Why Leadership Team Problems Quickly Become Organisational Problems
We know that the senior leadership team shapes the clarity and priorities that everyone else will adopt. So why does what starts in that room, with those senior leaders, travel so quickly across the organisation? Why do problems at the top rarely stay at the top? And what should you do about that?
In this article and the video that accompanies it, I explore why problems in the senior leadership team tend to spread so quickly, why senior teams are often surprised by that, and what leaders can do to spot the effects earlier.
Why don’t problems in the leadership team stay contained at the top?
The senior leadership team has such a disproportionate influence. People take their cues from their leaders: what they see them doing, and what they hear them saying.
Any small top team issues then get amplified as they move through the system. Uncertainty at the top creates a lot of uncertainty as it spreads below.
How do leadership team problems spread through the organisation?
This is very interesting. Boston Consulting Group did a survey a few years back called When Leaders Say They Are Aligned, but They Aren’t. They looked at 3,000 senior leaders. What they found was that those leaders often leave having made a decision, but with very different takes on what was actually agreed.
When Leaders Say They Are Aligned—But Aren’t
So the messages to their teams become inconsistent.
What feels settled in the room often turns out not to be settled at all.
Why are senior leadership teams often surprised by how quickly those problems grow?
I think the surprise comes from the fact that the spread of those problems is indirect at first. People below the senior leadership team are responding to that lack of clarity, or that uncertainty about what was actually agreed. And they compensate for that. They fill in the gaps with their own priorities, or their own views of what should have been agreed.
By the time the effect of all of this becomes obvious, it is already embedded more widely across the organisation.
Another reason senior leadership teams are often surprised by how quickly those problems have grown is that they continually underestimate just how visible they are. Everybody else’s eyes are on that senior leadership team.
So what can leaders do about this?
Take one real, live project or priority, and go and listen a bit to what people around the organisation are saying about it.
Explore questions like these:
- Do people seem to know what the priority is?
- Do they know what success would look like?
- How well do they feel able to lean into that priority?
If the answers you are getting back are vague, mixed, or hesitant, that tells you something about how well aligned your senior leadership team is. It may be that they have left the room thinking they agreed on something, but as that BCG survey suggests, it was not that clear after all.
About me
I’m Nick Robinson. I work with senior leadership teams who sense they’re not yet working well enough together.
My programme The Shift is a development experience that helps leadership teams strengthen trust, alignment and how they function together, so the organisation benefits from clearer decisions, stronger collective leadership and better overall performance.
