When The Team Doesn’t Disagree In Meetings, There’s a Problem Two Failure Modes There are two failure modes when it comes to conflict in leadership teams. The first is obvious: escalating conflict, openly adversarial peer relationships, meetings that generate more heat than resolution. Most people recognize this as a problem. The second is more subtle, […]
Personality profiles don’t explain why you’re not executing We’ve all experienced personality profiles as part of our leadership team experiences. DISC, Myers-Briggs,Insights Discovery, an enneagram workshop, They can tell you who’s a driver, who’s a stabilizer, who needs more processing time before a decision. They are great for breaking the ice and breaking down interpersonal issues. […]
Last to integrate. Most expensive to ignore. Merged on Paper. Not in the Room. We’ve all heard stories of the teams, that years after the acquisition is done, introduce each other by their previous company’s name. “I’m from Citi” “I’m from Chase.” I know I’ve experienced it post merger. Integration plans after a merger are […]
Accountability has a reputation problem. For a lot of people, being held accountable feels like being set up to be blamed. So, they hedge commitments, qualify timelines, and avoid owning outcomes they’re not certain they can control. The result is a team that’s busy, well-intentioned, and too often vague about who is responsible for what. […]
Every organization carries history. Hopefully a lot of it is good, sometimes a lot of it is bad. The restructuring that blindsided people. The leader who played favorites. The initiative that consumed enormous energy and went nowhere. New leaders don’t always know the details. But they feel the effects every day. Scar tissue is invisible […]
Culture doesn’t come from a slide deck Your organization doesn’t learn culture from a slide deck. It learns it by watching what the leadership team actually does: how you disagree, how you decide, and whether your actions match your words. The culture of the senior team is the culture of the organization, whether it intends […]
Your Change Leadership is. Most AI transformation efforts will fail. It’s been true for transformations for decades. This one will be no different. Not because the technology isn’t ready. Because the organizations implementing it aren’t. Leaders who couldn’t build change-ready teams before AI aren’t suddenly going to succeed at it under more pressure, more urgency, […]
Overcommitment isn’t a performance problem. It’s a leadership one. Execution problems are almost always misread. You see slippage and then reach for familiar responses: tighten accountability, have more frequent check-ins, set seemingly clearer deadlines. Those aren’t wrong, exactly. But they’re treating the symptom. What I see happening most frequently right now isn’t a discipline […]
Your presence in certain meetings isn’t helping. It’s editing. As a senior leader, what is your impact on meetings? You’ve probably done the work of cutting low-value meetings from your calendars. Have you ever looked at what your presence in certain meetings is costing the people around you? When a Director or VP or […]
The more people you include, the less likely you are to actually decide anything. The more uncertain things get, the more leaders do the one thing that guarantees a bad outcome: they add more people to the decision. A decision that belongs to everyone belongs to no one. And in a climate where ambiguity is […]
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