📅 The Weekly Edge

— Where Problems Actually Come From

Rule: The bottleneck is at the top of the bottle.

Source: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

Most organizational problems are leadership problems in disguise.

Lencioni’s team dysfunction model begins at trust and ends at accountability, and what’s true of each layer is that the tone is set at the top. Teams that lack trust often have leaders who have not been vulnerable enough to model it. Teams that avoid conflict often have leaders who have not demonstrated that honest debate is safe.

The executive who looks at the dysfunction in their organization and sees a people problem is often missing the reflection. The dysfunction is downstream of something that started in the leadership. The team learned, over time, what was actually acceptable — and they adjusted accordingly.

This is not a comfortable observation. It requires leaders to apply to themselves the same analytical rigor they apply to the businesses they’re trying to diagnose. The questions are hard: Where am I creating the constraint? What behavior am I modeling that is producing this outcome?

The leaders who make the most significant organizational improvements often start not with the team but with themselves — with the honest identification of where their behavior is creating the conditions they’re trying to change.

The bottleneck is at the top of the bottle is a principle at The Executives’ Institute. It is among the most confronting truths in organizational leadership.

Look in the direction that’s hardest to look.