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They understand what you want. So why aren’t they doing it? He’d read the leadership books. He’d tried to be fair, supportive, constructive. He’d explained what he expected and given people time to improve. Then the same problem would turn up again. He couldn’t understand why his team weren’t learning. They were experienced. Surely they weren’t confused about what he wanted. Yet he was spending more and more time revisiting things he thought had already been dealt with. And work was becoming less enjoyable. The same explanation, again This is often the point where you decide you need to be clearer. So you explain the expectation again. Follow up more closely. Remind people what was agreed. Perhaps make the consequences clearer. All reasonable things to do when someone genuinely hasn’t understood. But what if they have? If capable people appear to understand what you want and the same problem keeps returning, you may no longer have a communication problem. So what else might be going on? Diagnosis is often poor ​A survey reported in HBR asked 106 C-suite executives across 91 organisations about problem diagnosis. 85% said their organisations were bad at it. 87% said it carried significant costs. Managers tend

The CEO ripped into Kate in front of the leadership team and their direct reports. By the time he finished, Kate was crying. In front of everyone. Nobody stopped him. Sarah reported directly to Kate and held a senior role just below the C-suite. She had been in the organisation only a few months, still learning how it worked and trying to establish herself. She said nothing. The people in the room with far more authority than Sarah let the meeting carry on. Kate at least did something for herself. She later asked the CEO to apologise. He did, both privately and publicly. But it didn’t stop him. Not long after, in another meeting, he did it again. Another leader humiliated someone Around the same time, something similar happened in another part of the organisation. Marcus, another senior leader at Sarah’s level, publicly humiliated one of his direct reports at a meeting of his whole team. The man went on sick leave and never returned. It didn’t take long for Sarah to hear about it. But what was she supposed to do? Marcus didn’t report to her. Nor did the man he had humiliated. Unlike Kate, he did not have

At some point, every leader discovers there’s something their team won’t tell them. Mine came early. Where it started The first thing Geraldine wrote on the board was ASSUME. All caps, nothing else. She was my favourite university lecturer, and in our very first class she said: the biggest mistake you can make in market research is to assume. I thought about her often in my first leadership role. The boss I thought I was I thought I was being a good boss, doing right by one of my team. That we had good rapport. Then I heard on the grapevine she’d been telling people otherwise. Not in polite terms. She’s a b*tch. Avoid working with her if you can. More than once. I was shocked. Not because it stung (though it did) but because I’d had no idea. What she wouldn’t tell me We all keep secrets at work, especially from our boss. Not necessarily significant ones. Sometimes it’s just easier to stay quiet than to risk it. I’ve done it too. She assumed that if she told me, I wouldn’t do anything about it. She might have been right. But she might have been wrong, and that possibility

They’d put their career on hold to help their partner with their work. It had been going on for a long time, and it was costing them. They knew it. They just hadn’t worked out what they thought about it yet, or what they were prepared to do. So they put it into AI first. It was organised, positive and moved them fairly quickly toward answers. They knew it wasn’t helping. So they went looking for a person. The AI itself suggested a few. They checked us out. Website, LinkedIn, anything they could find. When we spoke, they told me what had tipped it. Their father had been in clothing manufacturing. So had mine. They’d read a story on my site about working for my dad during school holidays. No algorithm decided that. They did. The real problem They didn’t need answers yet. This isn’t a criticism of AI. For many things, professional, analytical, even genuinely complex ones, it’s useful. But this was something else. Personal. Relational. The kind of thing where the obstacle isn’t understanding but what you’re willing to face. AI kept moving them away from that. It mirrored back what they gave it, resolved the uncertainty quickly and produced

You hire someone excellent. The kind of person who lifts the standard the moment they arrive. They see what needs to change and they start moving the work in the right direction. Then it starts. A comment. A hesitation. A small complaint that doesn’t match what you’re seeing. Someone “not sure they’re the right fit”. Someone “having trouble with their style”. In Australia, some people call this white anting. White ants are more commonly known as termites: pests that gradually erode a structure from within before anyone realises what is happening. But naming it doesn’t solve the harder problem here, which is working out what’s really going on. The term doesn’t capture the complexity. And you feel it too. Not confusion exactly. Something more uncomfortable. The responsibility of working out what’s actually happening. Who’s right? Is this a performance issue? Or is it resistance to change? Do you back your new hire? Do you slow down and listen? How do you tell the difference? If you reach a point where you’re clear this is happening, what to do next is a different question. I’ve written about that here. No one prepares leaders for this part. The person being undermined feels their

She’s been reporting to someone for two years and still can’t explain what he does. She’s asked. Colleagues have noticed. She’s not the only one who can’t pin it down. There’s always movement, meetings, urgency, noise. But when she looks for the work underneath, she can’t see it. Now she’s been asked to act up for a week. She’s thinking: Here’s my opportunity to find out for sure. A handover in name only He gave her thirty minutes. Most of it was him telling her which meetings she didn’t need to attend. No reasoning. No context. Just a list. When she asked what decisions might come up, the answers were vague. Same old same old. Still no clearer about what he actually drives. She walked out with the acting title and no sense of the work or what might be asked of her. Access to the layer above The best part of the week is that she gets access to a layer she’s only ever observed from below. She can walk into rooms she’s been kept out of. See who brings what. Watch what lands and what doesn’t. Test her instincts against reality instead of inference. The role probably isn’t hollow.

James (not his real name) had done good work before we met. He’d inherited a turnover problem running at 40%. He suspected salary was part of the story, looked at the data, confirmed it and acted. By the time we started working together, things were improving. But something still didn’t sit right. The fix worked. The friction remained. Staff were acutely sensitive They were complaining about even the smallest differences between colleagues. Who was coming in only a minute or two later and ‘getting away with it’, who was getting the supposedly more interesting or easier work. Like younger siblings fighting over which shape of TeeVee Snacks they got, angling for the larger ones, when they’re virtually identical. They’re an Australian chocolate biscuit, if you’re not familiar. That was a signal. Best practice: Decide before you see Before I became an executive coach, I spent years as a market researcher. Best practice is to decide what you want to know before you even design the research. You think about the questions you want answered. You decide what to measure, what to ignore and how you’ll analyse it. You anticipate which combinations of the data might reveal something useful. You start

A client missed his team’s Christmas party because a client flew him to Europe for consulting work. When he got back, people asked questions. Direct ones. Who paid for it? Did you fly first or business? Was it leave? He answered plainly. The client paid. Economy. He used the special leave category for that kind of work. A few weeks earlier, several staff had planned to attend a conference. Then funding changed. Budgets tightened. Unless people paid for it themselves, they couldn’t go. None did. Only the two most senior people went—him and his direct report. They were presenting. They were attending in their formal roles. They were fully funded. We talked about what was happening underneath both incidents. I used the phrase: envy of the troops. He stopped. Yes. That’s exactly it. He hadn’t thought of it in those terms before, but the recognition was instant. Where envy shows up This is one of the places envy appears in organisations. Not as wanting a plane seat, but as a response to difference made visible. Who gets to go. Who gets funded. Who is representing the work elsewhere while others stay behind. Hierarchies give some people access that others don’t

There’s a moment in leadership that rarely gets named. You appoint someone capable. They raise the standard. They do the job well. And instead of momentum, things start to slow. Information stops flowing cleanly. Decisions get second-guessed. Small obstacles appear where none existed before. Nothing is overt. Nothing you can point to easily. And yet, something is clearly off. If you’ve led long enough, you’ll recognise this situation. Not as confusion exactly, but as the discomfort of having to work out what’s actually happening. When capability creates friction In Australia, this is sometimes described as white anting. But the behaviour isn’t always that deliberate, or that malicious. Often, what you’re dealing with is not poor performance, but resistance to change. A capable person can represent a shift someone didn’t choose. A new way of working. A higher bar. A loss of informal influence. When that happens, resistance doesn’t usually show up as open refusal. It shows up sideways. Delays. Withholding. “Helpful” commentary that undermines. Requests for reassurance that never quite resolve. As a leader, you’re left holding an uncomfortable question. Is this a capability issue, a conduct issue, or something else entirely? The judgement leaders have to make This is

This week, I’m doing something different. Over the past year, I’ve been conducting independent research into what helps senior leaders lead well and stay effective under pressure. From that work, I’ve built something new — the Senior Leader Assessment — and I’d love you to try it. Why I did it Even strong operators can’t read the label from inside the jam jar. The research revealed six recurring situations senior leaders commonly navigate — things like board relationships, talent gaps and loneliness at the top. This assessment gives you an external read on your situation and the moves that have been found to work. Five minutes now saves you wondering. What you get Seven questions. Five minutes. Instant results. You’ll receive a short summary of your current reality, what’s supporting you, what’s not and some practical next steps. Click here to take the Senior Leader Assessment. You’ll get a clear view, fresh insight and a real perspective. Image by Pexels from Pixabay