If you ask ten leaders who their team is, you’ll usually get a lot of the same answers.
Most point to the group they manage, aka “my department.”
Occasionally, someone will say “the Board.”
A few will pause and reflect.
It’s a simple question that exposes a powerful truth: in most organisations, leaders say they’re aligned, but their daily behaviour tells a different story. They protect their own team, fight for their functional priorities, and leave cross-functional collaboration to “later.”
In his book, “The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business”, Patrick Lencioini calls this out brilliantly through the concept of the First Team…the leadership team you sit on, not the one you lead.
It’s a deceptively simple shift, but it changes everything about how culture works.
Why the First Team Mindset Matters
The First Team mindset means recognising that your primary loyalty, energy, and accountability lie with your peers on the leadership team and the organisation’s collective success, not just your functional team.
When leaders embrace this idea, three things happen:
- Decisions speed up. You stop waiting for consensus across silos because the senior team operates as one.
- Trust deepens. Disagreements are handled directly, not via corridor conversations or passive resistance.
- Culture stabilises. Mixed messages vanish because everyone in the business sees leaders pulling in the same direction.
When the First Team mindset is missing, the opposite takes hold:
- Departments become silos.
- “We” quietly turns into “us and them.”
- Culture feels inconsistent, depending on which team you’re in.
Sound familiar?
The Culture Connection
Culture isn’t defined by slogans or posters; it’s modelled by leaders every day. And the most visible culture in any business is the one created at the top.
When a leadership team acts as one, debating well, deciding together, supporting decisions publicly, they create a foundation of consistency and trust that cascades through the organisation.
When they don’t, even the best culture initiatives crumble. And your people spot the gap instantly:
“They talk about collaboration, but we still see them pulling in different directions.”
That disconnect erodes credibility and energy faster than any external threat.
Culture starts where leadership alignment begins, and ends where it breaks down.
What It Takes to Be a True First Team
Adopting the First Team mindset is easy to say, but hard to live. It requires humility, courage, and a shift in how leaders define success.
Here are three habits of true First Team leaders:
- They prioritise the whole over the part.
They ask, “What’s best for the organisation?” not just “What’s best for my area?” They recognise that shared success builds stronger long-term performance than functional wins.
- They debate inside, unite outside.
Healthy conflict happens in the room — not after the meeting. Once a decision is made, they back it 100%, even if it wasn’t their preferred outcome. That unity builds trust both within the team and across the business.
- They model accountability.
They hold one another, as peers, often to higher standards than they expect from their own teams. This visible accountability shapes a culture of ownership rather than blame.
A Shift That Defines Leadership
Leading a function well is of course, important. But leading as part of a united First Team is where leadership truly counts.
That’s why the First Team mindset isn’t just a management technique, it’s a cultural shift. It’s the difference between “aligned in principle” and “aligned in practice.”
And when it happens, you can feel it:
- Conversations get more open.
- Decisions stick.
- People across the business start saying, “It finally feels like we’re one team.”
The Challenge
So, here’s a question worth sitting with:
“When push comes to shove, which team comes first for you? The one you lead, or the one you’re part of?”
For many leadership teams, this single shift unlocks a stronger culture, greater trust, and a higher-performing business.
If you’d like to explore what it looks like in practice, and how to make it work in your own organisation, join me for our upcoming 45-minute webinar:
The First Team Mindset : How Leadership Alignment shapes your culture.
Join us to uncover what gets in the way of that alignment, what great First Teams do differently, and how any leader, at any level, can help build a culture that truly leads as one.