Does your leadership team know what it is there to do?

One of the simplest questions I ask a leadership team is what they believe the team is actually there to do. I don't mean what the organisation does, or what each individual around the table is responsible for. I mean what becomes their collective responsibility when they come together as a leadership team.

I usually ask each person to write down their answer independently before anyone shares their thinking. It is a simple exercise, but the answers are often more varied than people expect.

That doesn't necessarily mean there is a problem. It does, however, reveal something important: we can work alongside one another for a long time without ever testing whether the things we assume we understand in the same way are actually understood in the same way.

Familiarity can look a lot like clarity

Most leadership teams are made up of experienced, capable people who know the business well. Each person understands their own responsibilities, they are familiar with the organisation's priorities and they may have worked alongside one another for years. In that environment, it is very easy for shared clarity to become something we assume rather than something we consciously create.

Ask those same people what the leadership team itself is there to do and the differences can start to emerge. One person may see its primary role as setting strategy, another as making the important decisions, while someone else may believe they are there to represent their function and ensure its needs are understood. Another may see membership of the leadership team as carrying a collective responsibility for the performance and health of the whole organisation.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those perspectives. The interesting part is whether the differences have ever been made visible.

If they haven't, each person can be operating from a perfectly reasonable understanding of their role while assuming that everyone around them is working from broadly the same one.

Different understandings shape different behaviour

Those differences matter because what we believe our purpose to be influences how we behave.

Imagine two leaders sitting in the same meeting. One believes part of their responsibility is to represent their area of the business, so their attention naturally goes towards what a decision means for their people, resources and priorities. Another believes that entering the leadership meeting requires them to step beyond their functional responsibility and make decisions primarily from the perspective of the organisation as a whole.

Neither needs to be deliberately difficult for tension to emerge. Both can be acting entirely consistently with what they believe good leadership requires, while holding different expectations of themselves and of each other.

Over time, we can start to explain the resulting friction through the people involved. Someone appears territorial or unwilling to see the bigger picture. Someone else seems disconnected from operational reality. Conversations become repetitive, decisions take longer than they should or the same tensions keep returning in slightly different forms.

At that point, it is tempting to conclude that we have a people problem.

Sometimes we do. But sometimes what looks like a behavioural issue has a lack of shared clarity sitting further upstream.

If we have never explored what collective leadership means here, what are we expecting people to align themselves to?

Clarity gaps rarely announce themselves as confusion

One of the reasons these differences can persist is that human beings are very good at filling gaps. When something isn't explicit, we interpret it through our own experience, expectations and understanding of what good looks like. We then behave in ways that make sense from that perspective.

That means a leadership team can lack shared clarity without anyone feeling particularly unclear.

The consequences tend to appear somewhere else. Priorities compete rather than connect. Decisions made around the leadership table are interpreted differently when they reach different parts of the organisation. Conversations have to be repeated because people leave with subtly different understandings of what was agreed. Issues return to the table because ownership wasn't as obvious as everyone thought it was.

Individually, none of these moments necessarily looks significant. Collectively, however, they begin to shape the environment the leadership team creates around itself.

This is why clarity is about considerably more than producing a purpose statement or agreeing a set of words. It is about making enough of the implicit explicit that people can lead together intentionally rather than relying on everyone to interpret the gaps in roughly the same way.

Before seeking agreement, get curious about the differences

A useful place to begin is with a question:

What are we here to do together that we cannot achieve simply by doing our individual jobs well?

There is a temptation, once different answers appear, to move immediately towards finding the right one. I think there is more value in staying with the differences for a little longer.

What do we already understand in broadly the same way? Where do our interpretations diverge? What have we assumed is understood because nobody has ever asked the question? Most importantly, where might those different assumptions already be influencing the way we make decisions, set priorities, hold responsibility or lead the rest of the organisation?

The purpose of those questions isn't to expose who has misunderstood the role of the leadership team. It is to make visible the different interpretations that may already be shaping how the team works.

That distinction matters because answers are not the answer. Creating another statement for everyone to agree with may give the appearance of clarity, but the more valuable work is understanding what sits underneath the different perspectives and what those perspectives are creating.

Leadership teams create an environment whether they design it intentionally or not. Shared clarity gives them greater choice about the environment they create.

And sometimes the first step towards that clarity is simply being willing to ask a question everyone thought they already knew the answer to.