Keep your executive team to five to seven people. That group runs the weekly tactics, reviews KPI and OKR progress each month, and resets the plan each quarter. Put strategy and innovation into a separate strategy council. If the executive meeting is already too crowded to make decisions, no agenda or facilitator will fix it. You need fewer people in the room. That’s the starting point for executive team coaching.
When I walk into a scaling company, I count the chairs around the executive table.
If there are twelve, I can usually predict the meeting. Each functional leader gives an update. Everyone gets a chance to speak. The difficult issues are noted for later. Then two or three people make the real decision after the meeting.
The company hasn’t become slow because the people are weak. It’s become slow because too many people are involved in every decision.
A leadership team is one of the few parts of a business that gets less effective as it grows.
How many people should be on an executive team?
Five to seven. Never more than seven when you’re running one business with one profit line.
I didn’t always understand why. At Rackspace and Peer 1, I could feel meetings getting heavier as the senior group grew, but I couldn’t explain what was happening. Every person had a valid reason to be there. Finance needed a voice. Sales needed a voice. Marketing, operations and people did too.
The problem wasn’t any one person. It was what happened to the conversation when all of them joined it.
With six people, you can challenge an assumption, follow an answer and change your mind. With twelve, you manage airtime. Updates replace debate because there’s no time to do anything else.
A group with several separate businesses under one roof may need a larger forum with smaller decision groups underneath it. But if you’re running one founder-led business, that’s a different problem.
For your executive team, seven is enough.
The research backs this up. Ruth Wageman, Debra Nunes, James Burruss and Richard Hackman studied more than a hundred senior leadership teams for their book Senior Leadership Teams. They found six conditions that explained up to 80% of team effectiveness. Keeping the team to the right size was one of them.
I cover all six conditions for a high-performing team in a separate article. The relevant point here is that a team needs enough people to cover the work, but not so many that people stop participating.
John Housego saw the same problem during his twenty-two years at W.L. Gore. He found that teams worked well at eight to ten people and became inefficient once they moved past twelve.
Gore applied the same thinking to its factories. When a plant reached roughly 150 people, the company would split it. Housego’s point wasn’t that 150 was a universal law. It was that Gore didn’t wait for size to damage how people worked together.
What is the difference between an executive team, an extended leadership team and a strategy council?
You need three groups because you’ve got three different kinds of work.
The executive team runs the business. The extended leadership team manages delivery and people across the functions. The strategy council looks beyond the current plan and helps you decide what comes next.
Put all three jobs into one meeting and tactics will win. They always do. The customer problem that needs an answer today will beat the market shift that might matter next year.
The XLT isn’t a junior version of the executive team. Its members lead the functions and manage the people doing the work. They need different meetings because they’re making different decisions.
How did your executive team get this big?
You didn’t set out to build a twelve-person executive team.
At thirty employees, you invited the people you relied on. Finance joined because you needed the numbers. Marketing joined because growth was on the agenda. The people lead joined because hiring had become difficult.
Then you reached a hundred employees and hired more experienced functional leaders. The new people joined the meeting, but the original group stayed.
Nobody wanted the difficult conversation about who still needed a seat, so you avoided it and added another chair.
Do that a few times and every function has a representative. You’ve got twelve people in the room, even though you never decided that twelve was the right number.
What happens when the executive team becomes a committee?
The meeting turns into a sequence of updates.
Finance reports. Sales reports. Marketing reports. Operations reports. People ask a few questions, but there’s no time to stay with an issue long enough to resolve it.
Then the hour’s gone and nobody’s made a decision.
Strategy meetings aren’t much better. Everyone offers an opinion, but nobody challenges it because there are too many people waiting to speak. The group uses slides to keep things orderly, which makes the meeting easier to run and less useful.
The real decisions happen afterwards. Two people agree the answer in the corridor. Three people sort it out on a call the next morning. You make the final choice when everyone else has gone.
If that sounds familiar, the executive meeting isn’t where you’re running the business. It’s where people report what their part of the business has been doing.
Look back at your last meeting. Which people helped make a decision, and which people only gave an update?
The second group doesn’t need a permanent seat.
How do you cut the executive team without breaking the business?
Start with a blank org chart.
Ask the current senior group: “If this company were twice the size, what leadership structure would it need?”
Keep names out of the first conversation. Agree which decisions belong at the top, which functions can sit under one leader, and how many direct reports you can manage properly.
You may decide that sales and marketing need one revenue leader. You may decide that the people lead belongs on the XLT rather than the ELT. The answer depends on the business. The process doesn’t.
Agree the roles first. Put names against them second.
Don’t make the common mistake of removing people from the meeting while leaving all of them reporting to you. If you do, they’ll bring the same coordination problems to you one at a time.
The XLT needs to own day-to-day delivery and people management across the functions. The strategy council needs to protect time for questions about the future. Otherwise the smaller ELT becomes either another operational bottleneck or a purely tactical meeting.
There’s also a personal issue to handle.
Michael Cahill described it well when I had him on Scale to Win. People say, “I am the Marketing Director”, when the more accurate statement is, “I’m currently doing the Marketing Director role”.
If someone treats the role as their identity, losing a seat feels like losing status. Make the conversation about what the business needs from them next, not what the change says about their worth.
You often don’t need a new title or an elaborate restructure. You need to explain why the meeting is changing, give the person a clear role elsewhere, and take them off the invitation.
Dominic Monkhouse, founder of Monkhouse & Company. Scaled Rackspace UK and Peer 1 Hosting as Managing Director. Coached more than 200 founder-CEOs through scaling.
I scaled two companies to £30m. Every week, I'll show you how.
What meeting rhythm should the executive team run?
Once you’ve got the right people in the room, give each meeting one job.
- Weekly: tactics. What needs attention now? Where are you stuck? Who owns the next move?
- Monthly: performance. Are the KPIs and OKRs moving? Which commitments are slipping? What needs to change?
- Quarterly: priorities. Is the plan still right? What have you learned? What matters most over the next ninety days?
Don’t turn these into three versions of the weekly update. If the quarterly meeting gets pulled into this week’s customer problem, nobody reviews the plan. If the monthly meeting becomes a tour of every department, nobody deals with the numbers that are off track.
The cadence works because each meeting forces a different conversation.
I’ve set out the full meeting rhythm for growth elsewhere.
Who should own strategy if the executive team can’t?
Don’t assume the most senior people are the best people for strategy.
Some of your strongest leaders are executors. Give them a clear problem, a difficult target and a deadline, and they’ll deliver. Ask them where the business should be in three years, and they’ll try to turn the question into a project plan.
They’re not failing. You’re asking them to do work that doesn’t suit them.
Patrick Lencioni’s Working Genius gives you useful language for this. Strategy tends to need Wonder, Invention and Discernment: people who enjoy asking what might change, generating options and judging which ones are worth pursuing.
Use a simple test. Would you give this person a blank sheet of paper and ask, “Where should this business be in three years?”
If you wouldn’t, don’t put them on the strategy council just because they’ve got a senior title.
Choose three to five people from the ELT or XLT, plus you. Meet weekly or fortnightly. Don’t use the meeting for updates or slide decks. Discuss changes in the market, choices you’re avoiding, and ideas that aren’t ready for an operating plan.
The council advises you. It doesn’t make the decision by consensus. You still do that as CEO.
And don’t put strategy into the last fifteen minutes of the ELT meeting. Operations will always use the time first.
If choosing the council feels political, ask the wider group: “Who do you trust to think about strategy on behalf of all of us?” Limit them to four or five names. They’ll usually choose well.
Once you’ve chosen a direction, the wider team can turn it into a roadmap. I’ve explained how a strategy council works in more detail here.
How do you keep culture intact as the XLT takes on people management?
When the XLT takes on more people management, its leaders start making decisions that you used to make.
That’s what you want. But they need to understand how you expect those decisions to be made.
A values slide won’t do it. Leaders learn the culture by working through real choices with you. How direct should a manager be with someone who’s underperforming? When should you say no to a demanding customer? Who owns a problem shared by two functions?
Bring the ELT and XLT together once a quarter and work through those issues. Don’t turn it into another update meeting. Use the time to compare how each group is handling people, priorities and cross-functional problems.
If the two groups give different answers, your culture will depend on which manager somebody works for.
Why do hard conversations about the executive team keep getting postponed?
Because taking someone off the executive team feels personal.
You may have worked with them for years. They may have helped build the business. They may hear the change as a demotion, even when their role and pay stay the same.
So you avoid the conversation. You change the agenda, add pre-reads, tighten the timings or bring in a facilitator. None of it works because the problem isn’t how you’re running the meeting. It’s who’s in it.
The rest of the company can see this. They know which decisions get made after the meeting and which people keep a seat because nobody wants to upset them.
If you duck that conversation at the top, don’t be surprised when managers avoid performance conversations everywhere else.
Explain the new structure. Explain what each group is responsible for. Tell each person where they’ll contribute and why the meeting has to change.
Your executive team didn’t become too large because you were careless. You kept adding people because each invitation made sense at the time.
Now you’ve got to decide who actually needs to be there.
Five to seven people. A clear job for each leadership group. And no second meeting afterwards to make the decisions the first one avoided.
Frequently asked questions
How many executives should a company have?
If you’re running one core business, keep the executive leadership team to five to seven people, and never more than seven. That doesn’t limit leadership to seven people. It limits the room that runs weekly tactics, reviews monthly performance and resets the quarterly plan. Other leaders work through the XLT and strategy council.
How many people are on an executive team?
A healthy executive team has five to seven people. Once the room reaches double figures, people tend to report rather than debate and the real decisions move into smaller conversations afterwards. A better agenda won’t solve that problem. You need fewer permanent seats and a clearer place for updates to happen.
How do I create an executive team structure that scales with the business?
Start with the future business, not the current people. Give the senior group a blank org chart and ask what leadership structure the company will need at twice its present size. Keep the ELT to five to seven people, move functional delivery into the XLT, and give strategy its own council.
Agree the roles first. Discuss names second.
What is an extended leadership team?
The XLT is the wider senior group that turns the executive team’s decisions into coordinated action. It owns functional delivery and much of the people management that would otherwise pull the ELT into operational detail. Its members aren’t junior leaders. They’re leading different decisions and need a different meeting to do that work.
What is the difference between an executive team and a leadership team?
Your executive team runs the business through the weekly, monthly and quarterly rhythm. Your extended leadership team carries that work through the functions and manages people. Your strategy council advises you on what comes next. The labels can vary, but the boundaries can’t. Each group needs a clear job and clear decisions to own.
What should you do next?
If your executive meeting has become a round of updates, count the people who helped make the last decision. The rest may need a different room.
Redesign the leadership structure around the decisions the business needs, then decide who belongs in the ELT, the XLT and the strategy council.
That is the point. A smaller executive team is not about status. It is about making the meeting useful again.
Four ways to take this further
- Book a call. If the size or structure of your executive team is constraining growth, Dominic can help you work out whether the problem is reporting lines, meeting design, capability or unclear decision rights. No obligation, no pitch. You will know quickly whether this is the right kind of help.
- Grab the book. Mind Your F**king Business gives you a practical way to stop being the bottleneck and build a company that can scale without you in every room.
- Explore leadership team coaching. Start here if your team needs clearer roles, better decisions and a meeting rhythm that works.
- Subscribe to the newsletter. Get one practical idea each week for building a company that can scale beyond you.
Your move. Count the people who changed the last decision, then redesign the room around the people you actually need.
About the author
Dominic Monkhouse scaled Rackspace UK and Peer 1 Hosting as Managing Director, taking both to a £30m annual run rate. He is the founder of Monkhouse & Company.