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19%of leaders say different parts of the business work well together
43%say the executive team fosters collaboration / cross-functional teamwork
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C-suite structures have always been neatly divided: clear lines were drawn between each role to define areas of responsibility and where accountability sits. The CFO owns finance. The CHRO owns people. The CTO owns technology.
For decades, these lines created clarity. But today, many of the business outcomes that matter most no longer fit neatly inside them. In fact, what now decides whether the enterprise succeeds is the work that happens where nobody drew a line.
The priorities that will define the next decade of growth now cut across every function. AI crosses entire business models. Workforce transformation does not belong only to HR, resilience to Operations, or customer experience to Marketing. Cybersecurity lives in all functions, not just technology, and sustainability isn’t only a matter important to corporate affairs.
No single function can deliver against these challenges alone. Yet executive accountability remains largely defined one function at a time. That creates a fundamental mismatch between how leadership is organized and how organizational outcomes need to be delivered.
Leaders see the consequences. Only 19% of CEOs and C-suite leaders say different parts of their business work well together. And only 43% said their executive team encourages cross-functional teamwork. In other words, the people running the enterprise believe it is not, in any meaningful sense, running as one.
With the most important leadership now happening between functional lines, not within them, there is a significant opportunity for organizations to rethink who they hire and develop, and how they set up their top team for success.
Here we explore why functional excellence is no longer enough on its own, what it means for executives to lead beyond their functions, and how organizations can build top teams capable of collectively stewarding the enterprise.
Across our research, a consistent pattern is emerging: the demands on leadership are changing faster than many of the structures and practices designed to support it.
57% think their executive team has the capabilities to lead successfully—down from 80% in 2021
39% say roles and responsibilities are genuinely clear within their organization
19% say different parts of their business work well together
43% say the executive team fosters collaboration and encourages cross-functional teamwork
28% say their executive team balances short-term and long-term priorities
29% describe transformation efforts as very or extremely successful
25% report increased profitability from AI implementation
Issues increasingly stack and interact, compounding complexity. Leaders must navigate multiple interconnected consequences at once.
Disruption is arriving faster as innovation cycles compress. The opportunities for those who move early are growing, as are the risks for those who do not.
Business-critical issues now cut across business units, requiring leaders to solve problems together that no single function can own.
Leaders must deliver short-term performance while making decisions whose impact may take years or decades to materialize.
Leaders face increasingly diverse—and often conflicting—stakeholder expectations. Alignment is rarely possible, while social media can amplify disagreement.
Functional structures remain essential. They create expertise, clarity and accountability. But as more critical business outcomes depend on several functions working together, the points of connection between them become increasingly consequential.
Yet organizations tend to be much more explicit about what individual executives own than what they own together. Decision rights, incentives and measures are usually clearest within functional boundaries—and less clear when an outcome crosses them.
As a result, an organization can have strong functions, led by highly capable executives, and still struggle to deliver as an enterprise.
That mismatch creates three risks.
Leadership advisor, Legal, Risk, and Compliance Practice, RRA
Leading between the lines requires much more than better collaboration or goodwill between C-suite executives (although both are important). It requires a different approach to how the top team operates: what leaders own together, how enterprise trade-offs are resolved, and how the CEO enables the team to lead collectively.
Ultimately, the purpose of the executive team needs to extend beyond its individual functional mandates. It does not exist to represent the functions to the CEO. It exists to steward the enterprise—to own, together, the small number of outcomes that will decide the organization's future, and to hold the long term and the short term in the same conversation.
Stewardship is easy to endorse in principle. It becomes difficult at the moment it costs something: when the CFO must back an investment with uncertain near-term returns, when the CHRO must support a productivity decision with hard workforce consequences, when a business-unit leader must give up resources for a higher-value enterprise priority, or when a leader's own scorecard suffers because the enterprise made a different trade-off.
Collaboration alone does not resolve these conflicts. Enterprise stewardship requires leaders to put the needs of the organization ahead of optimizing their own function—even when doing so comes at a cost. That requires a different way of leading, built around three imperatives.
Start by identifying the small number of outcomes the executive team genuinely owns together. These should be outcomes that matter to enterprise performance but cannot be delivered by any one function alone—such as AI adoption, workforce transformation, capital allocation or enterprise resilience.
Next, be clear about exactly how leaders will work together to deliver them: Who owns the outcome together? Which executives need to contribute? Where do decision rights sit? What happens when leaders disagree? And how will success be measured?
Without that clarity, “shared ownership” can easily become diluted ownership, with several executives involved but no one clear on how decisions get made or where ultimate accountability sits.
The interests of the enterprise and the function will not always align, and executives need to understand what is expected of them when they diverge.
That means being willing to support an enterprise decision even when it comes at a cost to their own function. It also means challenging decisions fully before they are made, then carrying an outcome that went against them as visibly as one that went their way.
Measures and incentives need to reinforce that expectation. Leaders cannot be asked to prioritize enterprise outcomes while being rewarded solely for optimizing their own function. The outcomes executives own together need to carry meaningful weight alongside functional performance.
That mindset also needs to be developed before leaders reach the top team. Give future executives meaningful responsibility for outcomes they cannot deliver through their own authority—requiring them to influence peers, navigate competing priorities and succeed through other functions as well as their own.
• Finance ↔ Technology
From making the investment case to owning a value case together
Functional leadership means tech defends its investment case to finance. Enterprise leadership means jointly defining how transformation value is measured, tracked, and funded.
• Legal & Risk ↔ Strategy
From reviewing decisions to shaping decisions together
Functional leadership means Strategy develops the choice and Legal & Risk reviews it. Enterprise leadership means Strategy and Legal & Risk jointly shape choices that balance opportunity and risk from the outset.
• HR ↔ Technology
From deploying tools to redesigning work together
Functional leadership means Technology deploys new tools and HR supports adoption. Enterprise leadership means jointly redesigning how work gets done—and where technology can create the greatest value.
• Operations ↔ Technology
From automating processes to rethinking the work
Functional leadership means Technology delivers tools into an existing operating model. Enterprise leadership means jointly rethinking how the work should happen before deciding what to automate.
Collective enterprise leadership requires the CEO to lead differently too.
When a cross-functional issue arises, resolving it personally can feel like the fastest route forward. But repeatedly doing so reinforces a hub-and-spoke model in which executives bring competing priorities to the CEO rather than working through them with one another.
CEOs need to be explicit about which decisions genuinely require their involvement, which belong to the executive team collectively, and which executives should resolve directly with one another. The aim is to create more spoke-to-spoke leadership, with executives taking greater responsibility for resolving the dependencies and trade-offs between their functions.
The CEO remains central—but less as the place where everything integrates, and more as the leader who builds a team capable of integrating more for itself.
Executive teams furthest along in this reset treat these questions as a standing governance item rather than a one-time exercise.
• What are the few outcomes this executive team genuinely owns together?
If everything is collectively owned, nothing really is.
• Where are functional priorities, measures or incentives working against an enterprise outcome?
Enterprise stewardship becomes most important when what is right for the organization comes at a cost to an individual function.
• Which decisions are escalating to the CEO that the executive team should be resolving itself?
Repeated escalation can be a sign that collective accountability or decision rights remain unclear.
• If a member of the executive team changed tomorrow, what would their successor have to learn through experience rather than design?
The answer reveals where critical ways of working still depend on relationships and unwritten agreements.
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