The Leadership Problem That Starts in Your Chair

A few times a year, the same call comes in. A CEO tells me his leadership team is broken. No one trusts anyone. No one owns outcomes. People aren’t straight in the room, and they’re worse behind closed doors. He has watched it long enough to name it, and now he wants it fixed. “Can you do something about my leadership team?”

So I start asking questions. Discovery is nothing fancier than that. You ask enough people in enough corners of the company until the story the top tells stops matching the story everyone below is living.

More often than it should, the two stories split the same way.

The business is in worse shape than the CEO has admitted. A cash squeeze. A key client with one foot out the door. A number that is not going to land. Instead of saying so, he decides who gets to know. He keeps the truth from the exact people whose work depends on it. They keep working blind. A problem that should surface in a week sits untouched for a quarter. By the time it reaches my desk, the damage is in plain view. Good people are gone. I have watched a quarter of a sales team walk out before the CEO connected a single resignation to himself. The ones who stayed keep their heads down and their opinions to themselves.

Put a number on that. Replacing one seller runs anywhere from half to twice their annual pay by the time you count the search, the ramp, and the pipeline that dies while the seat sits empty. A quarter of the team walking is not a morale dip. It’s a six- or seven-figure hole and the better part of a year to climb out of it. He booked it as an attitude problem.

And he reads every piece of it as a problem with his people.

It is not. That is the leader. The trust he called me in to rebuild, he had already spent himself.

His other leaders are not the disease. They are the symptom. They learned, from watching him, that you handle bad news by controlling who sees it. They conceal because he conceals. A company does a faithful impression of the person running it. It always does.

Why Won’t My Leadership Team Take Ownership?

Usually because they are running the playbook you modeled, whether you handed it to them or not. A team stops owning outcomes when it watches the person at the top avoid owning his.

You might not see yourself in that story. You might be ready to move on to the next thing in your inbox and feel clear. Don’t.

The blind spot doesn’t need anything that dramatic. You tell the company you want candor, then go quiet the month the numbers turn. You tell your leaders to make the call, then quietly redo the ones you’d have made differently. You want urgency from everyone while the one decision they’re all waiting on sits on your desk. You ask your team to trust each other while you hold the full picture close.

Every one of those teaches the same lesson. Watch what he does, not what he says.

Then you hand the whole company a diagnosis. We have an accountability problem. Nobody owns outcomes. The team won’t change. And you leave exactly one person out of the report. The one who sets the temperature for all of it. “My people won’t change” is that exemption in four words. It names everyone but the chair.

Run the Complaint Backwards

Running the complaint backwards means taking each gripe you have about your team and asking what behavior of yours trained it. The blank almost never stays empty.

Take each complaint and finish the sentence out loud: and the way I teach that is ___.

They won’t make decisions. And the way I teach that is reversing the ones they make.

Nobody owns outcomes. And the way I teach that is taking the job back the second it wobbles.

They aren’t honest with each other. And the way I teach that is controlling who gets to see bad news.

Nobody brings me problems early. And the way I teach that is making the person who does regret it.

The team won’t change. And the way I teach that is announcing the change, then running exactly the way I always have.

The CEO on that call could run this in an afternoon. Every complaint he has about his team traces back to a behavior he modeled first. He never runs it, because he decided long ago that the problem is them. That decision is the whole trap. The exemption isn’t that you’re doing something wrong. It’s that you ruled yourself out as a suspect before the investigation started.

The 10-minute version

Write down the three complaints you make most often about your team. Finish “and the way I teach that is ___” for each one. Then circle the one you’d least want them reading over your shoulder. That’s the one to fix first.

Run the Business Like a Thermostat. Run Yourself Like One Too.

The fix for your own blind spot is to run yourself the way you already run the business: on a set line, a few warning signals, and a response decided before the pressure hits.

You already know the difference. A thermometer reacts and reports. A thermostat holds a line, watches for signs it’s drifting, and fires a response when it does. All of it set before the pressure arrives. That’s the discipline you want running through the business.

The one place you don’t run it is on yourself. On the business, you’re a thermostat. On your own leadership, you’re still a thermometer. You read the company’s temperature as a fact about them, when a good part of it is a reading on you. That isn’t a character flaw. It’s the blind spot every operator has, because you can’t watch yourself work. So turn the same three on yourself.

Set the floor. Not a goal. A floor. Name the behavior you will not cross, specific enough that you know the moment you slip. The CEO on that call doesn’t need a delegation plan. He needs one floor: I don’t hide the number from the people I’m asking to hit it.

Name the signals. Decide now what tells you you’ve drifted back. The job lands on your desk instead of your PM’s. Your sharpest person stops pushing back. Bad news reaches you late. You rate yourself “good” while the company rates leadership “broken.” Name the triggers now, because in the moment you’ll explain every one of them away.

Decide the response in advance. The moment a job turns sideways is when your old instinct is loudest and your judgment is worst. So decide now. Hand the decision back and name who owns it. Ask the question instead of answering it. Set the response before the pressure hits, or the pressure sets it for you.

Here is the catch that undoes all three. Every one depends on reading your own temperature, and that’s the one read you can’t take. You cannot be the thermometer for your own leadership. Someone with no reason to flatter you has to take the reading and hand you the number.

Why Fixing Yourself First Is Leverage, Not Self-Help

Change the playbook at the top and the model changes underneath. Not because you sent a memo. Because your people watched you do the thing you’d been asking of them. That’s the only version of culture change that holds. The rest drifts back inside a quarter.

This is why the work starts with you and not with them. It isn’t self-improvement. It’s the highest-leverage move you have. One person changes, and the whole system reorganizes around the change.

What to Do Before You Blame the Team

Before you spend another dollar trying to fix your people, run the complaint backwards. Take the last problem you diagnosed for the whole company and finish the sentence: and the way I teach that is ___.

Then get the read you can’t take yourself. Hand it to someone with no reason to flatter you: the board member who doesn’t report to you, the number-two who’s earned the right to be blunt, an advisor with no stake in your comfort. Give them one question.

“Where am I the reason this isn’t working, and where have you stopped telling me?”

Then sit still long enough to actually hear the answer. That is the whole job.

When CEOs call me and say “I have a leadership problem,” they’re usually right. They just have the org chart upside down. So here is the question worth sitting with. What is the diagnosis you’ve handed down to everyone but yourself?

Quick Answers

What does it actually cost when a leadership team breaks down?

More than the morale hit you can see. Replacing one seller runs half to twice their annual pay once you count the search, the ramp, and the pipeline lost while the seat sits empty. A quarter of a team walking is a six- or seven-figure hole and close to a year to rebuild — usually booked, wrongly, as an attitude problem.

How do I know if I’m the leadership problem?

Run the complaint backwards. Take each thing you say about your team and finish “and the way I teach that is ___.” If the blank fills in easily, you’re modeling the behavior you’re complaining about.

Can I fix this on my own?

Not the diagnosis. You can’t read your own temperature, which is the blind spot every operator has. Set one behavioral floor you won’t cross, then ask someone with no reason to flatter you — a board member, a blunt number-two, an outside advisor — to tell you the moment you slip.

If this sounds like your company, book a complimentary 30-minute call.