Nobody Killed the Initiative. It Just Faded.

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Execution Fade Isn’t a Project Management Problem — It’s a Leadership One

But it started so well…

Most strategic initiatives launch well — clear rationale, visible leadership backing, a kickoff. Then, somewhere around month three to six, the attention quietly moves on.

Steering committee meetings get skipped. Updates get shorter. The thing that was going to change how the organization operates becomes one more line item.

This rarely looks like outright failure.

More often it’s one of three quieter outcomes: the work limps across the finish line, delivered by a team that stopped believing leadership cared about its success.

Or the scope shrinks to match whatever resources are left. Nobody formally decides that or owns it.

Or the bar gets lowered, the team declares victory, and everyone quietly knows what actually happened.

Each version is survivable enough that no one has to name it which is exactly why the pattern repeats.

 

Execution Fade is a leadership team problem, not a project management one. And it has real cost. The sunk budget and resource costs. The project team’s sense that their time was wasted. Another opportunity lost or challenge left partially unaddressed.

 

Two important fixes for Execution Fade.

  • Put the initiative on the standing leadership team agenda and check it against the original intent, not just activity.
  • Make one leadership team member (not the program lead) fully accountable for each initiative. Tie their goals and their incentives to it. Ownership at the program level gets you coordination; ownership at the leadership level gets you commitment.

The launch is the easy part. Sustained attention has to be managed on purpose. Like anything that’s important, it doesn’t happen on its own.

When conflict goes underground

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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, more common, and often more damaging. Genuine disagreement exists but gets managed rather than resolved. They are discussed openly in hallway conversations but not in the room, separate meetings occur, and functional decisions quietly diverge from what the team appeared to agree on. The goal in the room is to preserve relationships rather than surface real concerns.

This mode produces meetings that look healthy. Calm. Collegial. Efficient. The dysfunction only becomes visible later. I saw this pattern clearly when I worked in a financial services company. Meetings were consistently polite, conflict was rare, and the moment each session ended, executives quietly lined up to get on the president’s calendar to say what they hadn’t said in the room.

Recognizing It

The pattern I look for isn’t whether the team argues. It’s whether what gets raised in the room is the real conversation or a version that’s safe enough to say out loud:

  • Members describe the real conversation as something that happened after the meeting, not during it.
  • The CEO is routinely surprised by concerns raised one-on-one that never surfaced in the room.
  • When disagreement does appear, it resolves quickly, not because the issue was worked through, but because someone backed down to preserve the peace.

The Damage It Does

Conflict that has gone underground is self-perpetuating because its consequences are seldom traceable back to the conflict itself. The feedback loop that would allow the team to learn is broken at exactly the point where the cause was managed out of sight.

Too often, people comply with the decision rather than commit because they don’t feel heard or to avoid any more difficult conversations on the topic. This leads to the deterioration of the relationships among those involved.

Sometimes the team doesn’t learn the cost of compliance, or never recognized the true source of the problem. Post-mortems may blame failure on execution gaps, unclear ownership, insufficient resourcing. What doesn’t surface is that the real disagreement was never resolved.

 

The team that fights openly and well will eventually recognize the true nature of the conflict. A team that manages conflict quietly keeps attributing the consequences to other causes and never reaches the source.

The Fix

The goal isn’t more confrontational meetings. It’s making the room safe enough for real concerns to surface — and building the team’s capacity to work through disagreement without the relationship cost that currently makes avoidance feel like the better option.

 

Profiled. Workshopped. Still Stuck.

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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.

What they usually can’t tell you is the complete story about why the team is stuck.

That’s not a flaw in tools. They were built to describe individual style, not to diagnose how a team functions as a leadership system.

Knowing that someone is a driver doesn’t tell you whether the team has a working process for converting decisions into action. Or whether authority and accountability line up. Or where alignment quietly breaks down between the meeting room and the next quarter.

Those are systemic questions, and they require a systemic answer — one built from how the team actually behaves under real conditions not personality preferences in isolation.

Style and system aren’t in competition. But they answer different questions, and treating a systemic problem with a style-based tool is one of the more common reasons executive team work fails to produce lasting change.

If a team already knows its personality types and is still stuck, that’s often the clearest sign the next layer of the problem is systemic, not stylistic.

Our research-based Executive Team Assessment analyzes the team systemically across 8 dimensions. If your team is stuck, let’s chat.

Build a Higher-Performing Senior Leadership Team

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Because Connection Fuels Growth and Drives Results

For CEOs, a high-performance leadership team isn’t just about competencies; it’s about building connection, driving executive performance, and fostering team growth. The senior leadership team sets the culture, the pace, and the strategy for the organization, so it’s critical that they function as a cohesive, aligned unit. Here’s how CEOs can shape a leadership team that performs at its best, fosters growth, and is deeply connected to each other and the organization.

  1. Define Roles That Align with Strategic Goals and Team Growth

    High-performance leadership teams are composed of individuals who not only understand their own roles but also how those roles connect to the organization’s larger strategy and to each other. A CEO must design roles that drive strategy forward while also allowing each leader to build upon their strengths and contribute uniquely to the team’s overall mission. This role clarity paves the way for both individual and team growth.

    • CEO Takeaway: Define each leader’s role in relation to the company’s long-term goals, but also focus on how each role can support and challenge peers on the team. This fosters an environment where growth is collective, and every leader feels valued for their contribution to both strategy and culture.

  1. Build a Culture of Connection and Accountability

    Connection and accountability go hand in hand for senior leadership teams. Leaders who feel connected to each other are more likely to hold themselves and one another accountable to high standards. CEOs can encourage this by prioritizing both formal and informal opportunities for connection—creating a culture where accountability isn’t just about hitting metrics but also about delivering on commitments to each other and to the organization.

    • CEO Takeaway: Facilitate regular executive team check-ins that go beyond business updates to discuss shared goals, challenges, and successes. Consider off-site retreats or virtual “connection” sessions that build rapport. Connection fuels a culture of accountability where every leader is dedicated to the team’s performance as much as their own.

  1. Emphasize Transparent Communication and Executive Performance Feedback

    Transparent communication isn’t just a leadership skill; it’s a pathway to better executive performance. When leaders communicate openly about both wins and challenges, it creates an environment where feedback is constructive, continuous, and centered on growth. CEOs should model transparency by sharing their own challenges and performance goals, encouraging the same openness among their team.

    • CEO Takeaway: Establish a feedback loop within the executive team where performance is regularly discussed and celebrated, and areas for improvement are addressed directly. Encourage leaders to seek feedback from each other and to view these conversations as essential for both personal and team growth.

The Bottom Line: Creating a high-performance senior leadership team requires intentional design. By clarifying roles, fostering connection and accountability, and promoting transparent communication, CEOs can build a team that is not only aligned in strategy but deeply committed to one another’s success and growth. This team dynamic doesn’t just improve performance; it creates a leadership culture that radiates throughout the organization.

4 Must-Do Items on Every Leader’s January Checklist

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We’re starting another year. Like any other, it will be filled with opportunities and challenges, achievements and disappointments, zigs and zags. During these first couple weeks of the year, position yourself and your team for success in the months to come. Here are 4 actions that will help you start the year personally centered, organizationally aligned, and ready to go.
How can you and your team get off on the right foot in 2023?
Reconnect to your North Star.  What is your big “why?” Why do you do the work you do? How is it helping you live your values? How does your work advance your personal and career goals? Your business goals? What needs to change to move you further along this year?
  • There are hundreds of tools online to help you do this.  Here’s one.

 

  • If you’re already sure of your North Star, here’s a quick tool for moving you forward: with your north star in mind, create a “Start-Stop-Continue/ Improve” list. Focus on specific behaviors like “start spending 5 minutes preparing for every meeting/discussion by writing down how it aligns with my purpose and my goals and the top three things I want to accomplish.” Or “stop complaining in front of my team and focus on solutions.”

 

  • No matter what you do, write your thoughts down and put an alert in your calendar to check in with them on at least a quarterly basis. As this year ramps up we will be distracted by fire drills, urgent requests, and changes in plans. Aligning to your North Star will allow you to focus more fully on adding value and saying no to non-value-add activities.
Clarify goals.  For many of you, December and January are about setting annual goals for yourself and your team. Make sure you and your team are clearly aligned. Engage your team members in individual conversations about how frequently they want to check in on goal progression and the best way you can support them. Also, decide how you will reprioritize when inevitable change comes along. Even if you did this as recently as December, a quick check-in is important. People lose focus over the holidays, things change quickly and clarifying expectations at the beginning of the year leads to better alignment and happier team members.
Assess your personal routines.  Research shows that having routines can allow us to be more creative.  By creating routines around repetitive leadership tasks, we are able to direct our free cognitive resources to learning and creativity.  What are your current routines? What else could you routinize? For example, set up ‘do not disturb’ on your messaging while you’re doing concentrated work.  That way, responding to messages becomes routinized, and you’re able to respond at a time when you can focus more fully on the messages. Another way to improve your leadership is to consider your daily habits… what do you do almost without thinking or planning? What should you start/stop/continue?  Here’s a great list shared by 21 executives.
Do a mental health check.  How are you feeling as you start the year? Take an honest look at your emotional and mental health. Many of us are energized and ready to go. Many others are still feeling overwhelmed, burnt out, and daunted by what lies ahead of us. Commit time each day to taking care of yourself. Go for a walk. Connect with friends. Read. Do something that feeds your energy. Your company likely has confidential resources that you can access to help you understand and improve your health.
Being intentional around these four areas, you’ll position yourself for a great start to 2023.
What else do you do to start your new year with intention?

What’s Going On With You? A Little Introspection Can Improve Personal Performance

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Recently, I’ve been talking with leaders, including mid-level leaders, about the challenges they are facing with staff shortages, continued ambiguity from COVID, and end of year pressures. In these conversations, the underlying theme is the toll these issues are taking on their emotions and their continual effort to push those emotions away or to simply plow through them.

The context for these conversations is a broader discussion about leading with emotional agility. Susan David and Christina Congleton, in their Harvard Business Review article, define emotional agility as the ability to manage one’s thoughts and feelings in a mindful, productive way. When most of us get hooked by our negative thoughts, especially at work, we have one of two reactions. We buy into them (“I always do something stupid that gets in the way of my success.”) and avoid the situations that may evoke them. Or, we rationalize them away (“I shouldn’t have these thoughts. Just get on with it.”)

When we get hooked and choose one of these two common reactions, we are not giving ourselves the opportunity to respond effectively and intentionally. To choose to respond rather than react, the first step you must take is to recognize what is going on with you.

When I talk with these leaders, I ask them how many times a day they check in with themselves to assess what they are feeling. The overwhelming response is never. Some will say rarely. A very small fraction will say regularly. Then we do the following exercise:

First, we pause the conversation right there and I give them 30 seconds to just stop and check in with themselves.

Before the pause, I encourage them to work hard to accurately name what they are feeling. Don’t just tell themselves they are feeling stressed. Rather become more granular in the assessment. Are you angry? Frustrated? Overwhelmed? Constrained? To respond, rather than react, the first step is to accurately identify and understand what you are feeling. You can’t create an effective response or strategy if you are unable to clearly define what you are responding to.

At the end of 30 seconds, I ask them about their experience. They often say it makes them feel more centered, have more clarity, and are better able to manage those emotions than have the emotions manage them. It provides them the space to choose a response.

We then discuss how pausing 1-2 times a day – taking 1 minute out of an 8, 10 or 12 hour workday– can significantly impact the ability to become more emotionally agile and the impact of that agility on their ability to lead in challenging times.

Over the next few weeks, take a moment or two throughout the day to check in with yourself. What are you feeling? How are you reacting to those emotions? What opportunities do you have to pause to make the choice of how you will respond?

These are stressful times. You’ll find that this technique also works quite well at home.

3 Ways to Improve Your Strategic Thinking

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You may have heard the story of the truck that was immovably stuck under a bridge and how the solution came from an unlikely source. If you don’t know it, I’ll share it at the end of this newsletter.

I was thinking about this story when recalling a professional meeting where the topic was developing a global mindset. One of the speakers was talking about their company’s research showing that experiencing another culture has a significant impact on one’s strategic thinking. “Experiencing” didn’t mean going there on a vacation. It was an immersive, longer-term experience, like ex pat assignments or managing a global team where you had to travel to work within their culture somewhat regularly.

The speaker noted that these assignments have this profound impact because they challenge your perceptions and perspectives of the world. These different perspectives allow you to be more nuanced in your thinking about how different parts of a whole interact, the variables that impact it, and the resulting implications. Your competitors are increasingly global, not just national or local. Therefore, such experiences help you to think more like (and outthink) your competitors, to anticipate trends, and to consider solutions and strategies from a broader array of possibilities.

How, then, can you stretch your perspectives to help develop your strategic thinking when working globally isn’t a possibility (or, at least, not yet)?

  • Regularly interact with people in a different function or area of the company. Marketers and engineers don’t think alike. Operations people think differently than researchers. See how someone different from you may experience the same issues or the organization itself.
  • Interact with those outside your industry.  For years, benchmarking was the buzzword when you wanted to get a more strategic perspective and to gain some competitive advantage. Benchmarking is often practiced with a closed-system approach. Life science companies benchmark other life science companies. Tech firms benchmark other tech firms. That’s important, but it’s also somewhat limiting, especially in a world where industries and disciplines are bleeding together like never before. The perspective of someone in a different industry about your issue or situation will cause you to think about the variables and interactions more broadly, more strategically. One of the things that made Steve Jobs so successful at product design was that he included perspectives he gained from things as diverse as digital animation, calligraphy and architecture.

When we hire people who are mostly like ourselves we multiply our strengths… but also our weaknesses and blind spots.

  • Hire people who are different from you. We’re all familiar with research which shows that diverse organizations are generally more successful. In addition to the typical diversity categories we’re used to thinking about (gender, race, age, etc.) we should look for diversity of thought, experience, and education, among many other factors. When we hire people who are mostly like ourselves, we multiply our strengths… but also our weaknesses and blind spots. Make sure to regularly ask those you’ve hired for their perspective and input on the business issues you are working to address.

Thinking about your daily business interactions expansively will help you develop the broader perspective needed for strategic thinking.

So, the story of the truck goes like this. The top of the truck was wedged against the underside of a bridge, and it could go neither forward nor backward. It just wouldn’t budge. Traffic was backed up and police and tow trucks were trying to figure out how to get it out. A little boy walked up and asked what was going on.  The police officer explained the dilemma. The little boy looked at him and said, “let the air out of the tires.”

Alignment + Agility = Competitive Advantage

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Our previous two articles talked about creating alignment for success in 2021. First, your organization (and your teams) need a clearly articulated North Star and strategic clarity. Second, it is imperative to build a culture that reinforces alignment between how you work and what you aim to achieve. Alignment is essential for success. However, agility – in addition to alignment – will lead to competitive advantage.

Alignment without agility is stagnation.

Agility without alignment is chaos.

Over the past year, rapid response and breakneck adaptation have been watchwords for successful businesses in the COVID environment. The pace of that agile response has left people exhausted and organizations risking burnout among their teams. Some organizations have been changing so quickly that they have prioritized adaptation too highly. They are no longer aligned with or certain about their business strategy. And some feel they no longer recognize their culture. In a deep and dire emergency, business survival trumps culture.  Nevertheless, it has its negative consequences.

On the other hand, some of my clients are already worried that, as we approach a post-pandemic world, the desire for a sense of “normalcy” and decompression will result in a temporary, but dangerous stagnation. It could be very tempting to feed the longing for some stability, and focus too heavily on alignment, deprioritizing agility.

And therein lies the conundrum. Organizations that build and maintain competitive advantage create a balance between two competing elements: alignment and agility. It can be convincingly argued that the benefits of agility are only achieved within the context of ongoing alignment with strategy and culture. It is also a fact that change and alignment are, at their core, competing forces that require constant attention.

How can you create alignment and agility within your team?

  • Clearly focus on only a handful of strategic imperatives. And don’t assume clarity. Revisit those imperatives regularly with your team and discuss how the team’s work contributes to them. Use them as your guardrails.
  • Help strategy bubble up from the bottom.  People in the organization who are closer to the customers, operations and technologies often see opportunities and threats more quickly than executives do. In my HBR article, “5 Behaviors of Leaders Who Embrace Change”, I shared these two ideas for building this capability in your team:
    • Make opportunity-seeking part of the regular conversation. Simply asking questions like “What are our customers talking about? What do you think they will want a year or two from now? What new trends do you think will impact us?” sends the message that looking ahead is important. And that you value their input.
    • Advertise successes. Nothing breeds success like success. Tell the stories at company events and recognize team members who are looking ahead and identifying opportunities. Demonstrate that the status quo is not enough anymore.
  • Encourage experimentation and learn from failure:  Too often, traditional organizations’ first response to a risk is to ask, “Why?” Change agility requires leaders to ask “why not?” and to establish opportunities for pilots, prototypes, and experimentation. Experimentation is an integral part of R&D. While an overall strategy informs the researchers’ focus, any R&D scientist will tell you that there are sometimes dozens of experiments that don’t get results and that, without those failures, they wouldn’t have been able to find the successes.
  • Reallocate resources with discipline.  As Sulls’ and Homkes research found, organizations tend to move too slowly or move quickly but lose sight of the strategy. I consulted to an organization a few years ago where moving too quickly without discipline was hampering their ability to achieve results. The CEO had started the company and was the classic early-stage entrepreneur; extremely responsive to market needs, ready and willing to change strategy, and endlessly shifting resources. However, the company was not early stage anymore and this nearly sole focus on agility led to a complete lack of follow-through, very little alignment and was seriously impacting results. The board removed him and named a new CEO who added a new level of discipline to resource allocation through a combination of centralized oversight and distributed decision-making.

Start 2021 with the ideas we’ve discussed in these three articles – defining your North Star, creating strategic clarity, building a strong culture and creating aligned agility – and you will have improved your ability to thrive.

Is Storytelling One of Your Leadership Superpowers?

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I’ve been working with some senior leaders recently on using powerful tools like storytelling to engage others in strategy. Just last week, I also saw a headline that Marvel’s most recent movie – Ant Man and the Wasp – opened in 1st place this past weekend. It was their 20th straight #1 opening. Marvel is telling some great stories. How can we, as leaders, start telling some great stories?

A recent article in The Mission identified 20 Storytelling Lessons We Can Learn from Marvel, analyzing what makes them so good at the art of the story. I’m not going to discuss all 20, but but here are three that all leaders can use to make storytelling one of their superpowers.

  • Heroes are not inherently interesting. Only dynamic, flawed characters can connect with dynamic, flawed humans. Too often leaders, especially senior leaders, are viewed by other people in the organization as being different from them. And, too often, these leaders hide the parts of themselves that would make people believe any differently. I’ve facilitated many leadership sessions where a senior leader shares his or her story. The most impactful stories are those where the senior leader opens up and shares the stories of the hardships, the mistakes, the questioning of themselves and the missteps that they have experienced in their lives and careers. And what they did to overcome those challenges that led to success.
  • The world is more than blue sky and green grass. Create a believable universe, not a pretty backdrop. When we tell a story, we may tend to gloss over the parts that aren’t too pretty. We only talk about all the benefits that will come from the company transformation. Just like showing your own human, less than perfect side, you should paint a realistic picture of what your team and your organization faces. “The new organizational structure will position the company to be more successful. AND… yes, it will mean growing pains. Some people will no longer fit into the company’s future, and some people will have to learn new ways of working or report to new managers. And we’ll all have to manage a degree of uncertainty as all the kinks are worked out. We don’t take these steps lightly.  But there is no growth without growing pains.“
  • Avoid info-dumping by maintaining a thread of suspense until the last possible moment. I recently saw a video by Lani Peterson, who is an executive coach and storytelling expert. She explained what happens when we talk facts and figures. She notes that we make sense out of information by turning it into a story and comparing it to other stories we’ve experienced. We, as the listener, have to do all the work. As leaders, if we are focusing on facts and figures – info dumping – rather than weaving a story that builds to a important point, we are not engaging our listeners. Instead, they’re in their own heads, working to figure out how to make sense of what we are telling them. When you’re communicating, don’t rely on Powerpoint or spreadsheets to share where the organization is going or why a particular decision was made. Build a good story that pulls the pieces of the story together, allowing for the big reveal at the end.

If you’re a fan of Iron Man, one of Marvel’s most successful heroes, you probably see all three of these dynamics play out. Marvel gives us a character, Tony Stark (he inhabits the iron suits) who is deeply flawed. Like most people, he struggles with his weaknesses, overcoming them on the way to saving the world. Likewise, Marvel also doesn’t try to paint the good guys’ organizations in the story with an overly flattering brush. Like the heroes, the agencies eventually overcome their own challenges. And finally, like most good stories, there is a feel-good twist at the end. A sense of the heroics of overcoming difficulties both superhuman (defeating an evil empire) and every-day (salvaging a friendship, or coming together as a team) in the service of a greater good.

Five Behaviors of Leaders Who Embrace Change

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I had the opportunity to share my insights on the behaviors of leaders who embrace change as part of Harvard Business Review series Competing in the Future.

In today’s VUCA environment, leaders can no longer manage change, they need to enable it. In the article, I discuss how “Successful change-agile leaders at all levels in the organization respond to changes in the business environment by seizing opportunities, including throwing out old models and developing new ways of doing business. They try to make change thinking contagious, embedding it into everything they do from the most fundamental daily interactions to the most complex strategy.”

To read the article, click here. After you’ve read it, let HBR and me know what you think in the comments section.