The Four Functions of an Executive Team

One of the methods (but not the only one :) to help define the purpose of executive team meetings is to align them around the four functions of a high-performing exec team. You can use these four functions to set your agenda, to do yearly exec-team-performance-assessments, or to have high-level quarterly check-ins as a team. The four functions are:

1. Set company-wide milestones and success standards, then clarify them for each dept (so they align well).

2. Collaborate on resources, to ensure each team has the things it needs to succeed, and this includes sharing the burden when trade-offs have to be made.

3. Problem-solve cross-team conflict that couldn't be solved at a local level. Some conflicts are more efficiently solved by leveraging the insights of the exec leaders not directly involved in the conflict.

4. Minimize confusion and close information gaps that impact multiple teams’ ability to reach their goals. This includes clarifying which team or leader has final decision-making power over which areas.
   An important note on this: What I find hurts companies most is not disagreement over key decisions on goals, resource allocation, or cross-team conflict — what hurts companies most is a lack of transparency about how and when key disagreements will be deliberated, and confusion and unpredictability about who makes which decisions. So if you have not clarified these things, I recommend doing so soon. For example, some companies have explicitly clarified that they will use a collaborative decision-making approach: they discuss issues as a full exec team and then upvote on final decisions. Other leadership teams discuss issues as a team and then the CEO makes the final decisions or gives final decision-making power to the C-suite leader that they believe should own that decision.

   Both work well, but the key thing is to clarify:

   • Who is the final arbiter if there’s an impasse on a key issue? For example, if the COO and the CFO are in disagreement about an issue that impacts both departments (and thus impacts the entire company). Usually this would be the CEO, but often, especially with smaller companies or with co-founder companies, who is the final arbiter has not been clarified in advance, and this prolongs conflict and confusion on key issues.

   • What are the criteria for which decisions are leadership-team-level decisions, vs decisions that live within a department and belong to one leader? It can be as simple as “The CEO confirms which decisions are made by the full executive team and which get delegated to specific leaders” -but again, it’s important to be explicit about this as you grow the company, so that people understand how decisions are made.