Four questions. If you answer them plainly, honestly and without hesitating, you do not need me. I mean that seriously: it is the best filter I know.
1. What have your teams stopped daring to tell you over the past six months?
Not what they never told you - what they have stopped telling you. The distinction matters: it points to a moment when something closed.
If you cannot see it, that rarely means there is nothing. It means the filter settled in gradually enough not to be noticed.
2. Which decision are you deferring skilfully, while quietly dreading it?
“Skilfully” is the important word. A leader never defers a decision by saying they are deferring it. They wait for a figure, a committee, a clarification, a better moment. Each of those reasons is defensible. Taken together, they describe something else.
3. In your leadership team, who has taken power without a mandate - and why is no one moving?
There is almost always someone. It is not necessarily a manoeuvre: a vacuum gets filled. The real question is not who occupies it, but why the vacuum existed and whom it suits that no one says so.
4. What do you see, but cannot say without weakening your position?
This is the hardest of the four. It describes exactly the solitude of leadership: seeing clearly, and having nowhere to say it.
Not your team - you are their boss. Not your board - you are expected to arrive with a position. Not the people close to you - they love you too much to be lucid.
What the four have in common
None of them is about strategy. None asks for more information. All of them are about what circulates, or has stopped circulating, around the person who decides.
If they make you uncomfortable, that is a good sign. It is the ground I work on: not a comfortable coach, not a consultant with slides. Someone with no stake in the outcome of your decision, and who can therefore ask the question the others avoid.
Read also - What your non-decisions cost you · What you no longer see
Or see the three ways of working together.
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