Leadership Drift This Week
What Problem Are We Trying to Solve?
An organization can spend considerable time and money correcting employees while overlooking the conditions that make their jobs harder than they need to be. It can demand accountability from people while letting leaders avoid it. It can promote values that its own decisions contradict.
The activity looks like improvement. The underlying problem remains.
Sometimes the problem is a lack of strategy, talent, resources, or effort. Sometimes, the problem is leadership itself.
I am interested in problems where leadership decisions, behaviors, or systems contribute to poor outcomes for people and organizations. Confused priorities. Broken trust. Weak accountability. Preventable conflict. Talented people who become disengaged or leave. Managers who struggle to lead effectively. Teams that work hard without making meaningful progress.
These problems have different symptoms and different causes. What connects them is that leadership may be contributing to the difficulty. Understanding its role could help resolve it.
Leadership is a responsibility before it is a position.
It's a simple premise, but its implications are considerable.
I help people and organizations understand and solve problems where leadership contributes to poor outcomes. That means looking beyond visible symptoms, identifying the decisions, behaviors, and conditions that sustain the problem, and determining what needs to change.
Leadership is the responsibility people accept for their influence on others, the decisions they make, the conditions they create, and the consequences they allow.
Organizations often treat leadership as a collection of desirable qualities or skills to develop. Those things have value. Leadership research has given us useful ways to understand motivation, relationships, decision-making, culture, and performance. But knowing about leadership does not guarantee responsible practice.
We can communicate without understanding, hold people accountable without ownership, state values without integrity, and have managers with authority but insufficient leadership capability. We can teach people how to lead while leaving the conditions that undermine their leadership untouched. The question isn't whether we know enough about leadership. It is whether we are willing to examine what leadership is producing.
When something goes wrong, I want to understand what is happening, who is affected, why it matters, and what is contributing to it. I want to know where leadership is implicated, what responsibility it must accept, and what needs to change.
That requires curiosity before certainty. It means resisting the temptation to prescribe training, restructure a team, or introduce another framework before understanding the problem those interventions are supposed to solve.
It also means being willing to discover that our initial explanation was wrong.
Leadership Drift gives me eight diagnostic lenses through which to investigate these conditions: Direction Deficit, Communication Breakdowns, Feedback Failure, Team Neglect, Weak Accountability, Integrity Gaps, Capacity Constraints, and Growth Gaps.
These are ways to investigate existing problems. For example, a breakdown in accountability might reflect unclear expectations, inconsistent consequences, inadequate capacity, conflicting incentives, or a leader unwilling to have a difficult conversation. The label alone doesn't tell us which explanation is correct.
We have to look.
When we misdiagnose a problem, we may ask people to compensate for conditions they didn't create. We can spend money on interventions that leave the underlying causes untouched. We can repeat the same cycle of disappointment while wondering why nothing seems to improve.
Responsibility, however, must not become blame. Leadership is not always the cause of every organizational problem, and a credible diagnosis must account for economic conditions, inadequate resources, flawed systems, competing incentives, and individual circumstances. Sometimes leadership is part of the problem. Sometimes it is a major contributor. Sometimes the evidence points elsewhere. The point is not to find a convenient villain. It is to understand what happened, identify what we can influence, and determine what must change.
This is how I think about leadership as both a human responsibility and a practical discipline. The objective is not to produce better-sounding leaders or people who can repeat the right principles. It is to improve the conditions and consequences of leadership.
That means paying attention to what happens after the conversation, the training, or the announcement. Are expectations clearer? Are people taking appropriate responsibility? Are difficult issues being addressed? Are working relationships improving? Are the same problems recurring, or are people becoming better at recognizing and correcting them?
Improvement requires more than good intentions. It requires the capacity to see what is happening, say what needs to be said, own the responsibility, align around what matters, and act. It requires feedback and correction before an undesirable pattern becomes the accepted way of doing things.
I don't assume every leadership problem has a simple solution, or that improving a leader can solve every problem. I do believe we should take leadership's influence seriously enough to investigate it rather than automatically looking elsewhere.
Leadership shapes people's experience of work, the quality of decisions, how responsibility is exercised, and whether those being led are strengthened or diminished.
The starting point is straightforward:
- identify a consequential problem,
- investigate leadership's contribution, and
- determine whether the conditions actually improve.
It sounds obvious. Yet organizations continue to tolerate confusion, diminished trust, weak accountability, preventable conflict, and the quiet exhaustion of good people.
Give a damn. Tell the truth. Take responsibility. Make things better.
If that sounds obvious, consider how much organizational suffering persists because obvious things remain undone.
Drift Pattern of the Week:
Direction Deficit
Direction Deficit emerges when people are expected to act without a sufficiently clear understanding of what matters, what success looks like, or where their efforts should lead. Priorities compete, expectations vary, and teams can work hard without making meaningful progress.
Leaders often overlook it because they believe they've communicated the direction simply by announcing a goal or setting a priority. But stating an objective isn't the same as creating shared understanding.
Left unaddressed, Direction Deficit turns uncertainty into wasted effort, conflicting decisions, frustration, and disappointing results.
Leadership Practice
Before approving another intervention, ask three people closest to the problem to independently complete:
“The problem is ___, and we'll know it's improving when ___.”
Compare their answers before choosing a solution.
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Diagnostic Question
If the people affected by your latest improvement initiative described the problem it was meant to solve, would their answers match yours?
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From My Desk
Many leaders feel pressure to show they're doing something about a problem, even when they haven't agreed on what the problem is.
The result can be a steady stream of activity that looks responsible from the outside. Meetings happen, procedures change, and people receive new instructions. Meanwhile, the people closest to the work may still face the same obstacles.
The uncomfortable part is that leaders can end up defending the original decision rather than examining it. Progress begins when they become as willing to question their solution as they were eager to implement it.
Recommended Resource
Leadership Drift Self-Check
When the same organizational problems keep returning despite repeated interventions, leaders need a clearer understanding of what's sustaining them.
The Leadership Drift Diagnostic helps examine the leadership decisions, behaviors, and conditions that may be contributing to poor outcomes. Instead of assuming the cause, it offers a structured way to investigate the situation through relevant diagnostic lenses.
The goal is to leave with a clearer picture of what's happening, where leadership may need to take responsibility, and which changes deserve attention first.
Here's an inexpensive hack: Start with the Leadership Drift Self-Check
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Leadership Drift Quote
“Leadership is a responsibility before it is a position.”
Karl Bimshas on Leadership Drift
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