Talented but tangled

Picture a leadership team where every person is good at their job. The finance lead is sharp, the operations lead is relentless, the head of people is trusted across the organisation. And yet decisions take too long, the same issue comes back every month, and the CEO has become the switchboard for every conversation that matters.

That is what we mean by talented but tangled. Every person on the team is capable. The tangle lives in the space between them.

Where the knots form.

They form at the handovers. A decision that needs two people and belongs to neither. A piece of work that finishes in one team and starts in another, with nobody holding the join. A disagreement that never quite gets had, so it gets had instead in every meeting, slowly and sideways.

Capable people are often better at working around a knot than at untying it. They find a workaround, it holds for a while, and the workaround becomes the way things are done. Multiply that across a team and you have an organisation held together by private arrangements.

Every person on the team is capable. The tangle lives in the space between them.

Untangling.

The work starts by making the joins visible. Who decides what, drawn on a wall so everyone can see the gaps and the overlaps. Which conversations keep coming back, and what decision each one is standing in for. Where the CEO is the only route between two people who should be talking directly.

Then the team practises the new shape together, in real meetings on real decisions, with someone in the room to notice when it slides back. That takes longer than a workshop and less time than people fear. Most of the knots were tied by habit, and habits can be retied.

What you get is quieter meetings, a CEO with fewer messages to carry, and a team that adds up to more than its people.

Paul Steele