Why good leaders don't always build great teams (4 of 5 in series)

Make sure you read the previous article: Why you cant have it all: The Three Pillar-trade off (3/5)

In the previous post, I talked about the three trade-off combinations, Leadership + Team, Leadership + Strategy, and Strategy + Team. When I described Leadership + Team, I mentioned how it can create inward focus and how competence driven by leadership rather than the team leads to collapse.

But there's something deeper going on here for this specific one that I think deserves its own exploration. This one has taken me a while to understand. At first glance, shouldn't a good leader naturally build a great team? Why would these two pillars pull against each other when they seem like they should reinforce each other?

What I've discovered is that this tension is actually the most subtle and misunderstood of the three trade-offs. It's not immediately obvious, it creeps in slowly, masquerading as alignment when it's actually dependency. It shows up in decision-making speed, psychological environments, and how resources get allocated. And because it's subtle, it's often the one that catches teams off guard.

So let me break down why Leadership and Team + Organization create tension, even when they both seem strong.

Central Direction vs. Shared Input

They're not inherently opposed, but I've been reflecting on why they create such friction. I think it comes down to how power distributes through a system.

A strong leader often needs to centralize decisions to keep things moving fast-cutting through noise and pointing everyone in one direction. Sure, speed matters, but I think what's really happening here is the creation of clarity through hierarchy. When decisions flow through one person or a small group, you get consistency and alignment. But you also create dependency. The team starts waiting for direction, and individual initiative gets quieter.

But a healthy team thrives on distributed ownership, where we debate and decide together. In this we're leveraging collective intelligence and building commitment through participation. When everyone has input, decisions are richer, but they're also slower. Consensus takes time. And without someone to break ties or prioritize ruthlessly, you can drift into analysis paralysis.

The tension shows up in decision-making speed. Fast decisions require centralization, which reduces team ownership. Distributed decisions increase ownership but slow things down. Both approaches are valid, but they pull against each other. From what I've seen, you can't optimize for both simultaneously, then you end up choosing a balance point, and that choice has consequences that you must be aware of.

Pushing Hard vs. Keeping Balance

This one has been interesting to unpack. Leaders often bring that spark of urgency, rallying the team for big goals, which can feel motivating at first. Lencioni talks about this galvanizing energy, and I've felt it in organisations where a good manager turns a vague idea into something we all chase.

But I've been thinking about what's happening underneath. That urgency taps into something psychological, it creates focus through intensity. When a leader pushes hard, they're activating the team's drive, but they're also creating a kind of psychological pressure. The energy comes from the tension between where we are and where we need to be.

Teams, though, need something different. They need psychological safety, not just as a nice-to-have, but as a fundamental requirement for healthy conflict and innovation. Lencioni's pyramid starts with trust for a reason. When teams feel safe, they can disagree productively, admit mistakes, and take risks. But safety requires consistency, predictability, and space to process. It's slower. It's more sustainable, but it's less intense.

The tension here goes deeper than just pace, it's really about what kind of psychological environment you're creating. High intensity builds momentum but erodes safety over time. High safety builds trust but can feel too comfortable for ambitious goals. I've watched teams try to have both, and usually one gives way to the other.

Spotlight on One vs. Credit for All

This one connects back to what I mentioned earlier about dependency. A strong leader can become the go-to hero, which is great for external stuff like pitching to stakeholders or representing the company. But there's a subtle cost: it shifts attention upward, away from the group's shared wins.

I've been thinking about why this matters beyond just hurt feelings. When leadership becomes the face of success, it reinforces the dependency pattern I talked about earlier. The team starts to see themselves as executors of the leader's vision rather than co-creators. This isn't necessarily intentional, it's just how attention flows through a system.

Healthy teams are about everyone pulling weight and holding each other accountable. Lencioni's pyramid emphasizes peer-to-peer accountability for a reason, it's where real trust shows up. When someone on the team misses a commitment, it's their peers who call it out, not just the manager. But if leadership dominates the spotlight, that peer dynamic gets quieter. People start looking upward for validation instead of to each other for accountability.

On the flip side, if the team is the star, if everything is about collective achievement and the leader stays in the background, a leader might struggle to step up without seeming overbearing. They might hesitate to make unpopular calls or challenge the team's assumptions because they don't want to disrupt the harmony.

I've noticed this in retros: when leadership is front and center, blame or praise sticks to them. If something goes wrong, it's "the leader's decision." If something goes right, it's "the leader's vision." This weakens the "we're in this together" vibe because people start thinking in terms of hierarchy rather than collaboration. But when teams try to force equality, making sure everyone gets equal credit, avoiding any individual recognition, leaders can feel like they're not allowed to lead and reward, which creates its own problems.

The tension here is about how recognition and accountability flow through a system. Too much focus on leadership, and you lose peer accountability. Too much focus on the team, and you lose decisive leadership. Both are needed, but they pull in different directions and we need to think about it actively.

Limited Resources

I've been thinking about why this tension exists at a deeper level. Time and budget are real constraints, sure, but I think there's something more fundamental happening here. It's about how human systems work.

I should probably mention here that I'm biased, I come from a developer background, so complex systems theory heavily influences how I think about this. I tend to see organizations through that lens: feedback loops, constraints, energy flow, bottlenecks. That might be why I'm noticing patterns that others might interpret differently, but I want to hear those differences, so please comment.

When you pour resources into leadership, executive coaching, high-profile hires, strategic planning sessions, you're implicitly making choices about power distribution. That investment signals where decisions get made, who gets heard, and how fast things move. But a healthy team needs its own resources: time for trust-building, psychological safety through consistent interactions, spaces where people can challenge without fear.

The tension arises because these aren't just competing budget lines, they're fundamentally competing psychological needs. Teams need distributed autonomy to feel ownership; leaders need centralization to maintain direction. Both require ongoing investment, but they pull energy from different parts of the organization.

Real Examples

I've seen this tension play out in different ways:

Strong Leadership, Weak Team Autonomy

A product leader I worked with made all the decisions. They set clear direction, prioritized ruthlessly, and the team executed well. The product was successful, features shipped on time, quality was high. But when they tried to scale, when they needed the team to make decisions without them, it broke down.

Here's the specific moment: The leader was going on a two-week vacation and needed the team to handle a critical feature decision. They'd narrowed it down to two approaches and wanted the team to choose. The team meeting was silent. "What do you think?" the leader asked. "We're not sure," someone finally said. "What would you choose?" They'd been executing the vision so well that they never developed their own judgment. The leader wanted to delegate, but every time they stepped back, decisions stalled. The team waited for the leader's input because that's what they'd learned to do. Strong leadership direction, but weak team autonomy, and when they tried to shift the balance, the team wasn't ready.

Strong Team Autonomy, Weak Leadership Direction

A marketing team I observed had a hands-off leader who believed in letting the team decide everything. Each person owned their domain, made their own calls, felt empowered. The team was happy and autonomous. But nobody was looking at the bigger picture.

Here's what happened: The social media person was posting silly memes and goofy content, trying to be relatable and fun. The branding person was working on a serious, professional brand identity for enterprise customers. The customer communication person was focused purely on sales, sending transactional emails pushing discounts and promotions.

All three were executing their strategies well, but they were working against each other. A potential customer would see the goofy social media posts and think the company wasn't serious. Then they'd get a sales email pushing a discount, reinforcing the transactional feel. Meanwhile, the branding person was trying to build a professional reputation that neither of the other two were supporting.

The company was confused why people weren't sticking around. They had good initial engagement, but low retention. The problem was clear: everything was transactional. No one was thinking about relationship building or brand consistency. Each person was optimizing for their own metric without considering how it all fit together.

When leadership tried to create alignment, when they tried to introduce some central direction around brand positioning and customer relationship building, the team resisted. "We've been doing fine on our own," someone said in a team meeting. "My engagement numbers are up," said the social media person. "My conversion rates are good," said the customer communication person. They'd grown used to their autonomy. Strong team autonomy, but weak leadership direction, and when leadership tried to balance it, the team pushed back. The organization lacked coherence, and it showed in confused customers and low retention.

Trying to Have Both

An engineering manager I worked with tried to balance both: he'd set direction but also encourage team autonomy. He'd make strategic calls but let engineers make implementation decisions. It worked for a while, but then conflicts emerged.

Here's a specific example: The manager set a strategic direction to temporarily move to microservices to break down an overgrown monolith that had suffered from poor coding practices for too long. He let each team have autonomy in how they split their services and designed their abstractions.

But it became a race against fixing things. The monolith was causing production issues, and there was pressure to move fast. People overstepped clear boundaries and abstracted poorly because they didn't have enough experience with service architectures. There wasn't time to teach them properly. Teams created services that duplicated logic, built abstractions that leaked implementation details, and created dependencies that defeated the purpose of splitting the monolith.

Eventually the manager had to cut through and make some clear abstraction choices between the teams. He defined service boundaries, standardized interfaces, and overrode several architectural decisions. This eroded trust: "You said we could decide how to split our services," one engineer said. "Why did you give us autonomy if you were going to override us?" The next time, the manager let their decisions stand, which diluted the direction. The system ended up with inconsistent abstractions and unclear boundaries. He couldn't maintain both; each time he tried, one would give way to the other. He ended up oscillating between centralization and delegation, never finding a stable balance.

Each of these shows the trade-off: you can't have both strong leadership direction and strong team autonomy simultaneously. You choose a balance point, but that choice has consequences. And when you try to shift the balance, the system resists because it's already adapted to the current arrangement.

It often starts subtle: leadership boosts the team initially ("We're aligned!"), but over time, you see signs like disengaged meetings or folks leaving quietly.

I wouldn't say it's fully solvable, given the 2/3 idea, but you can soften it. Sequence things: build leadership first for direction, then layer in team health. Or go for "servant leaders" who empower without controlling.

And this gets me thinking about something deeper. Maybe the solution isn't about finding the perfect balance. Maybe strong organizations recognize which pillar needs attention at which stage, and they actively rotate their focus. They understand they're navigating a continuous loop that requires ongoing attention. This isn't a destination you arrive at.

Does this tension show up in your experience? What have you tried to manage it?