A Member of Two Teams

The most important promotion in a leader's career is usually the one nobody explains. You run a function. You run it well. One day you are invited onto the leadership team of the business.

Most leaders hear that as a reward for running the function, which it is. What almost nobody tells them is that the job itself has changed. The day you join the leadership team, you stop belonging to one team and start belonging to two: the function you lead, and the leadership team you have just joined.

Almost everything that goes wrong for leaders at this level comes from not noticing that, or from noticing it and not acting on it.

The meeting where it shows

Sit in any leadership team meeting and you can see who has noticed.

There is always somebody who speaks only when their own function appears on the agenda, and who says nothing of substance about anyone else's. The sales director who comes alive for the pipeline review and goes quiet for the discussion about operations. The finance director who treats every item as either a finance item or a break.

Everybody in that room knows what that person is. They are not a member of the team. They are a delegate from a function, and delegates get listened to the way lobbyists get listened to, which is politely and with a discount applied.

That discount is the most expensive thing in this essay, because it is applied silently and it is applied to everything you say afterwards, including the things that are true and urgent.

You also lose membership without being told. Nobody announces it. You find out from the calendar, because the conversation that shapes a decision now happens before you are in the room and you are brought in afterwards to be informed.

Why the function keeps winning

It is worth being honest about why leaders keep optimising for their own function, because the reasons are structural rather than personal.

Your targets are functional. Your bonus probably is too. The people who depend on you sit in the function, and their problems arrive daily and concrete while the organisation's problems arrive quarterly and abstract. And you were promoted for functional excellence, so the function is where you are confident and the rest of the agenda is where you are not.

So defending your corner is not a character flaw. It is what the whole system quietly pays you to do.

Watch a budget round to see where it leads. Sales argues for headcount, operations for capex, marketing defends its spend. Every argument is locally correct, and the chief executive ends up as the only person in the room working for the organisation.

A leadership team where every member optimises for their own function is not a team. It is a negotiation.

The test of membership is simple and uncomfortable. Can you argue for a decision that costs your function something, because it is right for the business? Until the answer is yes, you have a seat, not a membership.

Earning the right to be believed

There is a mechanism underneath that test which took me a long time to see clearly.

Everything you say in that room that would benefit your own function is discounted before it is heard. Ask for more headcount, a lower target, a longer runway, and the request is indistinguishable from lobbying, no matter how true it is. That is not cynicism. It is the team correctly noticing that every function asks for the same things.

Which means the credibility you need for the one argument that matters is not built in that argument. It comes from consistently demonstrating sound judgement. Having delivered what you said you would deliver. Having surfaced problems early, while they were still small enough to be inconvenient rather than serious. Having been balanced rather than self-serving for long enough that balance is what people expect from you.

Then, when you argue for something that also happens to help your function, people believe you are calling it as you see it rather than negotiating for your own position. That is the whole return, and there is no faster way to earn it.

What membership asks of you

Membership makes two demands, and they run in different directions.

In the room, it demands a view about things that are not yours. Members are expected to have an opinion about what the business should do, including the parts they do not run. That will feel presumptuous at first, and the discomfort is not a sign you are doing it wrong. Say the thing anyway. The alternative is the discount.

Outside the room, it demands that you carry decisions back to your function as a member, not a channel. A leader whose only contribution to their own team is passing on what the leadership team has decided is not a member of that team either. They are a channel, and people stop bringing things to a channel.

The hard case is the decision that costs your people something. When you bring it to them, they want to know whether you fought. Not whether you won. They are assessing whether you are a member of their team or an instrument of somebody else's. The leadership team is assessing something different: once a decision is made, a member owns it.

There is a sentence that satisfies both teams and it is the right sentence. I argued this. I lost. We are doing it, and I am behind it.

What you cannot control is how it lands. The leadership team hears ownership. Some of your own people hear self-protection, and no amount of care in the delivery will move all of them. That is the reality of the role rather than a failure of communication. Say the true thing anyway.

The cheap way out is available and it works immediately, which is why so many leaders take it. You deliver the decision with a small distancing gesture. A shrug, a tone, a phrase about what they have decided. The room warms to you within seconds and you have bought local credibility at a price you will not see on the invoice. You have told your own people that you are not a member of the team that made the decision, which means the next thing you bring them arrives pre-discounted. And you have told the decision itself that it does not have to be implemented properly.

What you cannot do is stand outside a decision you are accountable for and survive as a member of either team.

The same pattern, one level up

Once you can see this, you will see it repeat at every level of a multinational.

A country leader is a functional leader writ large. They run a market, and they sit on a regional leadership team. The same defaults apply and the same discount is waiting. The country head who speaks only about their own market is a delegate from a territory, and the regional room treats them exactly the way the local room treats the finance director who only does finance.

The distance adds one thing worth naming. A regional team is not badly informed about your market. It has your numbers, usually in more detail than you would like. What it lacks is context: it knows what happened and not why. So the member's contribution from a market is causation rather than data, and causation is the one thing that cannot be automated into a dashboard.

I watched this at close range when regional and global leadership started expecting country organisations to originate rather than execute. Authority was delegated properly: decision rights, resources, signature limits. What could not be delegated was membership. Headquarters granted authority and believed it had admitted the country to the team, and membership is not granted. It is earned the same way it is earned one level down, by demonstrating judgement about the whole business rather than your part of it.

The failure modes repeat too. The leaders I watch struggle most are not the ones under the most pressure. They are the ones who have quietly picked a side. Some become the regional team's representative in the market and lose the building. Others become the market's advocate at the regional table and get the discount applied to everything they say. Both are more comfortable than holding both memberships, and both end the same way.

Region and group, division and enterprise, it is the same job again. Every leadership level above the first is a membership of two teams, and the leaders who keep rising are the ones who learned to hold both at the level below.

Both, at once

Leaders in this position usually describe themselves as being in the middle. Caught between their team and the leadership team. Squeezed. I think that is the single most damaging idea a leader can hold about this job, because the middle is a place things pass through, and your value in the middle is your tolerance for discomfort.

You are not in the middle. You are a member of two teams.

So the point to carry away is the one I wish somebody had said plainly at the moment of promotion. The day you join the leadership team, your job changes. You are no longer simply leading your function. You are now serving two teams.