not a senior leader. True leadership team members see the whole picture and hold themselves accountable to it.

They also communicate with radical clarity and honesty. Conflict is not avoided — it’s channelled productively. Decisions are made, not deferred. Accountability is real, not performative. And the CEO is not the only person in the room with the authority — or the courage — to name what’s not working.

The 5 Most Common Mistakes CEOs Make When Building Their Leadership Team

1. Promoting on Tenure Rather Than Capability

One of the most common and damaging patterns I see in growing businesses is promoting loyal early employees into senior leadership roles they’re not equipped for. Loyalty is valuable — but it’s not a leadership qualification. When your VP of Sales got the role because they were your third hire, not because they’ve demonstrated the ability to lead a team and drive strategic revenue growth, you’ve created a problem that will compound over time.

2. Hiring for Skills, Not Character

Technical skills are assessable and coachable. Character — the values, mindset, and behavioural patterns that define how someone shows up in high-pressure situations — is far harder to change. Yet most leadership hiring focuses heavily on track record and functional expertise, and almost entirely overlooks character. Understanding the elements of character and how they manifest in leadership is one of the highest-leverage things a CEO can invest time in.

3. Tolerating Underperformance

Every CEO knows when a member of the leadership team isn’t pulling their weight. The question is how long they tolerate it. The answer, in most organisations, is far too long. The cost of carrying an underperforming senior leader is enormous — not just in direct output, but in team morale, accountability culture, and the signal it sends to the rest of the organisation about what standards are actually acceptable.

4. Failing to Create Psychological Safety

If people on your leadership team don’t feel safe to disagree, challenge, or raise uncomfortable truths, you’re operating with only a fraction of the intelligence in the room. Psychological safety doesn’t mean everyone is always nice to each other — it means people feel secure enough to take intellectual risks. Without it, leadership teams become echo chambers, and the CEO remains in a dangerous information bubble.

5. Not Investing in the Team’s Development

Hiring great people and then leaving them to figure things out is not a leadership strategy. The best senior teams are continuously learning — together and individually. Whether that’s structured coaching, peer learning, external facilitation, or deliberate stretch assignments, investment in your leadership team’s development is investment in the operating capacity of the business.

How to Assess Your Current Leadership Team

Before making any changes, you need an honest assessment of where things stand. Ask yourself:

• If I had to rebuild this team from scratch, who would I rehire without hesitation?
• Where does accountability break down in the business — and who owns that gap?
• Are difficult conversations happening, or are they being avoided?
• Does the team operate as a unit, or as a collection of competing functions?
• Who on the team is currently growing into a bigger role — and who has plateaued?

The answers will tell you more than any 360-degree review. Be honest with yourself. Confirmation bias is one of the most dangerous forces in leadership — the tendency to see what you want to see rather than what’s actually there.

Building the Team: A Practical Framework

Define the Roles You Actually Need

As the business grows, the leadership structure needs to evolve. The team you needed at £1m revenue looks very different from the one you need at £10m. Start with the structure — what are the critical functions that need senior leadership? — before you think about the people. Too many CEOs build around the people they have rather than the roles the business requires.

Hire Ahead of the Curve

The best time to hire your next VP of Engineering, or your first Chief Revenue Officer, is six months before you think you need them. Reactive hiring in senior roles almost always results in compromise. Proactive hiring — bringing in leaders who are slightly ahead of where the business is today — gives the organisation space to grow into its leadership, rather than scrambling to catch up.

Create Structured Onboarding

A new senior hire who doesn’t understand the culture, the decision-making norms, or the unwritten rules of how the business operates is operating blind for their first few months. Structured onboarding for leadership roles — covering strategy, culture, relationships, and expectations — dramatically accelerates the time to impact and reduces the risk of early misalignment.

Set Clear Expectations and Review Them Regularly

Every member of the leadership team should have absolute clarity on what success looks like in their role — not just the functional KPIs, but the leadership behaviours, the cultural contribution, and the cross-functional responsibilities. These expectations should be reviewed formally at least quarterly, and revisited whenever the business context changes significantly.

The CEO’s Role in Team Performance

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the performance of your leadership team is a direct reflection of your performance as a CEO. If there’s chronic underperformance, persistent conflict, or a lack of accountability, the first place to look is the top. This isn’t about blame — it’s about ownership.

The CEO sets the standard. They model the behaviour. They make — or fail to make — the difficult calls. A leadership team will only operate with as much rigour, honesty, and ambition as the CEO demands and demonstrates. Building a strong company culture starts with how the leadership team shows up — and that starts with you.

If you’re finding that your leadership team isn’t performing at the level the business needs, the most valuable thing you can do is get an outside perspective. A CEO coach can help you see the dynamics clearly, structure difficult conversations, and make the changes that your business needs to reach the next level.