Move That Mountain

Not every leadership team knows it’s the problem.

Most organisations don’t wake up one morning and discover they’re dysfunctional.

Instead, it shows up in smaller ways.

1️⃣ Meetings produce conversation, not decisions -

You leave the room having discussed everything and decided nothing. Agenda items reappear. Action logs grow. If your team is brilliant at analysis but allergic to commitment, something’s off.

2️⃣ The CEO is still the tiebreaker on everything -

Healthy exec teams disagree well and resolve it themselves. If everything escalates to the top, either the team doesn’t trust their authority, or they’ve learned not to use it.

3️⃣ There are two conversations: the formal one and the real one -
What gets said in the meeting and what gets said afterwards are different. That gap is where your culture actually lives.

4️⃣ People are protecting their patch, not the organisation -

When leaders optimise for their own function over collective outcomes, you don’t have a leadership team. You have a committee.

5️⃣ Nobody is challenging the CEO -

Not because everything is fine. Because it doesn’t feel safe to. If your leadership team are nodders, that’s not loyalty.

Individually, they don’t always feel like a crisis.
Together, they can quietly slow progress, weaken culture, and make leadership far harder than it needs to be.

How many of these five signs do you recognise?
If two or more landed a little close to home, it might be worth a conversation.