Why Your Leadership Team is Slowing You Down—And How to Fix It

Maya Moufarek shares how a "First Team" mentality can transform collaboration.

The Problem: Why Does Execution Feel So Hard?

If you’ve ever been part of a fast-growing company, you’ve probably felt it

Execution gets harder as you scale.

Decisions take longer.

Teams don’t move as fast.

Suddenly, the things that used to just happen now require endless meetings, approvals, and Slack threads that go nowhere.

At first, you assume the problem is tactical: maybe your OKRs aren’t clear enough, or your teams need better tools, or you just need to push harder. But no matter what you try, the underlying tension remains.

So what’s really happening?

Your leadership team - yes, the people who should be driving alignment - may be working against each other without realizing it.

That’s what I talked about with Maya Moufarek, a fractional CMO, investor, and board member who has seen this challenge play out at every stage of business growth.

You can find the full interview on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts

She’s worked at Google, AMEX, and high-growth startups and was the founding CMO of Pharmacy2U, where she helped scale the UK’s largest online pharmacy. But the lesson that stuck with her wasn’t about growth hacks or marketing—it was about how leadership teams work together.

“In the senior leadership team, you’re here to make each other successful as a priority versus the people who report to you or that functional entity that you head.

It’s this group of senior leaders that can make or break that business.

And then it's their role to manage their teams and other things like that.”

This simple but powerful shift is what separates companies that scale effectively from those that get stuck.

Maya’s Story: Learning by Doing

Maya has moved between big tech, startups, and scaleups, and she’s seen firsthand how leadership team alignment can either accelerate growth or slow a company down.

At Google, she saw how a strong company-wide mission could align teams even in a fast-growing environment. When she moved to AMEX, she learned the extreme end of stakeholder management:

“I don’t think I ever used the word ‘align’ until I joined AMEX, to be honest. It was a lot of ‘align, align, we discuss, realign.’”

Coming into Pharmacy2U, Maya had to adjust again - this time, leading in healthcare, an industry where she had zero background. Her team was a mix of tech-first marketers and healthcare veterans, and aligning them wasn’t easy.

“You inherit teams, you don’t always get to hire from scratch. You have to align with people around you that are maybe not cut from the same cloth or the same experience, who have done things a certain way for a while and you’re trying to transform.”

This wasn’t just about functional expertise—it was about getting leaders to work as a single unit rather than focusing only on their own teams.

That’s where the “first team” concept came in.

The Shift: From Functional Leadership to First Teams

Instead of leaders seeing their own teams - marketing , product, or engineering - as their primary focus, leaders need to prioritize their peers on the executive team first.

At Pharmacy2U, this shift completely changed how they operated. Instead of each function working toward its own goals, the leadership team worked as a unit.

The key to doing this was to have a shared mission, and one which is important enough to be a “must win battle”. At Pharmacy2U, their chosen mission, which they absolutely had to win if they were to be successful, was to be the best digital online pharmacy.

By defining this singular focus, the leadership team stopped working in silos and started operating as a cohesive unit. Maya describes how at Pharmacy2U, having this shared focus connected every department’s work into a single plan.

“It’s no longer a marketing plan or a front-end digital plan. It’s a single plan that has all of those different teams contributing in that way.

…

We were now all working together to arm this one battle and all contributing our piece to it. And all along the way, we could challenge each other and check each other, say, would that make us the best online pharmacy or not?”

A Framework for Fixing Leadership Misalignment

If you’re a founder, executive, or senior leader struggling with cross-functional friction, here’s how you can apply this shift in your company today.

1. Identify Your “Must-Win Battle”

Instead of setting separate functional goals, define a single mission that unites the leadership team. This should be:

✅ A clear, outcome-driven goal (eg, “Become the #1 choice for [X customer]”)

✅ Tied to what will actually drive company success

✅ Big enough that every major function plays a role in achieving it

2. Shift the Leadership Mindset

Every leader needs to see their peers as their real team—not just their functional reports. This means:

✅ Owning company-wide challenges, not just function-specific ones

✅ Holding peers accountable as much as direct reports

✅ Prioritizing collaboration over functional wins

3. Change How Leadership Teams Meet & Communicate

Most leadership teams meet regularly, but their meetings default to status updates rather than real problem-solving. Instead:

✅ Make leadership meetings about tackling the biggest cross-functional challenges

✅ Ensure every exec understands how their work impacts other teams - and vice versa

✅ Create shared ownership over the “must-win battle”

Final Thought: Scaling is a Team Sport

If you’re seeing slow execution, cross-functional conflict, or leaders pulling in different directions, ask yourself:

• Does our leadership team have a single, clear mission?

• Are we prioritizing the company’s success over functional wins?

• Are we solving problems together, or just managing our own teams?

Making this shift isn’t easy—but it’s one of the most powerful things you can do to unlock speed, alignment, and momentum as you scale.

If your leadership team isn’t actively working together to solve problems, it’s just a reporting structure, not really a leadership team.

👉 What about you? Have you experienced leadership misalignment in a growing company? What worked—or didn’t—for you? Let me know in the comments.