The hidden risk of building a leadership team with people you know

You’ve worked together before. You trust each other. You know how the other person thinks under pressure. On paper, it’s the safest move.

In many ways, it is. Shared history creates speed—faster decisions, candid conversations, less time decoding intent. When CEOs bring former colleagues into senior roles, baseline trust feels like rocket fuel.

But familiarity also introduces a hidden risk that undermines executive teams far more often than leaders anticipate.

What I see repeatedly in executive teams built on shared history is the quiet formation of inner circles. Leaders who “go way back” share shorthand, context, and trust earned elsewhere. Others, often equally capable with deep institutional knowledge, find themselves outside that orbit.

I coached a CEO who’d brought three former colleagues into a 10-person executive team. Within months, critical decisions were being pre-discussed among “The Four” before formal meetings. The other six leaders became increasingly passive, not because they lacked capability, but because challenging pre-baked decisions felt politically risky.

The damage isn’t caused by intent. It’s caused by relationships that were never recalibrated for a new reality, and by new relationships that were never deliberately cultivated.

The most effective executive teams consistently apply these four practices to prevent individual excellence from turning into organizational friction.

1. Connection

High-performing teams invest time getting to know one another, all members, not just familiar faces, before diving into business results. Career paths, pivotal decisions, what energizes and frustrates them.

This doesn’t take much time. A small investment upfront pays dividends for months. When facilitating executive off-sites, I often begin with a simple “my journey” exercise using images rather than words to reflect career highs, lows, decision points, and at least one non-work passion.

The impact is often immediate. Leaders who’ve worked together for decades consistently say they learn something new about their colleagues, newly hired executives feel less like outsiders from day one, and everyone gains a clearer sense of how to tap into the talent around the table.

2. Clarify contributions 

Each executive understands not only what they own but also how their contribution creates value for the enterprise. Where do I lead? Where do I support others? Where might my strengths unintentionally create drag?

Without this clarity, leaders default to optimizing their own function. Silos aren’t a cultural failure; they’re the natural outcome of unexamined individual priorities.

3. Intentional relationship recalibration

For leaders with shared history, relationships must be explicitly reset for the new context. What worked at the last company doesn’t automatically apply here. Assumptions from past roles, how we made decisions, how we disagreed, who deferred to whom, need to be examined, not inherited.

Strong teams explicitly revisit:

• How decisions are made now (not how they used to be)
• How disagreement is expected to show up in this company
• What information must travel across functions, not just within them
• How tension and conflict will be surfaced early within this team

This isn’t about questioning trust; it’s about updating the operating system. The CFO who was your peer at the last company now reports to you. The CMO you brought in was brilliant at a scrappy startup, but this is a public company with regulatory constraints. Same people, different game, different rules. Without recalibration, old patterns quietly reassert themselves, even when they no longer serve the business, or the team.

4. Accountability over loyalty

Loyalty protects people. Accountability protects performance.

In cohesive executive teams, leaders don’t avoid difficult conversations or cover for one another in the name of trust. They hold peers to shared standards, especially when it’s uncomfortable.

Many capable teams stall here. Loyalty gets mistaken for cohesion when, in reality, unchecked loyalty is what allows silos and turf wars to persist.

What great executive teams look like in practice

In the strongest executive teams, something subtle but powerful happens in meetings.

Side conversations are surfaced in the room. Misalignment is named before decisions are finalized. When one voice dominates, others step in, not to challenge authority, but to protect cohesion. Decision rights are referenced rather than assumed.

The CEO doesn’t act as referee. The team self-corrects.

That’s the signal of a deliberately designed team. And it’s why these teams execute faster in a crisis. Trust wasn’t inherited from the past; it was engineered for the present.

The CEO who’d created “The Four”? Once we surfaced the pattern and reset expectations, decision quality improved, and the full team reengaged. But it required deliberate intervention, not hope.

The CEO’s real work

If you’re building a leadership team from people you already know, your job isn’t to rely on trust, it’s to reengineer it.

Think of it this way: you wouldn’t move into a new office and keep the same floor plan from your last building. Why would you import relationship patterns from a different company, different roles, different stakes?

The best leadership teams don’t suppress individuality. They harness it through intentional relationship design.

Shared history may get you started. Only deliberate cohesion sustains performance.