Diagnostic Pattern
"My leadership team isn't a team"
The symptom is real. The cause is usually somewhere else.
Your leadership team has politics and silos. Each leader optimizes their own function, and you are the one holding it together. It looks like personality. A few strong people who will not get along. It may actually be that the alignment you assume was never tested, and there is no shared accountability holding the team to one direction.
What you think it is
My leadership team just isn't a team. There's politics and silos, and I'm the one holding it together.
So you read it as chemistry. You book the team-building offsite. You move people around the org chart and wait for the friction to settle.
What it usually is
A hypothesis to test, not an indictment on you or the team.
Alignment is everything moving in the same direction and connecting at the right places. The trap is believing you are aligned without asking. When two of your leaders' goals collide and there is no shared definition of the words that matter, no stack-ranked principle they can decide by in the field, and no shared standard for how they report, each one optimizes their own function and routes the conflict back to you. In COM-B terms this is not Capability and it is not the people. It is Opportunity: the systems, process, and leadership that let a team operate as a team were never built. Capable, motivated leaders still silo when nothing holds them accountable to one direction.
How to tell
When two of your leaders' goals collide, what is the agreed rule that breaks the tie? Or does it always route back to you?
The move
Stop assessing the people and assess the system. Alignment is built with three things: shared Definitions (the words that matter, on an index card), shared Principles (stack-ranked so a leader can break a tie in the field without you), and shared Standards (one report where one leader's lagging number is the next leader's leading number, so the handoffs stay clean). Then ask the question you have been avoiding: are we actually aligned? They route everything back to you because you are the only shared accountability they have. If you are looking for leadership, start with a mirror. Then build that accountability into the system and stop being the glue.
You might think it is personality and chemistry. It may actually be that you are the only shared accountability your team has.
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