Why the Right Hires Don't Always Make the Right Team

A regional president at a mid-sized independent network asked me to work with his leadership team last year.

He had made three senior hires in the preceding eighteen months. All three were strong. Experienced, commercially credible, well-regarded in the market. He had been deliberate about it. No rushed decisions. No compromises.

Six months after the last hire settled in, the team was not working. last year.

What good looked like on paper

The structure made sense. The roles were clearly defined. Experience levels matched what the business needed. On paper, he had done everything correctly.

But decisions were taking twice as long as they should. Accountability between functions was blurring. Two of the three new hires had retreated into their own lanes. The CEO who had spent the better part of two years building this team was now carrying more weight than before they arrived.

He called it a failure of judgment. He was wrong about that.

The gap nobody talks about

Most conversations about leadership quality stop at the individual.

Is this person capable? Do they have the right experience? Will they perform in this market?

These are the right questions for executive search. They are the wrong questions for building a leadership team.

A leadership team is not a collection of capable individuals. It is a system. And systems have dynamics that individual assessments cannot reveal.

The three hires were all strong. That was not the problem. The problem was that nobody had designed how they were supposed to operate together. Role clarity existed. Operating clarity did not: how decisions get made, where collaboration is actually required, how disagreement is supposed to surface.

What the iEQ9 surfaces

When I work with a leadership team, I start with the iEQ9 — the Integrative Enneagram assessment. Not to label people, but to make visible what the team cannot easily see about itself.

The iEQ9 surfaces core motivations, not just behaviours. It shows what each person is unconsciously protecting, what they avoid, and what they need from the people around them to operate at their best. At team level, it also shows the dominant patterns across the group: the energies that are over-expressed, and the energies that are missing.

In this case, the team profile was illuminating.

The CEO had a strong performance orientation and a fast-moving instinct for reading situations.

For him, confidence in a new environment is immediate. He assumed capable people would assert themselves from day one. When the new hires moved cautiously in their first months — reading the culture, watching how decisions were made, choosing when to speak — he interpreted that caution as disengagement.

The new hires were not disengaged. They were waiting to understand the rules of the room before they showed up fully. That wait was natural. The misread was the problem.

The dynamic nobody named

Once you understand how different types process new environments, what looked like a performance problem becomes something more specific.

Leaders with strong image and performance drivers often assume that confidence is immediate. They read hesitation as weakness rather than deliberateness.

Meanwhile, two of the new hires needed to understand the relational structure before operating openly within it. They were not being passive. They were being accurate. The difference matters, because the interventions are completely different.

What this team needed was not a performance conversation. It needed a shared language for how it was going to operate — and someone to hold the mirror still long enough for the group to look at itself honestly.

The workshop

I run these as facilitated sessions, typically over one to two days, using the iEQ9 team report as the foundation. The work is not therapeutic and it is not abstract. It is practical: what does this team over-do, what does it consistently fail to do, and where are the structural gaps in how it makes decisions and resolves conflict?

In this case, the session surfaced three things nobody had named out loud.

The CEO was the default decision point for conversations that did not need him — not because he wanted to be, but because the team had not agreed on what required his input and what did not.

Two of the new hires were competing for influence in a way that looked like collaboration but was quietly territorial. The iEQ9 profiles helped name that pattern without making it personal.

And the founding dynamic — the CEO's original vision for how this team would operate — had never been explicitly shared with the people hired to execute it. They were guessing at priorities they should have been told.

What shifted

None of this required months of work. It required naming what everyone already half-knew but had not said out loud.

Within three months, the CEO was no longer the bottleneck. The two hires who had been quietly competing had found a working division of influence. The third, who had gone quiet, was now one of the most constructive voices in the room.

The people had not changed. The system had.

The principle

Recruitment answers one question: are these the right people?

Leadership advisory answers a different one: are these people operating in a way that makes the most of what each of them brings?

The first question is necessary. It is not sufficient.

Strong individual hires are a precondition. What happens after they arrive; how the team is designed to function, what dynamics are named and what remain invisible, determines whether the investment pays off.

The iEQ9 does not tell you who to hire. It tells you what you have built, and what it will take to make it work.