Leadership Team Performance Assessment: See What Is Holding Your Team Back

What Does the Leadership Team Diagnostic Explore?

Senior teams can appear busy, capable and committed while still losing performance through patterns that have become normal. This diagnostic explores six areas that often determine whether a group of senior leaders operates as a genuine leadership team.

Purpose and priorities

Whether the team has a shared understanding of what it is collectively responsible for, where it should focus and which work belongs to the team rather than individual functions.

Decisions

Whether important decisions are made with sufficient clarity and pace, or repeatedly delayed, reopened or weakened by unclear authority and incomplete commitment.

Constructive challenge

Whether team members can question assumptions, surface disagreement and address difficult issues without damaging trust or retreating into guarded behaviour.

System awareness

Whether the team considers the wider organisation, stakeholders and consequences of its decisions, rather than optimising individual functions at the expense of the whole.

Learning and adaptation

Whether the team reflects on its performance, learns from setbacks and changes how it works as circumstances evolve.

Hidden dynamics

Whether status, power, alliances, avoided conversations or unspoken assumptions are influencing what the team can discuss and decide.

How to Use Your Results

Your result is not a verdict on the team. It is a starting point for a more useful conversation.

Focus first on the two areas that appear to create the greatest drag. Consider where those patterns show up in real meetings, decisions or stakeholder relationships. Ask what the team currently does, what effect that has and what a different pattern would look like in practice.

Avoid turning the results into a list of individual shortcomings. Senior-team performance is usually shaped by the interaction between people, roles, expectations and the organisational system around them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the signs that a senior leadership team is underperforming?

Common signs include slow or repeatedly revisited decisions, competing priorities, carefully managed disagreement, weak follow-through and problems that remain unresolved despite repeated discussion.

A team may also perform reasonably well within individual functions while struggling to create collective direction or lead across organisational boundaries.

Can I use the diagnostic if the whole team is not involved?

Yes. One person’s result can provide a useful perspective and help identify questions worth exploring.

However, it represents that person’s experience rather than an objective assessment of the entire team. Different team members may see the same dynamics very differently.

What makes a leadership team different from a group of senior leaders?

A group of senior leaders can coordinate information while continuing to prioritise their individual functions. A leadership team has meaningful shared work, makes collective decisions and accepts joint accountability for outcomes that no individual member can achieve alone.

Is this a validated team assessment?

No. It is a reflective diagnostic designed to surface useful hypotheses.

A fuller assessment might include confidential interviews, stakeholder input, observation of team meetings, psychometric data or a team 360, depending on the purpose and circumstances.

What should happen after the diagnostic?

The next step should be a focused conversation about one or two patterns that materially affect performance.

The team can then agree specific changes to its meetings, decisions, challenge or accountability. More persistent or systemic issues may benefit from facilitated leadership team coaching rather than another standalone workshop.