Leadership in Practice.

The situation

A senior executive arrived at a large global organization with a mandate to drive change and the authority to pursue it. Most of the leadership team had been promoted from within, and several had worked alongside each other for over a decade.

He was the newcomer in a room with a long memory.

What was getting in the way

Caution registered with him as resistance, and his answer to resistance was pressure.

People learned what raising a concern cost. They stopped bringing concerns to him, and the conversation moved to the places where he was not present.

What looked to him like a team that would not move was a team that had stopped telling him things.

The work

The work focused on what his response to disagreement was teaching the room, and on the decade of shared history he had been treating as an obstacle rather than as information.

Much of it came down to how decisions actually got made there, which was through relationships he had not yet built.

What changed

He started asking about the history behind a decision instead of pushing past it. He slowed down at the moments he had previously accelerated.

The situation

A founder moved into a senior executive role in a much larger organization, carrying the habits that had built her company: decide quickly, own the result, keep moving.

In the new organization, the decisions she made quickly belonged to several people.

What was getting in the way

Colleagues met decisions she had already settled. People who could have helped her heard about things late, and the ones with a stake in the outcome were handed a conclusion instead of a question.

She did not intend to leave people out. By the time she involved them, the decision had usually been made.

The work

We traced where decision rights actually sat across the organization, and what her pace signaled to the people who had not been asked.

What changed

She began involving stakeholders before she needed their support, and understood their priorities before a decision reached the point of commitment.

The situation

A high-performing executive was respected for what she personally delivered. Over time, the work that mattered had learned to route back to her.

Decisions waited on her, and the wait reached teams well outside her own.

What was getting in the way

When her team hit a problem, she solved it. The people around her practiced execution rather than judgment, because judgment was not what they were being asked for.

Disagreement did not surface either. She treated it as a signal that something had gone wrong, so the people who worked for her stopped starting one.

Stepping in spared her the discomfort of watching them struggle. It also spared them the experience that would have taught them to handle it.

The work

The work addressed what her habit of stepping in was teaching the people who reported to her, and what it would take for a decision to stop needing her.

What changed

She let her team carry problems through to a decision, and let their judgment stand even when hers would have differed.