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Are Leadership Teams Getting Better at the Wrong Job?
- Nazly Frias
- Sep 22
- 7 min read
Updated: Nov 12
I watch many leadership teams getting more effective at the wrong job.
Their calendar is packed. Updates are crisper. Actions get assigned faster. The organization moves, but it doesn't learn.
This isn't about competence. Many leadership teams are smart, experienced, and often exceptional at what they were hired to do. The problem is somewhere else: they're perfecting a version of leadership that no longer fits the world they're leading in.
1. The Comfort of Familiar Problems
There's a reason leadership teams default to optimizing what they know. It feels productive. Identity plays a part, too; many executives earned their seats through expertise and decisiveness, so questioning the frame can feel like questioning their legitimacy.
Time scarcity and cognitive load matter as well; when everyone is firefighting, routines beat reflection, and tools nudge work toward the transactional. Finally, simple narratives travel better “we improved execution” is easier to explain than “we updated our assumptions.”
These execution improvements and optimizations are real, and they matter. The trap is when they only strengthen single-loop learning: getting better at yesterday’s job while the context keeps changing. Without the second loop, testing the assumptions under the strategy and asking the deeper question—should we be doing something fundamentally different, leadership teams can become exquisitely efficient at the wrong work. I get it, these are very uncomfortable questions, too identity-threatening.
Most leadership teams I meet are stuck in this single-loop. They've gotten excellent at executing strategy, monitoring performance, and making decisions quickly. These were exactly the right skills when the context was more stable, when change happened in predictable cycles, when good planning could actually predict next year's challenges.
That world is gone.
Not just because work is more complex, but because it’s more volatile, more uncertain, and moving faster. The half-life of a decision has shortened. Signals arrive noisier and later. Plans expire sooner.
2. How the Context of Leadership has Changed
We still face complicated work, but the center of gravity has shifted: more of the leadership agenda now sits in fast-moving, genuinely complex systems where volatility is high and uncertainty cannot be fully resolved. The difference matters more than most leadership teams realize.
Complicated challenges have many parts, but you can still map cause and effect. Think sending a rocket to the moon: integrate specialists, follow rigorous procedures, and each repetition increases predictability.
Complex challenges emerge from interactions you can't predict. Think of a culture change initiative: the same move lands differently across teams; small cues—who speaks first, a leader’s reaction, the speed of follow-through, can have disproportionate and sometimes unexpected impact. You learn through small, safe-to-fail tests, because what worked last quarter can backfire after a reorg, with the why clear only in hindsight. Furthermore, here, you don’t just lack answers; you lack the knowability of what will matter next.
Most of the challenges leadership teams face now—market disruption, organizational change, talent dynamics, stakeholder expectations—are complex. They emerge from systems where cause and effect are only clear in hindsight. And they evolve quickly enough that yesterday’s right move can be today’s drag. The cadence of change outpaces the cadence of most leadership routines.
When you try to control complex systems, you don't get stability. You get brittleness. Teams that grip tighter often find they're steering something that's already gone in a different direction. In a BANI reality—brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible—over-specifying action and timelines increases fragility. The more you optimize for one forecast, the more vulnerable you become when the world refuses to cooperate.
I see this (almost) everywhere: leadership teams working harder to predict the unpredictable, plan for the unplannable, and control what can't be controlled. It's exhausting work, and it doesn't work.
3. The Question No One Asks
These are the questions leadership teams avoid: if the context has changed so fundamentally, what does that mean for what we're supposed to be doing here? Who do we need to become to lead this organization?
Most teams never ask this because the answer threatens everything they understand about their role. They were hired to be decisive, to know, to have answers. Their legitimacy feels tied to being the ones who can see around corners, who can drive outcomes through strategy and will.
But in complex environments, trying to see around every corner leaves you perpetually behind. The real edge comes from building an organization that can sense and respond faster than anyone else, not from having leaders who can predict better than anyone else.
This shift—from prediction to responsiveness—changes everything about what leadership teams are for.
4. A Different Job Description
The most effective leadership teams have quietly redefined their role. They've stopped trying to control outcomes and started focusing on something more powerful: creating the conditions for better outcomes to emerge.
Instead of having all the answers, they've gotten exceptionally good at helping the organization ask better questions. Instead of making every important decision, they've gotten clear on which decisions only they can make and pushed everything else closer to where the real information lives.
Instead of driving change through commands, they've learned to shape it through the patterns they reinforce, the conversations they start, the connections they make visible.
This isn't about being less decisive. It's about being decisive about different things. You still set clear direction. You still make hard trade-offs. But you spend less energy controlling how work gets done and more energy ensuring the organization can learn faster than its environment changes.
The technical term for this work is sensemaking—the ability to understand what's happening and what it means, quickly and collectively. But that makes it sound optional, like a nice-to-have skill for thoughtful leaders.
It's not optional. It's the core discipline that makes everything else work.
5. How Sensemaking Actually Works
When I talk about sensemaking, people often think I mean long strategic retreats or philosophical discussions. That's not what this is.
Sensemaking is practical. It's the discipline of continuously updating your understanding of reality so your decisions stay connected to what's actually happening.
Most leadership teams do this accidentally, if at all. They treat interpretation as something that happens between meetings, in hallway conversations, in individual heads. But in complex environments, interpretation is too important to leave to chance.
The teams that do this well have made it a visible, shared practice.
They start meetings differently. Instead of jumping straight to decisions, they spend time aligning on what they're seeing. Not just what happened, but what it might mean. Not just the data, but the patterns in the data. Not just the immediate problem, but the context that created it.
They ask questions that create new understanding. What are we not seeing? What assumptions are we making? If we're wrong about this, where would the evidence show up first? What would someone outside our industry notice that we're missing?
They create space for perspectives to collide and shift. Not just polite updates where everyone stays in their lane, but real conversations where different viewpoints can reshape how the group sees the situation.
This isn't soft work. It's the hardest work leadership teams do, because it requires admitting what you don't know in a room where everyone expects you to know. As noted in Jennifer Garvey Berger pioneering work on leadership in complexity, "The most effective leaders are no longer the ones with the best answers, but the ones who host the best conversations."
6. Making the Shift
You can't announce this change. You have to practice your way into it.
Start with the calendar. Look at how much time your leadership team spends making sense of what's happening versus making decisions about what to do. If it's less than 30%, you're probably operating blind.
Change how you structure conversations. Instead of round-robin updates, try collective interpretation. You can still bring the same data, but spend time finding the connections, the patterns, the signals that only make sense when you put different perspectives together.
Test assumptions explicitly. Make it normal to say "here's what I think is happening, and here's how I'd know if I'm wrong." Create regular moments to surface what's not working in your current approach.
Most importantly, model the behavior you want to see. If you want your organization to learn in the "right way", your leadership team must practice second-loop learning first: name and test the assumptions beneath your thinking and ways of operating, not just improve the routines around them.
7. What Changes When You Get This Right
Teams that make this shift don't just get better at responding to change; they start creating it. They spot opportunities earlier because they're looking at patterns, not just events. They recover from mistakes faster because they've built learning into how they operate.
Their organizations feel different too. People bring their real thinking because they see that thinking, not just compliance, is valued at the top. Decisions stick because they're based on shared understanding, not just authority. Change happens more smoothly because it's continuous, not episodic.
But the deepest change is in how leadership feels. Instead of carrying the weight of having to predict and control everything, you're focused on something more sustainable: building an organization that can thrive in this new context.
Final Thoughts
The world isn't going to become more predictable. The pace of change isn't slowing down. The complexity isn't resolving into simplicity.
But your leadership team can get fundamentally better at navigating complexity together. You can stop optimizing for a job that no longer exists and start building the capabilities the job actually requires.
The question is whether you'll do that work intentionally, or whether you'll keep perfecting yesterday's approach until it finally, obviously breaks.
What would your organization be capable of if your leadership team spent as much energy making sense of reality as it does trying to control it?
This article is part of a four-part exploration of leadership teams, their hidden dynamics, growing pressures, and the path from overload to renewal. Discover the rest of the series:
About the Author
Nazly Frias is the founder of Leadership Impact, a boutique leadership advisory practice specializing in working with executive teams and senior leaders in impact-driven professional service firms and organizations.
With over 15 years of international experience, Nazly brings a unique dual perspective: she has served as both an insider—leading and being part of leadership teams in global impact consulting firms and public innovation labs—and as an external trusted advisor. This combination allows her to understand the internal dynamics, pressures, and blind spots that leadership teams face while maintaining the objectivity needed to guide transformational change.
Originally from Colombia, Nazly works with clients across the globe in English and Spanish and is based in Berlin.
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