I am often fascinated by sports teams that perpetually struggle to compete, particularly in leagues with harder salary caps.
Why do some teams struggle year after year? And why, despite changing coaches, drafting new players, making trades, and bringing in new executives, can’t they seem to right the course?
I have become convinced of a few things.
- There is rarely one reason these teams struggle. Sometimes the issue is talent. Sometimes it is coaching. Sometimes it is ownership, culture, leadership, roster construction, or the systems surrounding the players.
- But I also think many struggling teams stay stuck because they misdiagnose what is actually holding them back.
- If the problem is organizational culture and they replace the coach, the same problems may simply reappear. If the roster is fundamentally limited, changing the culture alone is unlikely to make the team competitive. If the problem is coaching and they keep changing players, they probably won’t improve much.
The better the diagnosis, the better the odds of choosing the right treatment.
The same thing happens in organizations.
If an organization is underperforming, flat-lined, or struggling, how commonly do you think they:
- Do a thorough diagnosis
- Employ the most optimal treatment?
Of course, the success of the second is going to be largely predicated on the thoroughness of the first.
Leadership Health Provides a Better Diagnosis
This is one of the reasons I have become increasingly focused on Leadership Health.
Leadership Health is the condition of leadership across an organization or a defined leadership population. It reflects the degree to which leadership enables performance today while expanding the organization’s capacity to navigate future change, complexity, and uncertainty.
It matters because leadership helps establish both the ceiling of an organization—what it is capable of handling before leadership becomes the constraint—and its trajectory over time.
If we want to elevate either one, we need an accurate diagnosis.
The problem is that most leadership diagnosis centers heavily on one dimension: Results Delivery.
Results certainly matter. But they do not tell us why an organization is performing the way it is or what needs to change.
For that, we also need to understand Leadership Capability and Leadership Environment.
Looking at all three changes the treatment we prescribe.
Let’s consider three different situations.
1. Moderate Results, Healthy Leadership Environment, & Low Leadership Capability
In this situation, the organization has created decent conditions for leaders to succeed, and the results are keeping the organization alive. But the organization may be capped out because the leaders themselves may struggle to think strategically, develop others, adapt under pressure, or let go of control as their responsibilities grow.
In this case, development really is the appropriate treatment.
But even then, the right kind of development matters.
If leaders simply lack a skill, traditional horizontal development may be enough. Teach them how to coach, delegate, communicate, or conduct difficult conversations.
But if they already know what effective leadership looks like and still revert to urgency, defensiveness, control, or self-protection when the pressure rises, another skills workshop is unlikely to solve the problem.
That requires vertical development—development focused on elevating the internal capacity from which leaders operate.
2. Moderate Results, Strong Leadership Capability, and Poor Leadership Environment
These leaders may be capable of operating at a high level, yet they are surrounded by conflicting priorities, unhealthy incentives, excessive workload, poor decision rights, or a culture that makes thoughtful risk-taking unsafe.
Sending those leaders to another development program may do very little.
The treatment needs to focus more heavily on the environment.
The organization may need to change what it rewards, how pressure gets distributed, how decisions get made, or what senior leaders signal is truly valued.
This is an important distinction because organizations can spend considerable time and money trying to fix people who are actually being constrained by the system around them.
Personally, I think this is where a lot of sports teams go wrong.
3. Strong Results, Low Leadership Capability, and Poor Leadership Environment
This situation may be the most dangerous because, on the surface, this organization may not look unhealthy at all.
Targets are being hit. Financial results may look healthy. Senior leaders can point to the numbers as evidence that their approach is working.
Meanwhile, performance may depend heavily on urgency, control, leader heroics, unsustainable workloads, or short-term thinking—and the environment may be reinforcing those very behaviors. Your draft rightly identifies this as a condition where good surface-level performance can conceal a lower ceiling and deteriorating trajectory.
Commonly, in these situations, the organization slows down its investment in its leaders when it actually needs to ramp up its investment in its leaders. And, that investment probably needs to involve a focus on both Leadership Capability and Leadership Environment.
Otherwise, today’s strong performance may be masking a lower ceiling and a deteriorating trajectory.
General Electric and Boeing are classic examples here.
My Experience
My experience is that if an organization wants to elevate an organization, its performance, ceiling, and/or trajectory, it primarily employs the treatment of improving results delivery through the focus of either (1) development of knowledge and skills, or (2) investments in talent.
While these foci can be helpful, I find that they rarely move the needle on the organization’s effectiveness, ceiling, or trajectory.
Diagnose Before You Develop
This is why I think organizations need to become much more disciplined about diagnosing leadership before investing in its leaders.
- Sometimes the answer is skill development (If Results Delivery is an issue and Leadership Capability and Leadership Environment are not).
- Sometimes it is vertical development (If Leadership Capability is an issue).
- Sometimes the surrounding system needs to change (If Leadership Environment is an issue).
- And sometimes both the leaders and the environment need significant attention.
The goal should not be to provide more leadership development. The goal should be to identify what is actually limiting the health of leadership and apply the treatment that can raise the organization’s ceiling and improve its trajectory.
That is what a Leadership Health perspective makes possible.
If you want a starting point, my free Leadership Health Scan provides a light diagnostic across Results Delivery, Leadership Capability, and Leadership Environment.
And if you want to go deeper, I work with executives, division heads, and HR/L&D leaders to diagnose what is limiting Leadership Health within their organization and identify the interventions most likely to elevate it.
