Why Your Senior Leadership Team Keeps Getting Pulled Back Into the Weeds

There is a common assumption that once you have the right people around the table, with the right job titles, the strategic conversations will naturally follow.

In my experience, they really do not.

What actually tends to happen is that a senior leadership team gets together and, almost without noticing, spends most of its time on the operational. The day job. The immediate. The urgent. The stuff that is already in people's heads when they walk into the room.

In this episode, Gemma and I share a model we have been developing across this series, drawing on our own experience of working with and being in senior teams, and on the conversations we have had with guests so far. The model is designed to help teams identify what specifically is getting in their way. And in the spirit of the podcast, it has a name that is hard to forget.

It is a flower.

The petals and the bee landing zone

The model has four main petals, possibly five depending on how you count, and then a central element that holds them all together. That central element is what Gemma christened the bee landing zone, because neither of us could remember what the middle of a flower is actually called.

Each petal represents something that commonly stops a senior team from being properly strategic. They are not entirely separate, they affect and reinforce each other. But working through them individually is a useful way to diagnose where a particular team might be getting stuck.

Petal one: awareness

The first petal is awareness, and I think it is the most fundamental of the lot.

If you ask a senior leadership team how much of their time is spent on strategic work versus operational work, you often get an interesting silence before the answer. I put this question to a team a couple of years ago. They were a proper senior team, with a large organisation sitting below them. They told me, with some pride, that they spent about 95% of their time on operational matters and perhaps 5% on anything genuinely strategic.

My first reaction was a fairly strong one. If that team is not thinking strategically, who is?

That is the question I keep coming back to. Because if a senior leadership team is not carving out the time and the headspace for strategic thinking, it is quite possible that nobody is. And if nobody is, the business is not being run. The business is running itself.

Awareness simply means being conscious of the split. Not necessarily hitting a specific ratio, though we heard from Divinia Knowles earlier in this series that around 65% doing and 35% thinking is a useful benchmark to hold in mind. But at very least, being able to name roughly where you are and making a conscious choice about whether that is good enough.

Petal two: time

The second petal is time, and this one tends to produce the most excuses.

I say excuses gently, because I have made them myself. There are never enough hours. There are always other priorities. The diary is full. These are all real and understandable, but they cannot be the whole answer for a team at senior level. Because if your team exists to shape the future direction of the business, then finding the time to actually do that is not optional. It is the job.

There is also a relationship between time and skill that is worth naming. The less time a team has for strategic thinking, the better their strategic skills need to be. If you only have an hour, you have to be able to get straight to what matters. And if those skills are not yet there, you will need more time, not less. The two petals are linked.

I worked with a brilliant woman who was promoted into a more senior role and understood she needed to shift how she was spending her time. She successfully cleared space in her diary for strategic thinking. And then she sat at her desk, laptop open, with no idea what to do. She had the time but not yet the skill to use it. Once we worked out what those strategic activities actually were, she went from frustrated to flourishing. But it was a good reminder that time on its own is not the full answer.

Petal three: experience and skill

Which brings us to the third petal: experience and skill.

Strategic skill is not just about having a view on where the business should go. It also includes the ability to hold a conversation in the right place, to notice when a discussion has drifted into the tactical and steer it back, to summarise what has been said and check the room has reached a shared understanding, to create enough structure for good thinking to happen without over-engineering it.

These are behavioural skills as much as intellectual ones. And they are not evenly distributed across most teams. Often the same one or two people are doing this work in every meeting, while others are either contributing at the wrong level or not fully sure how to contribute at all.

Gemma makes a point here that I think is really worth sitting with. You do not have to have the big strategic idea in order to contribute strategically. Sometimes the most valuable thing someone can do in a senior team conversation is to hold the frame for the discussion, to create the conditions in which other people can think well together. That is a strategic skill. It just does not always get named as one.

Petal four: culture and team dynamics

The fourth petal is about the behavioural norms within the team, and this is where things can get quite subtle.

We talked earlier in this series about teams where the strategic thinking is essentially done by the CEO or founder, and everyone else waits to be told what the direction is. That is a cultural pattern, and it can be very hard to see from the inside. It does not feel dysfunctional. It just feels normal.

The question worth asking is whether your team has a norm of being able to pull conversations back up to a strategic level when they drift, and whether that can happen without it feeling like a criticism or a disruption. Can someone say "I think we're getting a bit into the weeds here" and have everyone take it in the spirit it was intended?

Power dynamics play a big part in this. The most effective senior teams I have seen are ones where the person who holds the most authority is explicitly clear that they do not want that authority to shut down challenge or flatten different perspectives. In the most stuck teams, that is precisely what happens, and it often goes unaddressed.

There is also something worth noting about ego. Not in a pejorative sense, but in the sense of being willing to say, in a room full of senior, experienced people, that you do not actually know enough to have a view on something. That it might be better to pause, bring in someone who does have the expertise, and come back to the conversation properly informed. That takes a certain kind of confidence, and a certain kind of culture to make it feel safe.

The fifth petal

We may also have a fifth petal. We are still deciding. It sits somewhere in the territory of whether you have the right people in the room at all, which connects to ego, to culture, and to the willingness to name when the expertise needed for a conversation is simply not present at the table.

The bee landing zone: architecture

And then there is the centre of the flower. The bee landing zone.

Gemma's name for this is architecture, which is less poetic but arguably more useful. It refers to the meeting architecture of a team: the defined purposes of the different times a team comes together, and whether those purposes are clear enough to create a shared language for where different conversations belong.

Gemma describes a team she worked in that had a weekly meeting, a monthly, and a quarterly. The weekly was operational and fast. The monthly was for things that needed more time and more of a strategic lens. The quarterly was for the big, longer-term questions. And because everybody understood that structure, they had a shorthand. If a conversation started to drift in the wrong direction, someone could simply say "that feels like a monthly conversation" or "let's take that to the Monday." It did not need to be a confrontation. It was just a reminder of where things belonged.

I was facilitating a team meeting recently where a fairly loaded comment about the organisation's culture landed in the middle of a very specific operational discussion. The room immediately ran after it. I pulled them back, and they ran after it again. Eventually I asked them a simple question: where would you put a conversation like this? And there was a long silence. They did not have anywhere to put it. There was no architecture. So the grenade stayed in the room, the specific thing they had come to discuss did not get resolved, and the culture question did not get properly addressed either.

Architecture does not solve all of the other petals, but it makes all of them easier to act on. If you have the awareness that you need more strategic time, the architecture tells you where to put it. If you have the skill to notice a conversation has drifted, the architecture gives you the language to redirect it. If your team has the culture to hold the frame for hard conversations, the architecture gives you the container in which to have them.

That is why it sits in the middle. It is not a petal in its own right, but without it, the petals struggle to function together.

So where does your team sit?

If you are in a senior leadership team, or you lead one, it is worth running through the model and asking some honest questions. How aware are you, as a group, of how you are actually spending your time? Do you have enough of it set aside for proper strategic thinking, and do you know what to do with it when you do? What is the skill level in the room for holding strategic conversations, and is that skill spread across the team or concentrated in one or two people? What are the behavioural norms, and do they help or hinder? And do you have a clear enough architecture for different types of conversations to actually know where things go?

None of these questions has a single right answer. But asking them together, as a team, is often a very good place to start.

You can find The Strategic Leader wherever you listen to podcasts. And if there is a strategic question or dilemma you would like Gemma and me to dig into in a future episode, we would love to hear from you.

Fi Craig is the founder of GoodThinking, a Bristol-based team and executive coaching practice working with senior leaders and their teams across the UK and internationally. The Strategic Leader podcast is co-presented with Gemma Bullivant.