1. Your team looks functional; but is it all just an act?

Many senior leadership teams look functional from the outside. Meetings happen. Decisions get made. People are professionally courteous with each other, but that’s often exactly what it is. Just an act, a performance. And the gap between the performance and the reality underneath it is costing the organisation more than most people realise.

When the team space becomes performative, the rest of the organisation reads it and reads it accurately. The misalignment that nobody’s naming in the room doesn’t stay in that room, it travels. And what looks like a well-functioning leadership team at the top can be quietly generating confusion, mixed messages, and lost momentum all the way down.

You can explore this in one-to-one conversations with colleagues and staff. Take one real live project and ask people their views, especially about what they believe it’s designed to achieve. Any misalignment or lack of clarity often shows up very quickly here.