The Dynamic Your Team is Feeling but Not Fixing
Before every offsite, we solicit feedback from team members (often an executive team) and next level leaders. While each team’s context is unique, One behavior pattern is predictable. In the words of one CEO,
“I want our senior managers to lead. They need to act like owners, drive change and scale their expertise.
But their next level leaders share,
“It feels like we’re being led—too closely. And the strategy isn’t clear so we end up churning far too long, and eventually waiting until the exec team weighs in.”
This dynamic is between very senior and experienced leaders—smart, capable, deeply committed. Yet just beneath the surface, these senior leaders don’t feel empowered or fully trusted to execute decisions.
Meanwhile, the executive team is feeling equally frustrated:
“Why aren’t they moving faster? I need them to lead this change—not wait for my permission.”
Sound familiar?
This tension between the the top team and next level leaders is one of the most underexamined dynamics in organizations. The Executive Team wants acceleration. The senior managers want autonomy, clarity on success metrics, agency and a safe place to take professional risks. Both want progress. But if left unspoken, it creates drag—on speed of decision-making, morale, and results.
What helps?
When we invite both teams to reflect on how they experience each other—not in blame, but in curiosity. We use team feedback not as a scorecard, but as a springboard for shaping new teaming behaviors.
The breakthrough in’t in solving the tension. It is in naming it—and making space to design a new way forward, together.
Here’s where teams we have worked with landed:
A president committed to skip executive team meetings and let her team make decisions and execute in her absence.
A senior management team committed to making bold calls on specific initiatives without waiting for a nod.
Two interdependent teams agreed to new commitments to one another. This created space for checking in with one another. Not micromanagement or false delegation, but genuine problem solving focused on progress.
The outcome occurred because we created a safe and anonymous venue for feedback to be shared, reviewed and prioritized. To everyone’s delight, the process in doing so was not traumatic or even particularly vulnerable. It was energetic, fun and creative. This happened because the teams began to trust the process of taking (and giving) more agency.
So if you’re a CEO, President or EVP—or on a team just beneath one—consider this:
What might change if you viewed this tension between impatience and frustration not as a problem to manage, but as a behavior pattern to redesign?
