2. Your team’s real business isn’t being done as a team

The real conversations in most senior leadership teams aren’t happening in the meeting. They’re happening in one-to-one calls beforehand, in corridor exchanges afterwards, in messages sent that evening. And everyone in the team and beyond knows it

That matters because those conversations, however honest and necessary they feel, can’t be worked with collectively. They fragment the team and the rest of the organisation along fault lines that never get directly addressed.

And there’s a personal cost too. Sustaining the performance in that leadership room day after day, while the real dialogue happens everywhere else is quietly exhausting.

If you want to explore this some more, start with your own examples. When have you short-circuited what should really have been a whole team conversation for the sake of speed, convenience, or brevity?