Bringing a fragmented technology services team together

Context snapshot

Industry: Large business insurance and underwriting

Domain: Shared Technology services leadership team

Environment: Complex, regulated, multi-activity

Team challenge: Fragmentation and low collective alignment

Strategic need: Operate as a leadership team, not a reporting forum

Executive tension

This large business insurance underwriter operated in a highly complex operational and technical environment.

Within a shared Technology services leadership team, accountability had grown organically. Each leader owned a distinct set of activities, priorities, and stakeholders.

Over time, this created a quiet but significant tension:

• The team met regularly, but did not operate as a team

• Meetings had become sequential updates to the director

• Peer-to-peer collaboration was minimal

• Leaders felt time was being consumed without collective progress

Individually, leaders were performing.

Collectively, the system was not.

Reframing the problem

This was not a capability, intent, or communication issue.

It was a leadership operating model problem.

Each leader was competent, accountable, and operating under genuine pressure. But the structure they were working within created predictable failure modes:

• No shared definition of collective accountability

• No unifying strategic focus

• An operating rhythm optimised for reporting, not collaboration

As a result:

• Meetings reinforced silos rather than coherence

• Time together generated updates, not decisions

• Leaders optimised locally rather than systemically

What the team did not need was:

• Better status reporting

• More agenda items

• Tighter facilitation

What it needed was:

• A shared understanding of purpose

• Clarity on what required collective leadership

• An operating rhythm that enabled alignment, learning, and decision-making

In short, the team needed to become a team around shared objectives.

How we worked

1. Establish a safe leadership space

Through facilitated coaching sessions, we created space for leaders to:

• Step out of day-to-day delivery

• Surface tensions without defensiveness

• Reflect on how the team was operating, not just what it was doing

This shifted conversations from individual accountability to collective responsibility.

2. Identify common ground

Rather than forcing alignment, we worked with the team to:

• Identify where activities intersected

• Clarify shared dependencies and constraints

• Articulate outcomes no individual could deliver alone

This revealed a clear set of shared leadership concerns that became the basis for joint work.

3. Define a collective strategy

From this common ground, the team:

• Articulated a small number of shared priorities

• Made trade-offs between competing demands explicit

• Agreed where to focus attention as a leadership group

The conversation shifted from “my area” to “our system”.

4. Redesign the operating model

With clarity on purpose and priorities, the team redesigned how it worked:

• Meeting cadence was simplified

• Agendas shifted from updates to strategic and systemic topics

• Time together was used to align, learn, and make decisions

• Leadership development became an explicit part of the team’s remit

The operating model evolved to support collaboration, not reporting.

Evidence of movement

The impact was visible quickly.

Meetings became shorter and more focused. Peer-to-peer challenge increased, and leaders reported greater value from the time spent together. Alignment improved across previously disconnected activities, and decisions were increasingly owned collectively rather than escalated.

The team moved from polite coexistence to active collaboration, operating as a leadership system rather than a coordination forum.

For the director, leadership responsibility became more distributed. Energy shifted away from managing updates toward shaping outcomes, resulting in a true leadership team rather than a management meeting.

Inviting your reflection

If your leadership team:

• Spends most of its time reporting

• Struggles to find common ground across diverse activities

• Feels busy but not aligned

the issue may not be performance.

It may be how the team is designed to work together — and whether your leadership structures reinforce silos or actively enable collaboration and collective ownership.