My Leadership Team Is Like Paradise Hotel

Author: Majken Lorelei Matzau

He had built the company from nothing. Forty-two employees, solid revenue, genuine market position. And yet when he sat across from me and described his leadership team, the image that came to mind – unexpectedly, almost absurdly – was a reality television program.

Alliances. Betrayals. People performing for the camera rather than working toward a shared goal. Meetings that felt like tribal councils. Someone always at risk of being voted off.

"My leadership team is like Paradise Hotel," he said. And then, with a kind of exhausted recognition: "And I created it."

The Structure That Was Never Set

What this CEO had built – without intending to – was a team without a clear mandate. No one was certain where their authority began and ended. Overlapping responsibilities created invisible borders that everyone could feel but no one could name. And in the absence of clarity, politics filled the vacuum.

When mandates are unclear, the most alpha personalities tend to expand into the available space. Others contract in response. The team stops functioning as a collective intelligence and starts functioning as a collection of individuals protecting their territory.

Why Smart Leaders Create Chaotic Teams

The CEOs who most often create these dynamics are not incompetent – quite the opposite. They are typically brilliant, fast-thinking, and deeply invested in every part of the business. They have opinions about everything. And over time, this omnipresence erodes the clarity that their leaders need to function.

When a CEO can override any decision, every decision becomes provisional. When no one knows which decisions are truly theirs to make, no one makes them with full commitment. The leadership team becomes a holding pattern rather than an engine.

Structure Before Soft Skills

The most important insight from this work – one that runs counter to much leadership development orthodoxy – is that structural clarity must precede relational work. You cannot build team cohesion while the mandate remains undefined. You cannot improve communication while the roles themselves are contested.

Before we worked on trust, we worked on architecture. Who owns what? Where do decisions get made? What requires alignment, and what can be decided autonomously? These are not bureaucratic questions – they are the foundation on which genuine collaboration can be built.

What Changed

Over the course of our work together, this CEO redesigned the operating structure of his leadership team. He made explicit what had been implicit. He redistributed authority in ways that felt uncomfortable at first – giving up control is never easy for someone who built the business from nothing.

But the team that emerged on the other side of that discomfort was unrecognizable from the one we started with. Not because the people had changed – most of them were the same. But because the structure finally allowed them to be something other than contestants.

Stay tuned.

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