Resetting Your Leadership Team in the New Year

A 5-Step Game Plan to Recover Trust, Get Unstuck, and Achieve More Together in 2025

2024 was a challenging year for many of the CEOs and Executive Teams I work with. Even where organizations achieved outstanding results, many did so at a significant cost—burnt-out leaders or team members, painful executive transitions and layoffs, or deep cuts to operating budgets. For teams that struggled to deliver against their goals, last year was even harder.

If your leadership team seems out of step, there’s no better time than now to take the necessary actions to get things back on track. Even if it takes a few months of effort, laying the groundwork over the next few weeks—or just after the holidays—can reset your team and provide the cohesive, competent, and aligned leadership your employees crave and deserve.

Leadership team resets are one of the most rewarding areas of work we focus on at Breaker28. Here’s the framework we use when advising CEOs, EDs, and Chiefs of Staff who are looking to improve Executive Team dynamics:

1. Tell Yourself the Truth About Where Things Stand

For many high-performing CEOs and EDs, it can be hard to fully acknowledge how poorly the executive team is functioning or how deep the trust issues run—and, most importantly, how these gaps are impacting managers, employees, and the work overall. This is especially true if you feel partly responsible for the dysfunction.

I’m not suggesting you panic (no one needs that right now), but in my experience, a CEO/ED and their E-Team won’t sustain the commitment to change or put in the necessary work unless they’re clear on what’s at stake. That starts with the leader “on the hook” for the team’s success being honest with themselves about how things are going.

2. Get Clear on What You Expect and Need From the Team

When CEOs and EDs are busy, it can be hard to pinpoint exactly what’s missing on the team and what’s needed instead. It’s easy to fall into recency bias, focusing on the latest issue rather than identifying broader patterns that need addressing.

A critical step in repairing your team and improving its impact includes hearing from your team to get their perspective. However, you cannot delegate the crucial responsibility of defining what “good” looks like as the leader of the group.

3. Gather Information About Your Executive Team’s Experiences and Concerns

If your executive team meetings or email exchanges are giving you a bad feeling, chances are you’re not the only one experiencing it. For newer team members or those with less power in the group, it might be easier for them to share feedback in one-on-one check-ins rather than in a full-group setting—at least to start.

If you have sufficient trust with your Executive leaders, create a structured set of questions to ask during upcoming check-ins to get a sense of their experiences. These questions should give you a pulse on how they’re experiencing the team, what they expect and need from you and their colleagues, and their ideas for improving the dynamic.

To avoid confusion, let the team know this process is happening, explain why you’re doing it, and share the questions (or at least the topics) in advance.

4. Facilitate a Reset Conversation (In-Person Is Best, but Virtual Works Too)

Once you’ve gathered a clear sense of where your team stands, what they need, and how that aligns (or doesn’t) with your perspective, it’s time to host a reset conversation.

Depending on the needs of your team and the severity of the trust issues, this could take as little as two hours or as much as a half-day. You can lead this yourself or hire a consultant to help—but make sure the person or firm you choose has a reputation for repairing leadership teams, not creating more drama.

At a minimum, the goals of this session should include:

• Developing a shared understanding of where your team stands and where it’s going.
• Creating space for team members to voice concerns, take accountability for missteps, and repair trust.
• Developing a simple action plan to guide the team’s work in repairing relationships and aligning further in the weeks ahead.

5. Create Accountability and Structures Around Your Plan

One result of your reset conversation should be a clear, simple action plan to strengthen the team. As a follow-up, establish a cadence of accountability around the plan by building structures or processes to ensure change happens.

This could include a monthly check-in to review commitments, dedicating a segment of every ET meeting to focus on progress, or revisiting specific goals from the plan. The sooner you create systems to ensure commitments are honored—even when work gets busy or challenging—the more likely the change will stick.

Change is hard, and these steps are just the beginning—but sometimes a kickstart is all you need to overcome negative momentum and set your leadership team on the right track.

Complimentary offer: If you’re a CEO or ED struggling to get your Exec Team back on track, I’d be glad to offer you a complimentary 30-minute spot coaching session. Schedule with me by emailing [email protected].