The Combined Leadership Team

/in , , , , , , , /by

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 usually thorough on systems, processes, and org charts. They are almost never thorough on whether the combined leadership team can actually operate as one team.

The Combined Team Gap

The gap between a truly combined team and two factions that are working together, tends to begin to surface three to six months after the deal closes. The initial goodwill has worn off and real decisions like budget tradeoffs, aligning conflicting priorities, and decisions about whose process becomes the standard need to be made. The leadership groups need to function as a single unit rather than two groups sharing a company name.

A few things tend to be true of combined teams that are struggling, even when the org chart looks clean:

  • Decisions quietly default to “our side” and “their side” rather than a shared standard, even months after the deal closed.
  • Trust that took years to build on each legacy team has to be rebuilt from zero across the combined group, and nothing in the integration plan accounts for that timeline.
  • Disagreements that would have been resolved directly within one legacy team get escalated instead, because the norms for how this new team handles conflict haven’t been established yet.

None of this shows up in an integration checklist.

It shows up in how the combined team actually makes decisions together, resolves conflict, has honest conversations, and tackles tough issues. How do you identify it? With a systemic read of the new team rather than an assumption that good people will sort it out.

The cost of leaving this question unasked isn’t a single bad quarter.

It’s a leadership team that never fully integrates, well after the systems did. And the longer that gap persists, the more the organization learns to work around the team rather than through it — building informal workarounds, duplicate processes, and shadow coordination structures that quietly drain capacity and compound the original cost of the deal.

How much has an unintegrated leadership team cost your merger or acquisition?

E.Onderick-Harvey@NextBridgeConsulting.com

cracked concrete wall showing past stresses

The Organizational Scar Tissue Problem

/in , , , , , /by

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 on an org chart but visible everywhere else.

It shows up in the room that goes quiet when a new idea surfaces. In the team that nods enthusiastically and then does nothing differently. In the manager who learned that raising concerns leads nowhere good.

It’s not resistance. It’s memory.

The mistake most leaders make

They treat skepticism as a communication problem. More emails, more town halls, more slides. But scar tissue isn’t a communication problem. It’s a trust problem. And trust isn’t built by talking. It’s built by doing, consistently, in ways people can actually feel.

What actually helps

Name it. Acknowledging that history exists — “I know there have been changes here that didn’t go the way people hoped” — signals that you’re paying attention to something real.

Let actions outpace promises. Make small, visible commitments and keep them. Repeatedly. Until the pattern becomes undeniable.

Give it more time than you think you have. Trust rebuilds on its own timeline, not the leader’s.

An organization’s history doesn’t disappear when new leadership arrives. However, it can be rewritten by what happens next.

The leaders who understand that earn something more valuable than compliance. They earn commitment.

What’s the history on your team that’s still shaping how people show up today? Reply and let me know.

  E.Onderick-Harvey@NextBridgeConsulting.com

What Signals Are You Sending?

/in , , , , , , /by

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 to be or not.

When a leadership team debates openly and decides with clarity, that behavior tends to show up in the teams below. When a leadership team is siloed, territorial, or conflict-avoidant, those patterns replicate too — often without anyone consciously choosing to model them.

The behaviors of a senior team travel downward fast.

Three things that are watched closely

How you handle disagreement. When two senior leaders have a conflict, does it get worked out directly? Or does it go underground and show up as friction between their teams? People learn what to do with conflict by watching what the people above them do with it.

Whether decisions stick. When directions get quietly reversed or different parts of the organization operate as if different decisions were made, people lose confidence that anyone is actually steering.

How you talk about each other. The way leaders refer to their peers — in meetings, in passing, in how they explain decisions — sets the tone for how the whole organization talks about itself. Respect at the senior level is contagious. So is the opposite.

The question worth sitting with

If your team were to describe the leadership team’s dynamics to a new hire, what would they say? Not the official answer. The real one.

That description is your culture. And it starts at the top.

What’s one behavior you’ve seen ripple from a leadership team through an entire organization? Reply and let me know.   E.Onderick-Harvey@NextBridgeConsulting.com

Your Strategy Isn’t Necessarily the Problem

/in , , , /by

Your Culture Might Be.

Your executive team can be fully aligned—and the business can still struggle to execute. 

That’s not a contradiction. It’s a clue.  Failure isn’t necessarily because the strategy is weak.  The executive team has debated it, pressure-tested it, and aligned on the direction. On paper, priorities are clear.

And yet execution slows. Decisions get revisited. Teams hesitate. Initiatives often stall quietly, not dramatically.  The issue isn’t strategy. It’s the gap between your strategy and your culture. 

 

Culture is how work gets done when leaders aren’t in the room.

It shapes:

  • How decisions actually get made
  • What risks feel safe to take
  • How conflict is handled—or avoided
  • Whether accountability is real or symbolic

When strategy asks the organization to behave one way, but day-to-day habits and norms reinforce another, execution stalls.  Not loudly. Subtly.

You see it in:

  • Decision ownership that’s unclear or constantly escalated
  • Lingering fear of risk
  • Competing priorities that haven’t been resolved
  • Mid-level leaders left to figure out how to turn strategy into action on their own

From the executive suite, it can look like resistance or capability gaps.  From the middle of the organization, it feels like confusion—or whiplash.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: The organization is executing—just in the way the culture allows.

Closing the gap between culture and strategy isn’t about more communication or motivation. It’s about:

  • Clear decision ownership and authority
  • Explicit trade-offs, not just priorities
  • Clear guidance for how leaders turn strategy into day-to-day decisions
  • Calling out behaviors and habits that work against the strategy

This is the hard, often overlooked work between agreement on the strategy and results.  So, if execution is slower or messier than expected, the question isn’t:  “Why don’t people get it?”

The question is:

“How has this organization been trained and incented? What has it been told is acceptable?’ ‘What have we channeled what is expected?’ And does our strategy require something different?”

That’s where execution actually begins.

Align Case Study

/in , , , , , , /by

The Align. Design. Lead. framework

In our last article, we introduced the Align component of our Align. Design. Lead.TM framework—and why executive misalignment is a silent killer of strategy and speed.

This week, we’re sharing a real-world example of how we helped one SaaS company confront that problem head-on.

The Challenge: Strong product, but strategic drift and weak team cohesion.

Our client—a PE-backed SaaS firm—had recently rebranded and launched a product that dramatically shifted its value proposition. But while the business was evolving, the executive team wasn’t.

As the CEO told us:

“We’ve been working on the business for years, but not on the team.”

Despite their market opportunity, they were stalling—fragmented execution, slow decisions, and siloed leadership. Strategy was drifting. Culture was eroding.

Our Approach: Get the team fully aligned before the business needs to shift again

1. Diagnose what’s really going on

We interviewed each executive, surfacing gaps in strategic focus, role clarity, culture, decision-making, and use of time. We didn’t just look for disagreement—we looked for drift: the slow, often unnoticed slide away from shared direction and relevance, that quietly erodes performance.  These interviews identified strengths and disconnection points on the team, allowing us to target our work to impact what would truly make a difference for this team and company.

2. Clarify leadership identity and intent

As they repositioned in the market and integrated acquisitions, we helped the team define how they needed to show up—to each other and the organization. We revamped communication rhythms, reset meeting structures, and anchored the team’s identity around shared intent.

3. Redesign behaviors and operating rhythm

The team needed to work together with the same rigor they applied to the business. We helped them define new norms, leadership behaviors, and cadence—all matched to the speed and pressure of their growth stage.

4. Shift decision rights and governance

Decision-making had become overly centralized with the CEO. We mapped where decisions should live, redesigned team structures, and installed collaborative decision practices. The result: distributed leadership, faster moves, and more ownership.

The Results: From fragmentation to forward momentum

  • The team began operating as one team—not just a collection of functions. Strategy drift slowed. Shared accountability rose.
  • Quarterly meetings evolved from tactical updates to forward-looking problem-solving, sharpening their ability to navigate what’s next.
  • Decision-making got faster and more collaborative, enabling quicker responses to real-time opportunities and risks.

 

“This work really helped me and the team grow over the past two years.”

— Company CEO

When execution is slow, look at the team—not just the plan.

This is what Align looks like in action—and why it’s often the first move to make when growth accelerates or stalls, product pivots hit resistance, or execution starts slipping at the top.

Is your leadership team feeling the strain of change but struggling to move together?

let’s talk.

No fluff. No generic offsites. Just clarity, traction, and alignment where it counts most.

Align. Design. Lead.TM is a flexible, non-linear framework that helps organizations move through inflection points with clarity and momentum. Whether you’re scaling, retrenching, or reimagining your business, the framework meets you where you are — helping you:

  • Align leadership teams to operate with strategic focus, speed, and cohesion
  • Design the organization to match your strategy—structure, roles, and workflows built for execution, not just org charts
  • Lead with the capacity and mindset required by mid level leaders to navigate uncertainty and drive change

For an overview of the full framework

 

Is your organization is under pressure but needs some assistance on where to focus next? We’d love to talk.

Schedule a call

Designing for Uncertainty

/in , , , , , , /by

How to Build A Resilient Organization in a Shaky Economy

Uncertainty isn’t a temporary disruption anymore—it’s the new background noise of doing business. Tariffs shift markets overnight, massive government layoffs ripple through industries, and investment slows as caution takes hold. And if it’s not these specific uncertainties, rest assured, the changing world will offer up others to take their place.

Many organizations are structured for predictable growth and efficiency—but that model cracks under pressure. One of the reasons organizations struggle with responsiveness is because they are built for stability, not agility.

So how do you design for a world where the ground is always shifting?

1. Build for Flexibility, Not Just Efficiency

Highly optimized org charts look good on paper—but they tend to collapse when circumstances change. Instead, consider flatter structures, cross-functional teams, and role fluidity. Think less about locking people into permanent roles and more about how teams can self-organize to solve emerging problems. This doesn’t mean you need to completely remove the management structure. It does mean you need to lead for empowerment, not control.

2. Create Distributed Decision-Making

In volatile times, centralized decisions move too slowly. Flatter organizations and more fluid roles needs to include distributed decision-making and autonomy so you can respond quickly in a shifting economy. Push decision-making authority closer to the action—equip leaders at every level with the clarity and trust to act quickly. Ensure alignment by creating guardrails for action with a clear vision and purpose, expressed values, and simple guidelines that inform decision making. Speed and clarity are your competitive advantages.

3. Design for Scenario Planning

A good org design helps leaders ask: “What if…?” rather than scramble to respond once something happens. Build routines for scenario planning into your leadership rhythms. Let the organization know this is part of how you are leading. Amidst uncertainty, the more people understand you’re planning for a variety of potential futures, the more their concern about the unknown diminishes. Structure your organization to flex without breaking when the unexpected arrives.

4. Reduce Internal Friction

In times of uncertainty, even minor bottlenecks become major liabilities. Look at your workflows, approval processes, and communication norms. Are they built for clarity and momentum—or control and caution? You’ll need more of the former.

Bottom Line:

Resilient organizations don’t guess right about the future. They’re just better at responding when the future surprises them. They can respond because they have proactively prepared. Design yours with that reality in mind.

How to Prepare for Growth Even as You Recalibrate

/in , , , , , , /by

The Strategic Pullback: Positioning Your Organization for What’s Next

Our shareholders, our boards, and we, as executives, continually focus on growth — bigger markets, expanded teams, new investments. But what happens when the smartest move isn’t pushing forward, but pulling back?

The most effective leaders understand that growth isn’t just about scaling up—it’s about structuring for what comes next. Sometimes, that means making tough decisions now—restructuring teams, streamlining operations, or refocusing priorities—to create the right conditions for future expansion.

 

The Both/And of Smart Growth

Too often, organizations get caught in either/or thinking:

  • Either we grow aggressively or we restructure and slow down.
  • Either we hire more talent or we optimize what we already have.
  • Either we expand into new markets or we strengthen our core business.

The key is to not accept these false choices but instead to think in terms of Both/And:

  • How do we redesign now to accelerate growth next quarter or next year?
  • Where can we streamline today to scale smarter tomorrow?
  • What strategic moves position us for long-term success, not just short-term wins?

Key Considerations for Recalibrating for Growth

If you’re rethinking your structure now to enable future success, consider these essential factors:

  • Talent Realignment: Are your key people in the right roles for where the business is heading? Growth isn’t just about hiring—it’s about ensuring your current team is positioned to drive impact. You shouldn’t be using a chainsaw or mandating that every department must reduce staffing by 10%. Strategically recalibrating means assessing what parts of the organization create the most significant impact and using that to inform decisions.

I worked with a client who had been focused on aggressive hiring after the pandemic to have the staff they needed to serve their customers. The impact of their talent acquisition function was consequential. The next year, the need to staff up decreased substantially. They also faced revenue headwinds. Reducing their talent acquisition staff numbers while growing their regional management staff produced the realignment they needed. The realignment was nuanced.

  • Operational Efficiency: Where can you simplify processes, remove redundancies, or reallocate resources to improve execution without adding complexity? Engage the people closest to the work. A company was looking to achieve around $6mil in savings. Rather than simply having the executive team determine the savings opportunities, they established a process for the entire employee base to submit potential opportunities for savings. Finance led the vetting process for the ideas, their reasonableness, and impact. Rather than $6mil in savings, the company achieved over $20mil.
  • Strategic Focus: Do you need to rethink yours?Recalibrating requires clear prioritization—focusing only on what moves the business forward. But businesses should look beyond just revenue or EBIDTA.  Will an enhanced customer experience be the key?  Will it be creating the infrastructure that was put on the back burner during your last sprint towards aggressive bottom line results?
  • Cultural Alignment: Change—even strategic recalibration—can unsettle teams. Are you effectively communicating why these shifts are happening and how they set the organization up for success? Even the word recalibration can create negative perceptions. Think like the people being impacted by the cultural alignment. How would it feel to be in their shoes?  What questions would it raise?  What concerns would they have? Even senior leadership teams with the best intentions aren’t always good at communicating about change.
  • Financial Positioning: Scaling too fast can create risk. Are you balancing short-term financial discipline with long-term investment in the right growth levers? Consider various scenarios and their implications.

Recalibration is Not a Retreat

If you’re reorganizing, restructuring, or even pulling back in certain areas, don’t mistake it for a retreat. It’s a recalibration. And if done right, it puts you in a position to move faster, execute better, and grow stronger when the time is right.

Your Next Move:

The most effective leaders design for the future while managing the present. If you’re making structural changes now—or considering them—how are you ensuring they set you up for real growth next quarter, next year, and beyond?

We’re working with clients right now who are doing the same. Let’s talk about how to balance today’s realities with tomorrow’s opportunities.

Schedule a conversation to explore how strategic organizational design can fuel your next stage of growth.

The Unspoken Rules of Communication: What Your Team Isn’t Telling You

/in , , , , /by

If you think your employees always tell you the truth, you’re incredibly lucky.

Every leader likes to believe they have an “open-door policy,” but let’s be honest—most employees don’t buy it. Too many have had the experience (often with previous bosses) that speaking too freely gets them labeled as difficult, uncooperative, or worse. So instead of telling you what’s wrong, they tell you some variation what they think you want to hear. Meanwhile, real problems fester, and by the time they surface, they’ve turned into full-blown crises.

The Hidden Truth: The Fear of Speaking Up is Costing You

Your team isn’t lying to you—they’re just editing. And the more senior you are, the more filtered your information becomes. Employees at all levels often avoid sharing hard truths with their boss because they’ve seen what too often happens when others do: nothing, or something bad.

The Fix: Make Honesty the Default (Not the Exception)

If you want the truth, you have to earn it. That means:

  • Asking sharper questions

    Replace “Is everything okay?” with “What’s one thing slowing you down that no one’s talking about?” The first few times you may be greeted with silence or be told ‘everything’s fine.’  Keep asking. Someone will finally take the chance and tell you their one thing.

  • Proving you can handle bad news

    Employees won’t be honest if they see leaders shoot the messenger. I was leading a team at a financial institution that was redesigning our performance management process based on employee engagement survey results.  We were a cross-level, cross-functional team. The CEO was our sponsor. During a check-in, a team member who worked in a branch, told the CEO a hard truth. We were a little stunned. The CEO was grateful. So grateful that he invited this person to have lunch with him once a month to share her perspectives.

  • Making feedback safer.

    Create spaces where people can share insights without fear of retribution. These can be formal or informal.  Share stories of people who shared insights, what the benefit was, and the actions taken. Those stories demonstrate that feedback is expected and welcome. I once worked for a large consulting firm that did the exact opposite. In an office-wide meeting, a consultant asked if we would have the opportunity to provide feedback into Partners’ and Managers’ performance reviews.  The answer was an unequivocal ‘no’. That story spread across the office like wildfire. It reinforced what we already implicitly knew – feedback was not welcome and it was not okay to question anything that a Partner or Manager did. This led to everything from bad habits to unethical behavior defining the culture.

When leaders make honesty a habit—not just a slogan—they stop being the last to know and start making better, faster decisions.

The Org Chart vs. Reality

/in , , , /by

Why Work Frequently Gets Done in the Hallways and How Smart Leaders Leverage That

Let’s be honest: Your beautifully structured org chart doesn’t really tell the whole story. It shows a neat hierarchy of who reports to whom, but it doesn’t reflect how work really gets done. We’ve all heard the saying “final decisions aren’t made in meetings”.  They don’t get made within your formal org chart either. They happen in impromptu hallway conversations, side chats, and text messages between the people who actually get things done.

The Invisible Edge: Informal Networks Run Your Business

Many leaders assume that because they have the right roles on paper, their organization must be functioning efficiently. But organizations aren’t machines—they’re ecosystems. People rely on relationships, not job descriptions, to get things done. When leaders ignore this reality, they make bad decisions, promote the wrong people, and fail to see where bottlenecks really exist.

The Fix: Map the Real Power Networks

Instead of relying on the org chart, leaders need to map their organization’s real networks. These are the relationships people use to get key questions answered, find the information they need to do their jobs, influence the direction and decisions of the company, and cut through the unnecessary noise. Mapping networks means identifying three important players in your organization:

  • Influencers – Not just senior leaders, but the people who others go to for advice and problem-solving. This will tell you who are really seen as trusted, knowledgeable, and able to make things happen.
  • Connectors – Those who bridge departments and functions, ensuring ideas and information flow. Many of the challenges your organization is facing today are too complex for a single silo or function to solve them. Connectors will help you move to the future. A decision that was to be made by a highly visible project team I was co-leading was made completely outside the project, by a key stakeholder influencing the CEO. He had no formal role on the project but had a very strong relationship with the CEO.
  • Hidden Bottlenecks – The unintentional, and sometimes intentional, gatekeepers who slow down progress. They may be the only person or a small handful of people who knows how to do something or understands a core technology. Or, they can be the people who feel they have the most to lose as the company evolves or transforms. They may be stuck in doing something the same way as they have for years, even though technology or new approaches are far more effective.

Once you identify these players, you now need to compare them to the formal organization and decide how to better align the two.

By balancing formal structure with an understanding of these real-world dynamics, you’ll create more agile, adaptive organizations that don’t just look good on paper—but actually perform.

 

You’re Overlooking the Most Important Leadership Skill of 2025

/in , , , , , /by

Hint: It’s Not Strategy, Vision, or Execution

If you had to bet on the most valuable leadership skill in 2025, what would you choose? Strategic thinking? Data-driven decision-making? Change management? All solid bets—but you’d still be missing the one skill that’s about to define leadership success more than any other: the ability to have tough, trust-building conversations.

Provocative Point: AI is replacing routine decision-making, and strategy is becoming more automated. But the human ability to connect, challenge, and align people toward a vision? That’s irreplaceable. Yet, most leaders still struggle to communicate clearly, deliver feedback effectively, and have the tough conversations that create real alignment.

Solution: Make 2025 the year your leaders become exceptional communicators. Train them not just in the mechanics of giving feedback, but in how to build trust, listen deeply, and communicate in a way that strengthens relationships while driving results. The organizations that prioritize this skill will develop leaders who don’t just execute well—they inspire teams to follow them into any challenge.