Why your leadership team is busy but your business still feels stuck.

I was working with a CEO last month and something came up that I see surprisingly often. Everyone in the organisation was busy. Really busy. The leadership team had full calendars. There were meetings, projects, priorities, action lists and plenty of good people working hard.

But the CEO said something along the lines of:

“I just don't understand why it still feels like we're not moving.”

As we unpacked it together, I don't think the issue was effort at all. It was clarity. There were just enough unanswered questions sitting underneath all that activity to keep pulling people back into uncertainty. Spoken and unspoken questions like:

What matters most right now?

What can wait?

Who owns what?

Which decisions can we make themselves - and which needs the CEO?

And what does “good” actually look like?

None of these are particularly complicated questions.

But when the answers aren't clear, people compensate, have another dang meeting or wait, and wait, or sadly, kick it back up the chain to CEO. They were like“WTF? These are smart people, I know I hired them, so why?”

And suddenly you have a business full of capable, hardworking people - with the CEO still sitting right in the middle of everything. Nice to be popular.

But seriously that’s the part I honed in on when I was talking to them, the crux. Because clarity isn't about them as CEO knowing everything.That’s a dumb strategy really.

Instead, what we unpacked as we chatted, was how to make things clear enough that their people could make the right moves without them. Comprende? Sound familiar?

CLARITY is the first of our CEO 6, and I think it's one of those areas that can look deceptively simple, until you realise what’s missing. Which may just mean you as CEO sit with your people and ask them:What haven't I made clear enough yet?

How would your organisation score on Clarity in the CEO 6?

Want to learn more? Take the CEO Freedom Gap Scorecard today.