How Do You Get Leadership to Act?

This series, Under the Visible, is about the problems most organizations can't see, the structural issues hiding underneath the visible symptoms. These issues produce the same problems over and over no matter how many times they get "fixed." Tate Linden is guiding us through through a set of questions designed to help you find them.

Here's the gap that kills most good organizational diagnosis. It's not that people can't see the problem. By the time you've worked through the questions in this series, you've probably got a solid picture of what's actually going on, which layer the problem is living in, why previous fixes didn't hold, and what the real intervention looks like. The gap is between knowing that and getting the people with authority to do something about it.

Knowing isn't enough. It never is.

The instinct when leadership isn't acting is to explain better. Build a cleaner deck. Add more data. Make the argument more airtight. Sometimes that helps. But usually the issue isn't that they don't understand. They understand fine. What they're weighing is whether it's worth it, and a structural diagnosis on its own doesn't answer that question. Telling a CFO the organization has a purpose-level misalignment is accurate and completely useless at the same time. You have to translate it into something they're already losing sleep over.

And that translation has to be personal, not just organizational. A CFO cares about margin and cost of rework. A COO cares about throughput, reliability, and whether commitments are being met. A CHRO cares about why good people are leaving and whether the organization can build the capability it needs. The same structural problem looks different from each of those seats, and the case you make has to reflect that. If you're talking to the COO about a purpose-level misalignment that's causing delivery failures, lead with the delivery failures and what they're costing operationally. If you're talking to the CHRO about the same problem, lead with what it's doing to the people absorbing the cost of decisions that were never made. Same diagnosis. Different door.

Go back to the services company we've been using. Projects delivering late, scope creeping, margins eroding, teams burning out. The structural problem is a rules gap sitting on an unresolved purpose question. But that's not what leadership is feeling day to day. They're feeling the client call where delivery came up again. They're feeling the budget conversation where the numbers don't add up. They're watching good people get tired in ways that are starting to show. Those are the consequences of the structural problem, and that's where the conversation has to start. Not "we have a structural issue at the rules layer." Something more like: "we're leaving money on the table on every engagement, our reputation for delivery is taking quiet damage, and we're burning through the people we most depend on, and here's why that keeps happening no matter what we try." Same diagnosis. Completely different entry point.

Executives don't just evaluate ideas. They evaluate risk. And the honest risk of structural intervention is that things get worse before they get better. Changing how decisions get made, making explicit tradeoffs that were previously left open, redesigning a core process, all of it creates a period of disruption where the old system is gone and the new one isn't fully working yet. Anyone who's lived through a change initiative that went sideways knows that period well. So the case for intervening has to be honest about that cost, not minimize it. What moves people is the argument that not intervening is already costing more, and that the evidence for that is sitting right there in things they're already tracking. Not projected losses. Not theoretical risk. The pattern that's been showing up in the numbers, the client feedback, the attrition data, the delivery record, for longer than anyone wants to admit.

The other thing that matters is specificity about what you're actually asking them to do. Structural fixes at the rules or purpose level almost always need something only senior leadership can provide. A real decision. A boundary that holds. An explicit statement of priority that replaces the ambiguity driving the problem. If the purpose question is unresolved, someone at the top has to resolve it. If two senior leaders have been operating on different assumptions, someone has to surface that and settle it. The reason executives often resist this kind of work is that it gets presented as a large, expensive, months-long change program. The more useful ask is smaller and more direct: here's the specific decision only you can make, and here's what becomes possible once you make it.

Sometimes, though, the reason the problem persists isn't that leadership doesn't see it. It's that fixing it requires someone powerful to give something up. To accept a constraint. To close off an option they've been keeping quietly open. When that's the case, no framing fixes it completely. What good framing can do is make the cost of doing nothing explicit enough that the conversation has to happen, even when it's uncomfortable.

Getting leadership to commit is a requirement. But it's not the finish line. Because even when the right level is targeted and their buy-in is real, there's still one thing that will determine whether it holds. That's where we'll end the series. Next time.

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