There are pretty good odds that you have too many people on your leadership team. In my experience, most businesses do.

Leadership teams are often made up of all the people who report to the business leader (i.e. the CEO, business unit leader or function head). While that default makes some sense, it’s not actually a strategic view of the leadership team and it often leads to the wrong people—or too many people—populating the team.

Let’s imagine that the head of a business has 12 direct reports; with this many people, it’s too hard to have productive conversations or balance speed with depth.

You also have to think about the role of the leadership team versus its composition. If the work of the leadership team to make sure the business follows all the rules and regulations, then maybe you need the General Counsel. But if the work of the leadership team is to drive innovation and transform your culture, then perhaps the General Counsel doesn’t need to be there. (I’m generalizing for the sake of example, many GCs are quite innovative.)

One of the “gates” that you might use to determine who gets to sit at the table is whether they think about the enterprise first; under this standard, an immature but aggressive sales leader may not have what it takes to come up with broad-minded views of how you solve things collectively for the entire business.

By a similar token, there are times when you might want someone on the leadership team who does not report to the business leader. An example would be when you are going through a digital transformation, but none of the CEO’s direct reports are digitally savvy. It might make sense to pull in a vice president or senior director to provoke and challenge, bring new ideas, or help the team spot the things about which you should be thinking.

So what happens to direct reports not on the leadership team?

The meetings of a leadership team should seldom be used simply to communicate status updates; these can be relegated to written documents. So this eliminates the main objection to not including a direct report because s/he “will not know what’s going on”; simply include these individuals on status updates.

The business leader can certainly continue to meet with such direct reports once or twice a month. The leader will still interact with this person, get reports from them, give direction to them… but these things won’t happen within the context of leadership team meetings.

To make wise decisions about the composition of a leadership team, you have to look closely at the details. Earlier I mentioned an example that said maybe you don’t need the General Counsel on your leadership team. But perhaps your General Counsel is a particularly dynamic person who is the only executive in the business who has previously worked with Private Equity. She is adept at interacting with the members of the board who come from the PE side. If so, you might be wise to include her on the team.

A useful thought exercise

If you are a leader open to rethinking the membership of your leadership team, consider…

“If I was building this team from scratch, what are the criteria I would apply? How would I think about the type of people I need to include?”

Just as importantly, ask yourself, how do I want the members to interact with each other, and with me?

You need a core group of people who collectively can tackle big opportunities and solve large challenges. They need to operate well under pressure, and to serve the culture and system you are trying to build.

The best teams are adept at defining problems first and then tackling them in an effective and efficient manner. You likely won’t get this sort of performance simply by gathering all the folks who are one level down from you.