Leadership Bites: Week 2
Preview: Fix leadership teams that avoid real conflict. Stop great ideas from dying in handoffs. Spot when teams optimize for the wrong outcomes. Build succession capacity that actually works. Plus, preserve momentum across departments.
People: When Your Leadership Team Becomes an Echo Chamber
During my leadership years, one of my biggest concerns was creating environments in which everyone was always in agreement – no challenges, no pushback. On the surface, it looked like perfect team alignment, but the lack of dissent was actually a warning sign.
I remember running leadership meetings that felt eerily predictable. We’d discuss the issues, everyone would nod along, and we’d leave feeling aligned.
However, this lack of differing opinions wasn’t a sign of alignment – it occurred because we’d unconsciously trained each other to avoid real conflict. Disagreements got smoothed over with diplomatic language. Hard questions got deflected with “let’s take that offline.”
We’d created what I call “artificial harmony” – the appearance of alignment without the substance that genuine debate provides.
Leadership teams typically swing between two extremes. Either they’re constantly at each other’s throats (dysfunction), or they avoid difficult conversations entirely (artificial harmony). The highest-performing teams I’ve worked with live in the productive tension between these two extremes.
The breakthrough came when I applied Lencioni’s 5 dysfunctions framework and realized we were stuck in the second dysfunction – fear of conflict. We had trust, but we weren’t willing to engage in productive ideological conflict. This meant we couldn’t achieve real commitment to decisions, because people hadn’t fully aired their concerns or explored alternatives.
The framework showed me that without healthy conflict, we’d never get genuine buy-in. People would nod in meetings, but harbor private doubts, leading to weak accountability and poor results.
I changed one simple rule: every major decision required someone to argue the opposite position. Not devil’s advocate theater, but a genuine exploration of alternative approaches – the kind of passionate debate about ideas that the framework identifies as essential for high-performing teams.
Almost immediately, our meetings transformed. Instead of nodding along, team members started pushing back constructively. Instead of quick consensus, we’d spend time testing assumptions and exploring downsides.
The quality of our decisions improved dramatically because we’d built real intellectual diversityinto our process. Conflict became a tool for better thinking, not something to avoid.
Try this week: Identify which of the five dysfunctions your team shows most: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, or inattention to results. Start by addressing that one dysfunction in your next leadership meeting.
Process: The Cross-Functional Handoff That Kills Momentum
Working with growing companies, I’ve noticed a recurring pattern: great ideas often fail in execution.
Projects start strong in one department, then lose momentum the moment they cross functional lines. Marketing hands off campaigns to sales, and key context gets lost. Product delivers features to customer success, but training falls short.
The real issue isn’t individual performance; it is that these companies have optimized each function independently without considering the connective tissue between them.
This happens constantly with companies scaling past a certain size. They build strong individual departments, but weak interdepartmental coordination. Success becomes about hitting your functional metrics rather than delivering end-to-end outcomes.
The companies that break through this understand that handoffs are where most value gets lost. They design explicit processes to preserve momentum across functional boundaries.
We mapped out the actual workflow when projects crossed departmental lines – like designing an assembly line for ideas, instead of hoping they’d magically flow between teams.
For every cross-functional project, we documented the following: exact handoff points between departments, what deliverables each department needed to pass along, clear timelines for each stage, who had decision-making authority at each step, and what triggers escalation when things get stuck.
The breakthrough wasn’t better communication; it was treating cross-functional work like manufacturing. You wouldn’t run a factory without knowing exactly when each station hands work to the next. But most companies run cross-functional projects with vague handoffs and unclear timelines.
Once we had the workflow mapped, delays became visible immediately. Instead of projects disappearing into departmental black holes, everyone could see exactly where bottlenecks happened, and who was responsible for moving things forward.
When implemented properly, projects that used to stall at handoffs start flowing smoothly from idea to implementation. The teams remained the same, but they were now aligned around shared outcomes instead of individual scorecards.
Try this week: Map the workflow for one project that regularly crosses departments. Document the exact handoff points, timelines, and decision makers. Make delays visible instead of invisible.
Data: When Your Team Optimizes for the Wrong Outcome
A few years back, I encountered a scenario that taught me how metrics can work against you. A customer success team had achieved impressive response rates to support tickets, which was celebrated across the company. But customer satisfaction scores were declining, and churn was creeping up.
The root cause wasn’t response time – it was that optimizing for speed had inadvertently encouraged superficial responses. The team had learned to respond quickly with partial solutions rather than taking time to fully resolve issues.
This happens more often than you’d think: teams that hit their metrics while missing their mission. It occurs when you reward the behavior you can measure, instead of the outcome you actually want.
The breakthrough insight: most customer service problems require multiple interactions to truly resolve. By measuring first response time instead of time to resolution, they inadvertently incentivized quick replies over comprehensive solutions.
The shift from response time to resolution rate on first contact transformed everything. The team began to spend more time understanding problems before responding. Average response time went up slightly, but customer satisfaction scores jumped significantly within two months.
The lesson wasn’t about picking better metrics – it was about understanding how metrics shape behavior in ways you don’t intend.
Try this week: Pick your team’s primary performance metric. Ask yourself: What behavior might this metric accidentally encourage that works against our real goals? Look for evidence of that behavior in action.
Tonio’s Corner: The Succession Planning Reality Check
In my years scaling teams, I’ve learned to ask scaling companies the same uncomfortable question that most leaders avoid: “If you disappeared tomorrow, who could step into your role?”
The silence usually lasts longer than they expect.
The reality is that many leaders know intellectually that they should be developing successors, but they get caught in the daily urgency trap. They’re too busy doing the job to prepare someone else to do it.
What I discovered: succession planning isn’t about replacing yourself someday – it’s about creating the capacity to focus on what only you can do.
The simple diagnostic: List the five things that only you currently handle in your organization. For each one, identify who could learn to do it at 80% of your effectiveness within six months.
If you can’t answer that for at least three of the five, you’re not just creating succession risk – you’re limiting your own strategic impact.
Try this week: Pick one decision or responsibility that currently comes to you by default. Spend 30 minutes teaching someone else how to handle it. Start building your organizational capacity deliberately.
The Compounding Effect
These four issues don’t exist in isolation – they create a vicious cycle in scaling companies.
Echo chamber leadership prevents honest assessment of broken processes. Broken processes lead to metric gaming that optimizes for the wrong outcomes. Leaders stuck optimizing the wrong metrics stay too busy firefighting to develop successors. Without succession planning, you never step back to address system-level issues.
But the reverse is also true: Fix one, and the others become easier to address.
Leaders who embrace productive conflict spot process breakdowns faster. Teams with clear cross-functional workflows measure what actually matters. Organizations tracking the right metrics create space for succession planning. And leaders with strong successors can focus on the strategic work that prevents these problems in the first place.
What’s one insight from this week that you’ll try in the next seven days?
