Interview

You call this the Leadership Line Diagnostic. Before we get into what it is, let's start with why it exists. What problem does it solve that wasn't already being solved?

Most organizations only have two explanations on hand when a manager isn't leading well: either they're not skilled enough, or they don't want to be. So the response is training, or a difficult conversation about performance, or eventually, replacement. And sometimes that's correct. But I kept encountering situations where neither explanation held up. The manager had the skills. Coaching hadn't moved the needle. And yet the team underneath them wasn't being led — decisions stalled, people disengaged, problems that should have surfaced early didn't.

What those situations had in common is that nobody had actually investigated the "line" — the manager, their own leader above them, and the team below them — as a connected structure. Everyone was looking at the manager in isolation, as if leadership capability lives entirely inside one person, disconnected from what's happening above and below them.

The Leadership Line Diagnostic exists to look at the whole line at once, because that is usually where the actual cause is sitting.

How does it actually work? What does the process look like?

It starts the same way the Team Diagnostic does — a structured intake conversation, this time with whoever commissioned the diagnostic, usually the manager's own leader. That conversation establishes the presenting problem, what's already been tried, and what a resolved situation would look like.

Then I interview three parties, individually. The manager themselves — their read on their role, their constraints, their own account of what's not working. Their direct leader — what they're observing, what they've already tried, what they expect. And a sample of the manager's own direct reports — what leadership actually looks like from where they sit, day to day.

Each interview follows a structured framework, but the questions differ depending on who I'm talking to, because each person has a different vantage point on the same line. I'm listening for where those three accounts converge — which is usually evidence of something structural — and where they diverge, which often points to something more personal to the manager.

The output is a written findings report and a debrief conversation, the same as the Team Diagnostic. But because this diagnostic sits across both structural and personal territory, the findings usually name both: what's constraining this manager that has nothing to do with them, and what, if anything, is actually about how they're showing up.

What's different about diagnosing one manager's line, compared to a whole leadership team?

The scope is narrower, but the mix of causes is wider. A Leadership Team Diagnostic stays almost entirely structural — roles, decision rights, incentives, information flow between peers. This one has to hold structural causes and personal ones at the same time, because a capable manager who isn't leading effectively is rarely explained by only one or the other.

Sometimes it's entirely structural — the manager has no real authority over the decisions they're held accountable for, or they're caught between contradictory expectations from above and below. Sometimes it's genuinely personal — a manager who has the skill but not the disposition, who avoids the parts of leading that make them uncomfortable, or who's protecting themselves rather than their team. Most of the time, it's both, tangled together, and untangling that mix is the actual work of the diagnostic.

What are the most common things a manager's own leader doesn't see?

The most common one is mistaking a structural bind for a personal shortfall. A manager who's been given accountability without real authority — over budget, over headcount, over priorities — will often look hesitant, or indecisive, or unable to make the hard calls. Their leader reads that as a leadership gap. But it's frequently a rational response to genuinely having no lever to pull. The manager isn't failing to lead. They're leading inside a structure that doesn't let their decisions stick.

The second is not seeing what's actually happening on the team below. A manager's own leader typically has almost no direct visibility into how that manager behaves with their own reports — what gets modeled, what gets tolerated, what gets ignored. So a leader can be confident a manager is "doing fine" based on how that manager presents upward, while the manager's own team would describe something very different.

The third is underestimating how much a manager's disposition, not just their circumstances, is shaping outcomes. Sometimes the structure genuinely is fine, and the honest finding is that this manager is avoiding something uncomfortable about the job itself — giving direct feedback, making an unpopular call, sitting with conflict instead of smoothing it over. That's harder to hear than a structural explanation, but naming it accurately is what makes it addressable.

Findings that mix structural causes with something more personal about the manager sound like they'd be harder to deliver than purely structural ones. How do you handle that?

Carefully, and by keeping the two kinds of findings clearly separated, not blended into one soft, ambiguous message.

Where the cause is structural, I say so plainly, and I don't let it get personalized in the delivery — "this manager has accountability without the authority to act on it" is a condition, not a verdict on the person.

Where the cause is genuinely about the manager themselves, I don't disguise that as something structural just to make it easier to hear. That would defeat the purpose of the diagnostic. But I'm careful about what "about the manager" actually means. Every manager in this diagnostic has already demonstrated the technical capability the role requires — that's not what's in question. What's in question is a leadership or performance gap, and that gap can have different explanations. Sometimes it's a genuine skill deficit — giving constructive feedback, for instance, is a learnable skill someone simply hasn't developed yet. Sometimes it's dispositional — the skill is there, but something about the situation makes them avoid using it. Those explanations call for different responses, and the manager's own leader needs to know which one is actually driving the gap.

The goal isn't to soften what's found. It's to make sure what gets named is actually what's true, structural, personal, or both, so whatever happens next is aimed at the right thing.

Who is this engagement designed for, and who isn't it right for?

It's designed for a manager's own leader, when they have a manager who appears capable on paper, but isn't leading effectively, and the usual responses, more training, a difficult conversation, haven't resolved it. It's especially well suited when the leader genuinely isn't sure whether what they're seeing is about the manager, about the structure around them, or about something in between.

It's not the right engagement when a manager has already privately concluded, on their own, that they're struggling and knows roughly why. That's a coaching conversation, not a diagnostic — the person already has the self-awareness the diagnostic exists to produce for someone else. It's also not suited to a leader who has already reached a firm conclusion and is looking for confirmation rather than an honest look at the line. And it's not appropriate where the real question is simply whether to keep or remove this manager — that's a decision for the leader to make, not something this engagement is built to produce.

Last question. What stays with you about this particular kind of work?

How often the manager at the center of it is the last person in the room to fully see their own situation. Not because they're unaware, but because they're inside it, absorbing pressure from above and below at the same time, without much room to step back and see the shape of the whole line they're standing in.

What the diagnostic usually produces isn't a verdict on whether someone is a good manager. It's a clearer picture of exactly where the real constraint is sitting, so the right thing gets addressed, instead of the manager, or their leader, guessing.

That is what this engagement is designed to do.

Alexander Spradling, PhD is an organizational consultant and executive coach with a PhD in Human Science. He works with senior leaders and their teams through his practice, Impromi.

To explore whether the Leadership Line Diagnostic is the right fit for what you are facing, the first step is to start a conversation.