“The strategy is clear. We communicated it.”
The offsite produced alignment. Every leader can recite the three priorities. The slides are on the shared drive. Communication happened.
Everyone agreed on the strategy. They mean different things by it.
Your three priorities are being read six different ways across four teams. Not because people didn’t listen — because the same words carry different weight depending on where you sit. “Customer-first” means one thing to product and something else to finance. Agreement went up. Shared understanding didn’t.
When people can’t explain the why without slides, alignment is performance, not belief.
“My door is always open.”
We’re hands-on leaders. We stay close to the work. People bring decisions to us because they trust our judgment. Accessibility is a strength.
Everything routes to the same three people.
Your calendar isn’t a sign of importance. It’s a symptom. Decisions come to you not because they need your judgment but because the system has no other path. You’ve become a routing mechanism, not a governing one. The more available you are, the less the system needs to build its own authority.
When leaders are in every meeting, leadership has already collapsed.
“We’re thoughtful and deliberate.”
Big decisions deserve careful review. We align stakeholders. We gather input. Thoroughness is how we manage risk.
The decision has an owner. It still took four months.
The VP you promoted has authority on paper. She’s used it twice — and both times took three alignment meetings, two escalations, and your quiet nod before anything moved. The system grants authority in titles and requires permission in practice. Your leaders aren’t slow. They’re structurally discouraged from being fast.
If a decision requires alignment from everyone, it will be made by no one.
“The numbers tell the story.”
Quarterly review is data-driven. The dashboard is green. Revenue is growing. Targets are being met. The team delivers what they’re asked to deliver.
The dashboard says green. The building is creaking.
Every metric you track is being optimized. That’s the problem. Teams learned what gets measured and what gets rewarded. The costs that don’t fit a KPI — the attrition of your strongest people, the workarounds that keep things running, the customer friction no survey captures — those pile up where your dashboard can’t see them.
When dashboards are green but people are struggling, the metrics aren’t lying. They’re just not looking.
“We want to hear about problems early.”
Leadership is accessible. We encourage people to raise issues before they grow. Escalation is part of how we manage risk.
They stopped telling you. Not because it got better.
Escalation volumes are down. You read that as progress. Your teams read it differently. They learned that raising something means a three-week review, their name on a report, and a reputation for not handling it themselves. The problems didn’t go away. They went underground.
When escalation volumes drop without structural change, problems are being absorbed, not solved.
Every lens sees the same system. Shared language is how the system starts to learn.
These aren’t failures of people. They’re the physics of organizations operating at scale and speed.