You can find plenty of advice on how to become a stronger leader. Articles, forums, and social media feeds, particularly on LinkedIn, are flooded with tips for individual growth and leadership development. Yet one critical aspect is often overlooked: how leaders work together. The traditional focus on isolated brilliance fails to recognize that a leadership team’s success depends on synergy, alignment, and shared responsibilities. Indeed, leaders working as a unified force is far more effective than a collection of superstar individuals.

This blog post explores how to build effective leadership teams that leverage systems thinking to identify interdependencies, align objectives, and create performance metrics that drive collective success. By embracing a systematic approach, leaders in different functions—from marketing to finance to sales—can collaborate more productively, innovate more efficiently, and ultimately steer the organization toward its greatest potential.

Moving Beyond Isolated Brilliance

Many organizations tend to elevate individuals who demonstrate extraordinary abilities in their functional silos. The result? A group of brilliant minds operating in isolation. While each executive might excel at their specialty, say, marketing, operations, or finance, these leaders may fail to collaborate to the organization’s maximum advantage. This not only limits the business’s overall capacity but also breeds inefficiencies, missed opportunities, and friction.

Yet true leadership success emerges when brilliance is harnessed collectively and the team understands they succeed in a symbiotic relationship. A highly competent marketing executive, for instance, needs to collaborate seamlessly with their peers in sales and product development to ensure messaging resonates with actual customer needs. When executives work together and connect their individual expertise to the broader strategy, the organization is more nimble, more innovative, and better positioned to succeed in a rapidly changing market.

Systems Thinking as the Foundation

To build a collaborative C-suite, you first need a unifying framework that helps leaders see the big picture. Systems thinking is exactly this kind of framework. It emphasizes looking at the organization as a network of interconnected parts, rather than as separate divisions or departments operating in isolation.

Understanding Systems Maps

A systems map is a powerful tool that visually represents the interplay between different departments and how one function’s output affects another. For example, imagine a systems map that shows how marketing leads feed into sales activities, sales revenue influences budget allocations in finance, and finance decisions determine operational investments. When leaders see this big-picture view:

• Interdependencies become clear: Everyone recognizes how their decisions ripple through the organization, for better or worse.

• Shared goals surface: Leaders can spot opportunities for synergy, such as aligning on lead quality over mere lead quantity.

• Bottlenecks and inefficiencies are revealed: With a systems map, you can pinpoint friction points like the dreaded marketing-sales disconnect, or where customer service experiences might be failing to retain converted leads.

Instead of playing a zero-sum game where each department maximizes its own metric at the expense of others, systems thinking encourages C-suite leaders to collaborate around the shared mission and vision. After all, if one department thrives while another struggles, the entire enterprise suffers in the long run.

The Power of Shared Metrics

At the heart of collaborative leadership lies a potent strategy: defining executive performance characteristics and metrics that span multiple departments. By holding two or more executives jointly responsible for a common outcome, you encourage cooperation right from the get-go.

The Marketing-Sales Synergy

A classic example is the relationship between the Vice President (VP) of Marketing and the VP of Sales. Traditional KPIs might measure:

• VP of Marketing: Number of marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) generated per quarter

• VP of Sales: Conversion rate of leads to closed deals

At first glance, these metrics look perfectly reasonable. However, trouble arises when Marketing optimizes purely for the quantity of leads without vetting the quality. Generating a flood of low-quality leads makes Marketing look good (they hit their volume targets) but leaves Sales to struggle with poor conversion rates. Everyone meets their own metric, or, more precisely, Marketing meets theirs, while Sales doesn’t, creating animosity and a sense of misalignment.

Now, imagine if both executives were measured on lead conversions. This shared metric encourages Marketing to produce fewer but more qualified leads (since they need the Sales team to convert them), while Sales and Marketing jointly strategize on the best messaging, targeting, and nurturing tactics to improve conversion rates. When both leaders have skin in the same game, they are more likely to align their efforts and collaborate rather than compete.

Extending Metrics Across More Departments

Collaboration becomes even more effective when three or more functions share a critical KPI. Picture a scenario where Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success all share responsibility for customer lifetime value (CLV). In that case, Marketing’s branding and lead generation strategies become intrinsically linked to Sales’ close rates and Customer Success’ retention initiatives. All three executives must come together to design a seamless customer journey, ensuring that the leads they generate and convert also stay engaged for the long haul, driving higher recurring revenue.

Why Individual Metrics Can Be Damaging

When each executive is measured on isolated metrics, it can encourage short-term thinking and undesirable behaviors. Individual metrics, especially those that are purely volume-driven, risk creating perverse incentives that undermine the organization’s long-term interests.

The “Money-for-Emails” Dilemma

Consider a marketing team that’s rewarded solely on the number of leads they generate. In theory, more leads mean more potential customers. But if the metric is just “get more emails,” the marketing team might resort to tactics like:

• Offering $100 gift cards to anyone who signs up

• Collecting random emails without verifying interest

Yes, the number of leads skyrockets, but they are low-quality, unengaged leads primarily motivated by money, not genuine interest in your product. Meanwhile, the VP of Sales sees a huge pool of “opportunities” that don’t convert, dragging down the conversion rate metric and potentially damaging the sales team’s morale.

This scenario showcases how siloed or misaligned metrics can tear teams apart rather than bring them together. Marketing has ‘won’ by its narrow definition, but the organization is worse off overall.

Putting It All Together: Creating a Culture of Collaborative Leadership

Building a culture where leaders actively collaborate begins with adopting systems thinking and then carefully designing shared metrics. Here’s a roadmap to get started:

Create a Systems Map:

Bring all your executives together for an interactive workshop. Map out how each department’s processes feed into another’s. Include tangible handoffs, like marketing leads to sales pipelines, but also intangible factors like brand reputation, which can influence recruitment, partnerships, and even investor relations.

Identify Critical Interdependencies:

Once the systems map is visible, highlight the key intersections. Where do two or more departments rely on each other to execute the broader strategy? For example, a new product launch might hinge on collaboration between Marketing (awareness, campaigns), Product (features, quality), Sales (pitch, demos), and Customer Support (post-purchase service).

Define Shared Goals and Metrics:

Translate those interdependencies into performance metrics that require multi-department collaboration. Whether it’s lead-to-close rate, customer lifetime value, or operational efficiency, ensure at least two executives share accountability.

Implement Review and Feedback Loops:

Regularly gather the leaders to review these shared metrics. Discuss successes, roadblocks, and new insights from the data. This creates a continuous improvement cycle, pushing the team to adapt and strategize collectively.

Reward Collaborative Behaviors:

Ultimately, words alone won’t change behaviors unless aligned with incentive structures. Recognize and celebrate executives who collaborate effectively. Consider building a portion of executive compensation around these shared metrics to reinforce the culture of unity.

Better Together

Modern business challenges—from disruptive technologies to shifting consumer demands, require leaders to act as a unified team. Siloed leadership, while it may produce fleeting moments of individual brilliance, rarely yields sustainable organizational success. Systems thinking provides a blueprint for seeing the bigger picture, while shared metrics ensure leaders have a compelling reason to work together.

When executives collaborate, leveraging their combined expertise to solve cross-functional challenges, the entire organization benefits. Products improve, customer experiences become seamless, employee satisfaction rises, and profitability soars. Indeed, great leadership is ultimately a team sport, one where the best players on the field know they’re stronger when they play in harmony. And that’s the kind of leadership that propels businesses to new heights.