Walk into most Leadership Team meetings and you will find capable people. They know their functions, they work hard, and they care about the company. Intelligence is rarely what is missing.
What is often missing is clarity. Everyone is smart, and everyone is quietly carrying a slightly different picture of what matters most.
Smart versus healthy
In The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni makes a simple split. Companies are strong in two ways. One is being smart: good strategy, marketing, finance and technology. The other is being healthy: little politics, little confusion, and a team that is actually aligned. His argument is that most leaders spend nearly all their effort on the first and treat the second as soft.
I have seen it from the other side of the table for 35 years. When two companies are about equally smart, the one whose Leadership Team shares the same answers pulls ahead. They make decisions faster and spend less time re-litigating them.
The questions that create clarity
Lencioni boils clarity down to six questions a team should be able to answer together: why the company exists, how it behaves, what it does, how it will succeed, what is most important right now, and who must do what.
Teams that run on EOS® will recognize much of this ground. The Vision/Traction Organizer™ already puts several of those answers on one page, and that is real work worth doing.
The fifth question is the one that tends to drift: what is most important, right now? It changes every quarter, and it is the one most likely to be answered five different ways in the same room.
Why that question drifts
Leadership Teams are full of capable people doing the work in front of them. Maximizing growth or finding the growth in your data might not be their focus. When every week brings real issues, the most urgent one quietly becomes the most important one. The L10 meeting works the Issues List well, but the Issues List ranks what is loud, not necessarily what moves the company. We wrote about that pull in False urgency: why busy Leadership Teams lose sight of growth.
Nobody is failing. Without a shared, visible answer, each leader fills the gap with whatever their own function is facing that week.
A quick test
Before your next L10 meeting, try this:
- Ask each person to write one sentence. What is the most important thing for the company right now?
- Collect the answers before anyone talks.
- Read them side by side. Count how many say the same thing.
If most match, you have clarity, and the job is to keep repeating it. If they scatter, that is not a verdict on the team. It is the most useful agenda item you will have this quarter. It is also the same exercise we suggested in What will grow the business next?, pointed at the whole company instead of at growth alone.
Where a Dashboard helps
A shared answer holds better when it is on the screen rather than in someone's memory. A Growth Plan Dashboard built from your own data shows where revenue stands against the Growth Plan, the gap in dollars, the trend and forecast, and the few Growth Levers that close the gap. That puts one answer to "what is most important right now?" in front of everyone every month. A forecast is a projection, not a promise, but it gives the team one set of facts to be clear about. For finding those Growth Levers, see How to find the few Growth Levers that actually move revenue.
One question for your next meeting
If you asked every person on your Leadership Team what is most important right now, would you get the same answer?
To see how your company compares, take the Growth Benchmark. It takes about two minutes.
Compare your revenue per employee and profit margin with your industry in about two minutes.
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