The best executive teams exploit their members’ distinctive strengths. For instance, disk-drive giant Seagate’s leaders—the CEO, COO, and executive VPs of finance and marketing/strategy—excel together by drawing on their complementary functional expertise.

Yet complementarity’s benefits don’t come free, say Miles and Watkins. For example, team members’ differing perspectives may keep them from committing to a common strategy.

How can leadership teams reap complementarity’s benefits while avoiding its risks? Erect four pillars of alignment: shared vision, rewards for achieving common goals, constant communication, and trust that each team member has the firm’s best interests at heart. Also, ensure smooth leadership transitions; for instance, help the COO prepare for the CEO role by giving him increasing responsibility for setting strategy. The payoff? A leadership team that collectively delivers far better results than each member could provide on his own.

The Idea in Practice
Miles and Watkins offer these suggestions for benefiting from team complementarity:

Understand Complementarity’s Dimensions
Leadership teams are most effective when members play complementary roles along some or all of these dimensions

• Task definition. Leaders divide responsibilities into blocks. For example, the CEO manages the external environment; the COO, internal management issues.
• Expertise. For instance, the CEO has a strong sales and marketing background while the COO possesses expertise in finance.
• Cognitive strengths. One team member excels at creating and communicating compelling visions and breakthrough strategies; another, at driving execution through tactical brilliance and follow-through.
• Role definition. For example, one leader provides “pull” through rewards and inspiration; another provides “push” through disciplined goal setting and sanctions.

Anticipate Complementarity’s Perils

Complementarity presents risks, including:

• Disagreement on organizational priorities. With contrasting tasks, expertise, mind-sets, or roles, team members may want to push the organization in different directions.
• Difficult succession. A leader transitioning into a new role on the team may have trouble letting go of his old one; for example, difficulty moving from a detail-orientation in order to focus on big-picture strategies. And subordinates, comfortable with him in his old role, may refuse to see him as credible in the new role.

Pay Special Attention to CEO Succession
To ensure smooth succession to the CEO job, consider these strategies:

• Appoint a COO whose experience and talents partially overlap with the CEO’s, so he can transition into the top role more easily.
• Extend the productive life span of a complementary CEO-COO relationship by appointing a COO who’ll take time to grow into the number-two job. Help him learn his own job and work with the CEO to prepare for the transition.
• Create an explicit agreement between the CEO and COO outlining the gradual transfer of responsibilities. The COO could, for example, take increasing responsibility for dealing with external constituencies such as shareholders.
• Redefine traditional CEO/COO roles. For instance, a COO who is strong at playing the “insider” role continues to do so after becoming CEO, and the new COO plays the “outsider” role.

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