Every senior leadership team eventually arrives at some version of the same conversation. Someone’s stepping on someone else’s work. Decisions are being made without the right people in the room, or with too many people in the room. Accountability is murky. This is the lanes problem.
The CFO sees the economics on a new market expansion and has serious questions. The COO has already aligned his team around the launch timeline. The CPO has scoped the product localization work and is staffing up. The CRO has promised the board a revenue number that assumes a customer base that doesn’t exist yet in that market. Each of them knows their piece. None of them are optimizing for the whole. Raising concerns now feels like interference, so the CFO flags it quietly in a one-on-one with the CEO and considers it handled. The expansion launches undercapitalized, underbuilt, and oversold. The postmortem will call it a planning failure. It was a lanes failure, and it is far more common than most leadership teams want to admit.
What follows, in most organizations, is a process intervention for clearer decision rights. The clarity helps. It is also not the root of the problem.
In decades of research at Harvard on how teams at the top actually function, culminating in Senior Leadership Teams: What It Takes to Make Them Great (2008), Richard Hackman and his colleagues arrived at a blunt finding: most top teams are not actually teams. They are collections of individuals who report to the same person, coordinate on logistics, and attend the same meetings. Real interdependence, they found, is rare.
That distinction matters enormously, because interdependence is exactly what executive work demands. Hackman identified what he called “compelling direction” as the first condition of an effective team, but the second condition was a team structure that supported genuine collective work. Psychological safety, clear goals, and good process all matter, but they operate on top of a foundational question: is this group actually designed to do work together, or to report to each other?
Lanes thinking answers that question in the wrong direction. It optimizes for individual accountability, which is real and necessary, at the expense of collective intelligence, which is where executive teams create their most distinctive value.
Amy Edmondson’s decades of research on team learning deepens this picture. In her studies of hospital teams, financial services firms, and more she found that the teams with the highest psychological safety were not the ones with the most harmonious relationships. They were the ones where people could raise concerns, challenge assumptions, and surface problems across whatever formal divisions existed. Lanes, when they become norms of non-interference, suppress exactly this behavior. They teach people that the responsible thing is to stay in their domain.
None of this means lanes are wrong. Clear ownership is a genuine organizational need. The problem is what leaders tend to conflate: accountability for outcomes and authority over information.
These are different things.
MIT’s Deborah Ancona, in her work on X-teams, found that the most effective teams inside complex organizations were not internally focused, they were boundary-spanning. They actively sought information from outside their immediate domain, managed relationships with adjacent groups, and adapted their structure to the task at hand. The teams that underperformed were the ones that focused inward, protecting their territory, executing against fixed assumptions.
The distinction Ancona draws is between coordination and integration. Coordination is logistics: who does what, by when, with what resources. Integration is something harder: making sense of how the pieces affect each other, holding the systemic view, allowing the whole to be smarter than any single part. Executive teams that live in lanes are often very good at coordination and terrible at integration.
Part of what makes lanes so persistent is that they solve for something real. In organizations that have grown fast, survived chaos, or absorbed too many competing priorities, clarity about ownership is genuinely stabilizing. Leaders stop duplicating effort. Decision rights become legible. People know who to call.
The problem is that lanes get installed as a solution to a relational problem. When an executive team is in conflict, when there is turf competition or unclear authority or one leader whose informal power exceeds their formal mandate, the lanes conversation is a way of addressing the tension without addressing the tension. It externalizes a structural fix for what is actually a trust deficit.
In the research on organizational behavior, this pattern has a name. Chris Argyris called it “defensive routines”: behaviors that protect individuals and teams from the discomfort of surfacing real issues, and that make those real issues harder to address over time. Lanes, in dysfunctional teams, are often a defensive routine dressed up as an operating model.
When clarity about ownership is installed in place of trust rather than alongside it, it teaches the team that coordination is safe and candor is risky. That is precisely backwards from what integration requires.
The organizations that navigate this well, and there is enough documented research to identify the pattern, tend to do a few things differently.
They separate domains from debates. Each leader owns their function, but the team has standing permission, even obligation, to engage on strategic questions that cut across functions. The domains are clear but the discussions are not siloed. The structural accountability is precise, but the intellectual engagement is deliberately boundary-crossing.
They distinguish between involvement and interference. Hackman’s work on this is useful: the question for leaders is not whether to involve themselves in adjacent domains but how. Asking questions is not the same as overriding decisions. Raising a risk is not the same as assuming control. Organizations that make this distinction explicit give leaders permission to think across the system without triggering territorial responses. They treat integration as a senior leadership competency. In practice that means teams that build meeting structures where cross-functional challenges get deliberate airtime. They create decision frameworks that require at least two functions to sign off on major commitments. They review outcomes as a team, not just in functional silos.
Underneath the lanes conversation is a question about identity. Each member of a senior leadership team carries two roles simultaneously: the leader of their function and a member of the enterprise’s governing body. These roles require different orientations. The functional leader’s job is to optimize for their domain. The governing body member’s job is to optimize for the whole, even when that creates friction with their domain.
Most leaders are promoted into executive teams because they are exceptional at the first role. The second role is rarely taught, rarely made explicit, and rarely assessed. What follows is predictable: leaders default to the orientation they know, and the team becomes a set of lanes.
The organizations that get this right treat it as a developmental question, not just a structural one. They name the dual role explicitly. They create conditions where thinking about the whole is rewarded. They hold leaders accountable for how they show up as members of the collective.
Lanes are not the problem. The belief that lanes are sufficient is the problem. Ownership and integration are not in tension. The teams that perform at the highest levels hold both, which requires more than a clear org chart. It requires leaders who have learned to think bigger than their own domain, and a team that has built the trust to hold them accountable when they do.Visit CarolinaCaro.com