Interview

You work with senior leaders on what you call a Leadership Team Diagnostic. Before we get into what that is, let's start with why it exists. What problem does it solve that wasn't already being solved?

The honest answer is that most of the tools available to senior leaders for understanding their team's performance don't actually tell them what's causing the problems they're observing. They measure things — how people are perceived, how they score on a personality dimension, how engaged they feel — but measurement is not diagnosis. A 360 assessment tells you that a director is seen as a poor communicator. It doesn't tell you whether that's because they lack communication skills, because they don't have enough information to communicate clearly, because they're afraid of how their boss will react to the message, or because the organization's priorities change so frequently there's nothing coherent to communicate in the first place. Each of those causes requires a completely different response. But the tool doesn't tell you which one it is.

What I kept seeing, across years of coaching and consulting work, was senior leaders who had tried everything — training, facilitation, restructuring, difficult conversations — and the patterns they were trying to address kept coming back. That persistence is almost never a sign that the interventions were badly designed. It's a sign that the diagnosis was wrong. The root cause was never correctly identified. And when you treat the wrong cause, the problem returns — because you haven't actually touched what's driving it.

The Leadership Team Diagnostic was built to do the thing those other tools don't do: investigate the specific conditions — structural, relational, motivational — that are producing the patterns in this particular team, with these particular people, in this particular context.

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

It starts with a structured conversation with the senior leader — what I call the intake — that establishes the presenting problem, the organizational context, and what a successful outcome looks like. That conversation is already diagnostic. The way a senior leader describes their team, the language they use, what they emphasize and what they leave out — all of that is data that informs how I approach the interviews that follow.

The core of the engagement is individual interviews with each member of the leadership team — typically four to six people, 60 to 75 minutes each, conducted by video call. Each interview follows a structured three-part framework covering role clarity and confidence, downward leadership, and cross-functional collaboration. The questions are designed to distinguish the influence of intrapersonal from cultural and systemic factors, by examining not just what each leader says but how they say it — the patterns in their language, the things they qualify or avoid, the places where their account of the situation converges with or diverges from what their colleagues describe.

After the interviews, I analyze the full set of transcripts systematically — looking for patterns that appear across multiple accounts, because convergence is evidence of systemic conditions, and for divergences that reveal where individual factors are at play. The output is a written findings report that covers the cross-team patterns, a structured comparison of what the directors reported against what the senior leader believed going in, a root cause analysis, individual assessments of each Director, and prioritized recommendations at three levels: for the senior leader personally, for the team collectively, and for each individual. That report is then the basis for a debrief conversation — which is not a presentation, but a strategic discussion about what the findings mean and what to do about them.

You mentioned a structured comparison between what the directors reported and what the senior leader believed going in. That sounds like a significant addition. Why does that comparison matter?

It's where some of the most important value of the engagement is created. Senior leaders arrive at this process with a diagnosis already formed — they've been living with these patterns and they've developed explanations for them. Sometimes those explanations are accurate. Often they're partially right but incomplete. Occasionally they're significantly off. And the gap between what the senior leader understood going in and what the diagnostic actually reveals is frequently the reason previous interventions haven't worked — those interventions were designed to solve the problem as the senior leader understood it, not the problem as it actually exists.

By capturing the senior leader's framing carefully at the intake and then comparing it systematically against what the directors report, I can show the senior leader exactly where their read of the situation was accurate, where it was incomplete, and what the diagnostic surfaced that they couldn't see from their position. That last category — what was not visible from where they were standing — is often the most significant. And it is almost always what makes the debrief conversation genuinely useful rather than just a review of findings they more or less expected.

What are the most common things senior leaders don't see about their own teams?

A few patterns appear repeatedly. The most common is that what looks like a collaboration problem is actually a direction problem. The team appears fragmented, siloed, not sharing information — and the senior leader concludes that the leaders need to collaborate better. But when you interview each director individually, what you find is that they don't have a shared understanding of priorities at the team level. Each of them has developed their own working definition of what matters most, because no one has defined it clearly for the team as a whole. The apparent collaboration failure is actually a consequence of strategic ambiguity. And those two problems require completely different responses.

The second thing senior leaders frequently don't see is the degree to which their own communication and decision-making practices shape how their directors behave. A leader who perceives risk in taking initiative — because past initiative was met with correction or reversal — will stop taking initiative. That looks like passivity or low motivation from above. But it is a rational adaptation to a specific set of conditions. The senior leader sees the symptom and misreads its cause.

The third is retention. Senior leaders are often the last to know that a valued team member is quietly weighing their options. The diagnostic surfaces commitment signals that don't typically make it into regular conversations — and sometimes the most urgent finding in the entire engagement is that a specific Director needs a direct conversation about their future that hasn't happened yet.

You mentioned that the senior leader's own practices sometimes shape what's happening in the team. That seems like potentially uncomfortable territory. How do you handle findings that implicate the senior leader directly?

Carefully — and honestly. Those two things are not in conflict, but they require deliberate craft.

The first thing I'd say is that findings that implicate the senior leader are not unusual — they are a normal feature of this kind of diagnostic. The conditions that shape how a leadership team performs are created at multiple levels simultaneously: by the senior leader, by the structure and governance of the team, and by the individual practices and orientations of each director. Root causes are rarely located in a single place. The senior leader matters most in this picture not because they are always the primary cause of the problem, but because they have more power than anyone else to change the conditions the team operates in.

The second thing is framing. The same finding can be delivered in ways that produce defensiveness or in ways that produce genuine reflection. Systemic framing — presenting a finding as a condition that exists in the organization rather than as a personal failing — is the primary instrument. "The team operates without enough clarity about where initiative is appropriate and where it isn't" is both accurate and more receivable than "you have been inconsistent in how you respond to initiative." Both statements may be true. Only one of them opens a productive conversation.

The third is sequencing. In the debrief, I don't lead with findings that implicate the senior leader directly. I let them engage with the team-level patterns first — see the evidence of what those patterns are producing — and then surface the conditions that are creating them. The most powerful debrief moments are when a senior leader arrives at their own conclusion: "I think I've been part of this." That self-generated insight is more durable than anything I could tell them directly.

Who is this engagement designed for — and who is it not right for?

It is designed for senior leaders who directly manage a team of leaders — CEOs, Presidents, General Managers, Division Heads, functional leaders with their own leadership teams — and who have reached the point where they know something needs to change but are not confident they understand what is actually causing it. The engagement is particularly well suited when prior interventions have not resolved the patterns, because that persistence is itself a signal that the diagnosis may be incomplete.

It is not well suited to a senior leader who arrives with a specific verdict already formed — "I need you to tell me whether to keep or let go of this person." That is a different kind of engagement. The diagnostic produces a team picture, not a verdict on an individual. And it is not right for a senior leader who needs the findings to confirm what they already believe. The value of this engagement depends on an honest presentation of what the evidence shows — including findings that may be unexpected or uncomfortable. A leader who is not genuinely open to that possibility will not get full value from the process.

What I look for in that initial discovery call — which is complimentary and carries no commitment — is a presenting problem that suits this methodology, a genuine openness to a diagnostic process rather than a predetermined conclusion, and an organizational readiness for candid conversation at the leadership team level. If those conditions aren't present, I'll say so.

Last question. After all the engagements you've conducted, what stays with you about this work?

What stays with me is how often the most important finding is something the senior leader genuinely could not have seen on their own — not because they weren't paying attention, but because their position in the system makes certain things structurally invisible. The people around them manage what they communicate upward. The patterns that are most visible to the team are least visible to the person at the top. And the gap between those two pictures is where the most significant change becomes possible.

The work I find most meaningful is not confirming what a leader already believes. It is showing them something they couldn't see from where they were standing, in a way that makes the path forward clear enough to act on.

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 Team Diagnostic is the right fit for what you are facing, the first step is a 30-minute discovery call — no charge, no commitment.