Teams
Your executive team does not have a trust problem
It is the most common brief we receive: they don't trust each other. Almost always, it is not true in the way the sponsor means it. The members trust each other's intentions perfectly well. What is missing is something more specific and more fixable.
Look at where the conversation stops. In most stuck executive teams, disagreement is permitted about facts and forbidden about priorities. People will argue all day about whether the number is right, and go silent the moment the question becomes whose portfolio should absorb the cut. That is not a trust deficit. That is an unclear mandate combined with unclear decision rights, and the silence is a rational response to it. Nobody wants to lose an argument that has no agreed rules.
Teams sent on trust-building interventions in this state come back warmer and no more effective, which is worse than doing nothing because it exhausts the sponsor's appetite for the real work. The real work is duller: establishing what this team is uniquely for, which decisions belong to it rather than to its members, and what happens when someone does not deliver on a commitment made in the room.
Trust is usually the output. It is rarely the input.
Leadership
The promotion that breaks good managers
There is a predictable point at which strong managers come unstuck, and it is not the step into management. It is the step after: from running a function to running functions they cannot personally do.
Up to that point, the manager's technical credibility has been doing quiet, load-bearing work. They could always resolve the hard case themselves, check the analysis themselves, model the standard themselves. Then the portfolio widens, and that instrument stops working — not because they lost it, but because there is no longer time to use it, and in two of their four areas they are now the least expert person in the room.
What we see next is one of two failures. Some retreat into the part they still know, and the rest of the portfolio drifts. Others try to keep the old standard across everything and become a bottleneck their team routes around. Both look like capacity problems. Neither is.
The shift required is genuinely hard: from being the answer to building the conditions in which answers appear — asking questions that expose weak thinking in a domain you do not know, judging people rather than work, and tolerating a version of the outcome that is not the one you would have produced. Very few people make that transition by being told about it. Most make it by being coached through the first six months of doing it badly.
Organisation
Restructures fail in the twelve weeks after the announcement
By the time a restructure is announced, most of the organisational attention has been spent. The business case was argued, the consultation was run, the legal risk was managed, the communication was drafted and redrafted. Then the last conversation ends and the project is treated as closed.
It is not closed. The people who remain are now doing altered jobs, often with colleagues who left, under managers who were themselves consulted, and with no reliable sense of whether more is coming. Absenteeism moves before engagement scores do. Discretionary effort goes first and quietly. Institutional knowledge walks out in the resignations that arrive four to six months later, and by then nobody connects them to the change.
The organisations that come through well do a small, unglamorous set of things in that window: they re-contract explicitly with the people who stayed rather than assuming relief is gratitude; they give managers language for conversations they have not been trained to hold; they fix the role clarity the new structure broke, which is nearly always more than expected; and they say plainly whether further change is anticipated, because the absence of that sentence is heard as a yes.
Doing the process well protects you legally. Doing the twelve weeks afterwards well is what protects the performance you restructured to get.
