Stage 3 is why your Leadership Team agrees on everything and is completely misaligned

When someone inside a business asks me this question, my first thought is about culture - specifically, what stage of organisational culture that business is at.

Dave Logan's Tribal Leadership model identifies five stages of organisational culture, each with its own language, behaviours and ceiling on what the group can achieve. Nearly half of all organisations assessed in Logan's research sit at Stage 3. In my experience, that's usually where this question comes from.

Stage 3 cultures are deceptively functional. Goals get hit. Performance is decent. The problems are real but abstract - the kind senior leaders would often prefer not to examine too closely. And the biggest problem is this: trust in a Stage 3 culture is individual, not collective. John trusts Sally. Sally doesn't trust Phil. John and Sally make a decent team - but they become a bottleneck, because neither will pass the ball to Phil.

Stage 3 cultures are also difficult to evolve, for a specific reason. Because trust is low, no one says there are problems. Everyone is pleasant. Meetings are cordial. And because everything looks fine on the surface, this is a very difficult to solve. Because it is a problem that no one will admit exists. I ran a workshop with one such team - the stated theme was constructive feedback. Nobody offered a single criticism of anyone else in the room. Not one.

At leadership level, this dynamic has a particular flavour. Things stay cordial. Meetings are professional and agreeable. And then everyone goes back to their departments and does exactly what they were going to do anyway. Much like that very British trait where two acquaintances meet on the street, catch up, and enthusiastically agree to get a coffee sometime. Both of them know that is never going to happen.

Divergence after a meeting isn't always about trust. A third reason has nothing to do with malice or ill intent. It's simply that different teams have different operating models, and nobody accounts for it. I've run away days where leaders from separate departments had no idea how the other teams actually worked - what their constraints were, what their processes looked like, what accommodations they could and couldn't make. Assumptions had been made on all sides. Those assumptions had quietly calcified into friction.

So what do you do about it?

You have to clear the air. And there is no way to do that without a significant degree of discomfort - for the group and for whoever is facilitating it. This isn't a process problem or a meeting cadence problem. It's a cultural problem. More specifically, it is a trust problem. And trust is only built one way. It is built through repeated acts of vulnerability that are met with safety rather than attack.

I've written in more detail about how to design that kind of intervention here.

The short version is that you have to move the group through what Daniel Coyle calls a vulnerability loop - slowly, deliberately, and with close attention to sequencing. Growth only comes through discomfort. Building trust between a leadership team that has learned to be politely dishonest with each other is no different.