Not every leadership problem is a people problem

When something isn't working well within a leadership team, it is natural to look at the people involved.

Perhaps someone isn't communicating clearly enough. Someone isn't taking ownership. One part of the business seems to be pulling in a different direction. Decisions are being revisited, priorities are competing or people aren't following through in the way others expected.

These things can certainly be about behaviour. But before we conclude that someone needs to communicate better, take more accountability or become more collaborative, there is another question worth asking:

Is everyone actually clear about what is expected?

It sounds obvious, yet clarity is one of those things we tend to notice most when it is completely absent. The more subtle gaps are harder to see because everyone can appear to know what they are doing while operating from slightly different interpretations of what matters, who owns what and how things are supposed to work.

Purpose is only the beginning

In my last blog, I explored what happens when members of a leadership team hold different understandings of what the team itself is there to do.

That is a useful place to begin because purpose gives collective leadership a point of reference. But agreeing why the leadership team exists doesn't automatically create clarity about how it should operate.

A team might have a strong shared sense of purpose while holding very different views about which issues belong around the leadership table and which should remain within individual functions. It may be clear about its strategic priorities without being clear about how competing priorities should be resolved. Everyone may understand their own responsibilities while assumptions remain about where one person's ownership ends and another's begins.

The same is true of decision making. A leadership team may spend considerable time discussing an issue without being explicit about whether the conversation is intended to inform, consult or decide. People can leave the same meeting believing different things have been agreed, not because anyone wasn't listening, but because the decision itself was never made sufficiently clear.

None of these gaps needs to be dramatic to affect how the team works. In fact, it is often the accumulation of small ambiguities that creates the greatest amount of unnecessary friction.

We tend to experience the symptom rather than the gap

Imagine a leadership team repeatedly finding that agreed actions aren't progressing as expected.

It would be easy to interpret that as an accountability problem. Perhaps people need to take greater ownership or be held more firmly to their commitments.

That may be true.

But there are other possibilities worth exploring first. Was it clear who owned the action? Did ownership mean completing the work, coordinating others or simply bringing an update back to the team? Was the priority of the action understood in the same way by everyone involved? Did the person responsible have the authority to make the decisions needed to move it forward?

If those things remain unclear, asking for greater accountability may simply place more pressure on people to navigate an ambiguity the leadership team itself has created.

The same pattern can appear in communication. When different parts of an organisation hear different messages from different leaders, the immediate response may be that the team needs to communicate more consistently. Again, that might be true, but consistent communication is difficult when the leadership team hasn't first created a sufficiently shared understanding of the message.

What appears downstream as a communication problem can therefore begin upstream as a clarity problem.

Clarity reduces the amount people have to interpret

Every organisation requires judgement. The aim isn't to create so much certainty that nobody ever has to think for themselves, nor is it realistic to define every role, decision or eventuality in advance.

The question is whether people are using their judgement where judgement adds value, or whether they are having to use it to compensate for things the leadership team has left unnecessarily unclear.

When priorities aren't explicit enough, people decide for themselves what matters most. When decision rights aren't understood, they either hesitate, escalate or act and hope they had the authority to do so. When ownership is blurred, several people may become involved in the same issue or everybody may assume somebody else has it covered.

Over time, those interpretations become ways of working. They can become so familiar that the organisation stops seeing them as the consequence of ambiguity and starts seeing them as characteristics of the people involved.

They always need everything escalating.

That department never takes ownership.

We keep having the same conversations.

People don't seem to understand the priorities.

Before accepting those explanations, it is worth becoming curious about the environment in which those behaviours are happening.

What are people being asked to interpret for themselves?

Look upstream before trying to fix downstream

This is one of the reasons I believe leadership teams benefit from periodically examining their own clarity rather than waiting until something obviously goes wrong.

Not to create certainty around everything, but to notice where different assumptions may be creating unnecessary work, frustration or inconsistency.

That means looking beyond purpose and asking some broader questions. How clear are we about what requires our collective attention? Do we understand how decisions are made and who has authority to make them? Are responsibilities and boundaries clear enough for people to act? Do our priorities help people make choices when everything feels important? Are we creating enough consistency for the wider organisation to understand what it can expect from us?

These are some of the areas I explore in my Leadership Clarity Audit, the first tool in my Leadership Teams Playbook. It is designed to help leadership teams recognise where clarity already exists and where assumptions, differences or unanswered questions may be worth exploring.

It isn't designed to give a team the answers, because answers are rarely the most useful starting point.

The more interesting question is what the current patterns are telling you.

If a leadership team repeatedly experiences problems with accountability, communication, competing priorities or decisions that don't translate into action, asking people to try harder may change very little.

Looking upstream may reveal that the team has been trying to solve the symptom rather than becoming curious about what is creating it.

And sometimes, before asking people to behave differently, leadership teams need to become clearer about the environment they are asking people to behave within.