05 — The team
Your leadership team is not working
Individually they are the strongest group you have had. Collectively they are slow, polite, and quietly re-litigating everything after the meeting.
What this usually looks like
- Decisions are made in the room and unmade in the corridor
- Nobody disagrees in the meeting and everybody disagrees afterwards
- Two members have a history that everyone is managing around
- Your agenda is a series of functional updates and no one is doing the enterprise job
- You have started having the real conversation in a smaller group, which everyone has noticed
What we would do about it
Watch the team work
We sit in your actual leadership meeting and your actual escalation forum before designing anything. The gap between how a team believes it decides and how it decides is where the value is.
Fix decision rights before trust
Most "trust problems" in leadership teams are unclear authority. Trust work on top of ambiguous decision rights is expensive theatre.
Give everyone a private thread
Each member gets 1:1 sessions with a coach who is not facilitating the team, so the unsaid thing has somewhere to go before it becomes the pattern.
Six months in, our meeting is ninety minutes shorter and we actually decide things in it.
Chief Executive, software
Questions this raises
What if one person is the problem?
Sometimes one person is the problem, and coaching cannot make a decision the chief executive is avoiding. We will say so early.
Can we start with an offsite?
You can, and we design those too. But an offsite without the follow-through is an expensive good day.
Chemistry call
Start with a conversation, not a contract
Thirty minutes with up to three coaches, free, with no sponsor in the room. You choose who you work with — we never assign.