And how to find them before they find you

I have worked with leaders at every level for 25 years, from founders running $5 million companies to executives inside the largest pharmaceutical and healthcare organizations in the world. The conversation that starts most of those engagements sounds remarkably similar regardless of the size or sector. The leader knows something is wrong. Revenue is moving, people are working, nothing obvious has broken, but the results are not what they should be given the effort going in. They can feel the gap and they cannot name it.

That gap almost always has a structural cause. It lives somewhere in how the organization is set up to make decisions, develop people, respond to its environment, and sustain execution over time. In 2012 I built the Signal Model to find it. Developed from over 200 organizational performance factors, it identifies 12 Critical Success Factors that predict whether a strategy will execute or stall. Those 12 factors sit inside five performance domains, and each domain has a set of signals that tell you whether it is working or breaking down.

What follows is a translation of those signals into the language of what leaders actually experience. Read it as a diagnostic. The sections that make you uncomfortable are the ones worth paying attention to.

When strategy stops reflecting the world the organization is actually operating in, the gap usually builds for a long time before anyone says it out loud.

1. External realities and organizational goals

Most organizations have more market data than they can effectively use. They have research functions, customer feedback channels, competitive intelligence reports, and people in front of customers every day. What many of them do not have is a decision-making culture that actually incorporates what those sources are telling them.

The pattern I observe most consistently in this domain is that customer-facing people stop bringing intelligence upward because they have learned it does not change anything. Research gets commissioned and sits on a laptop. Strategic decisions get made based on the loudest voice in the room rather than the data available to the organization. Over time the gap between where leadership believes the organization is positioned and where the market actually sees it grows wide enough to produce real consequences.

The question worth sitting with is whether your strategy, as it currently exists, still reflects the environment you are operating in today. Not the environment from twelve months ago when it was written, but today. If the answer requires some thought, that is the signal.

2. Barriers to workflow

Workflow barriers are among the most expensive problems in organizations and among the least visible to the people who have the authority to fix them. The reason is that the people managing the barriers have usually built workarounds, and those workarounds work well enough that the underlying problem never gets elevated to the level where it can be addressed structurally. What does eventually surface is the exhaustion of the people carrying them.

The most reliable indicator of workflow breakdown is what happens when something goes wrong and results fall short. In organizations where workflow is healthy, those conversations are about what broke down and how to address it. In organizations where workflow is compromised, those conversations are about who is to blame. The shift from the former to the latter is so gradual that most leaders do not notice it happening until it is well established.

Fire drills are the other indicator worth examining honestly. When all-hands urgent situations requiring immediate response become a normal operating mode, the organization has lost the ability to see far enough ahead to prevent them. I have never seen a fire drill culture that was the result of bad luck. It is always the accumulated cost of structural problems that were easier to work around than to solve.

Redundant work is a quieter version of the same problem. When two teams are doing the same work without knowing the other exists, when decisions get made and then remade by someone upstream who was not involved the first time, when high-value people spend significant portions of their time on work that does not require their level of skill or judgment, the organization is paying twice for results it should be getting once.

Accountability cannot exist where expectations have not been made specific. A leader who cannot describe exactly what good looks like cannot hold anyone to it.

3. Individual work contributions

This domain is where I spend the most time in engagements, because it is where the problems are most often misdiagnosed. Organizations see people who are not delivering and conclude they have a performance problem, a motivation problem, or a talent problem. What they frequently have is a structural problem in one of three areas, and addressing the wrong one produces frustration without results.

The first is capability. When an organization announces a new strategy and then discovers, months into execution, that the team does not have the skills to deliver on it, the response is almost always to find a training program. Training programs produce awareness and knowledge. They rarely produce the capability a new strategy requires, because that capability gets built through doing the actual work under real conditions with real feedback, not through attending something. The organizations that close capability gaps do it by designing work experiences that build judgment, not by adding curriculum.

The leadership pipeline version of this problem deserves specific attention because it plays out over a longer timeframe and the consequences arrive with much less warning. Many organizations have promoted their next generation of leaders based on technical expertise, which is a reasonable and common practice. The problem is that technical expertise and the ability to lead people through complexity, make high-stakes decisions under ambiguity, build alignment across functions, and sustain performance over time are genuinely different capabilities. Organizations that do not actively develop the latter find themselves with a leadership bench that looks credentialed and performs narrowly when the environment requires more.

The second area is decision-making clarity. Teams that have learned, over time, that their decisions will be revisited or overturned by someone above them stop investing in the quality of those decisions. They wait to be told. They ask for permission on matters that should not require it. The organization slows to the pace of whoever is at the top, which is almost never the pace the strategy requires. The most damaging version of this is when multiple people believe they hold authority over the same decision and neither of them is wrong, because the organization never got specific about who decides what. The conflict travels upward and senior leaders end up arbitrating problems that should have been resolved two levels below them.

The third area is expectations, and it is the one most often confused with accountability. When a leader gives feedback and the person receiving it becomes defensive rather than adjusting, the instinct is to conclude that the person is resistant or not open to feedback. What that response is more reliably telling you is that the expectation was not clearly established to begin with. You cannot hold someone accountable to a standard they did not know existed. A leader who says their team is not delivering but struggles to articulate in specific terms what delivering looks like has a clarity problem that will keep producing a performance problem until it is addressed directly.

Restructuring and attrition do not just reduce headcount. They remove the institutional knowledge of how things actually work, and that knowledge does not get replaced by documentation.

4. Emerging environmental factors

The organizational environment right now is producing a specific and consistent leadership challenge: people who were built to operate in relatively stable conditions being asked to lead through sustained and overlapping uncertainty. Regulatory change, economic pressure, competitive disruption, and workforce attrition are not new phenomena, but the simultaneity of them in the current environment is producing a level of organizational stress that most leadership development investments were not designed to address.

Restructuring and layoffs deserve particular attention here because their full impact rarely shows up in the numbers at the time they happen. The people who leave take with them the informal knowledge of how the organization actually functions, which is almost always different from how the org chart and the process documentation say it functions. They take the institutional memory of what has been tried before and why it failed, the cross-functional relationships that made things move when the formal process stalled, and the organizational judgment that gets built over years and cannot be transferred in an offboarding conversation. The people who remain are asked to absorb that loss and carry more than they were carrying before, usually without any acknowledgment that the load has materially changed.

Risk management is where I see the most consistent and consequential failure in this domain. Organizations that are disciplined about identifying strategic risk at the leadership level frequently have cultures where surfacing operational risk is uncomfortable. People know the problems exist. The problems do not travel upward through the organization. By the time they arrive at the level where they can be addressed with authority and resources, they have become crises that are far more expensive to manage than they would have been to prevent.

Change management is the domain’s other persistent failure point. Organizations communicate changes and then underestimate the work required to actually move people through them. Productivity drops during organizational change in ways that are real and measurable, and the primary cause is not resistance or lack of willingness. It is that sustained uncertainty creates a genuine tax on the cognitive and emotional resources people need to do their work well. Organizations that navigate change well treat that tax as a real operational variable and plan for it. Organizations that treat it as a communications problem to be solved with a town hall are surprised every time by how long the performance dip lasts.

5. Staying on course

Of all the failure modes I observe across organizations, this is the one that is most common and most preventable. A new initiative launches with real energy, genuine alignment, and leaders who believe in the direction. The work is good. The intent is real. And then, somewhere around month three or four, the momentum starts to thin. The initiative is still technically active but the people leading it have less time for it than they did at launch because other things have become more urgent. By month six, leadership has moved its attention to the next priority and the original initiative fades without a formal decision to end it, without a retrospective on what it produced, and without any consequence for the fact that it did not deliver what it was designed to deliver.

This pattern is so common that many organizations have simply accepted it as the way things work. They have normalized the experience of initiatives that do not finish. What they have not fully reckoned with is the cumulative cost of that normalization, both in the direct cost of work that did not produce results and in the signal it sends to the people doing the work. High performers who can see the difference between real progress and the performance of progress are the ones who lose confidence in the organization’s ability to execute first. Their disengagement precedes their departure, and by the time the departure happens, the organization has usually already lost the most valuable thing, which is their full engagement.

The underlying driver of this failure is measuring activity instead of outcomes. When organizations track and report on meetings held, initiatives launched, and effort invested, they have substituted the performance of work for the results of work. A leader who cannot answer specifically what changed in the organization as a result of a six-month initiative, not what was done but what changed, has an execution discipline problem that will keep producing this pattern until it is addressed at the level of how performance is defined and measured.

The five domains are where performance breaks down in practice. The twelve factors underneath them are where the actual causes live.

What to do with what you found

The five domains above are the Signal Model’s framework translated into the language of what leaders actually experience on the ground. They are not a diagnosis. They are a map of where to look.

The Signal Model identifies 12 Critical Success Factors distributed across these five domains. When we work with an organization the starting point is always the diagnostic, because finding exactly where performance is breaking down changes everything about what to do next. The organizations that skip that step and go straight to solutions spend a great deal of time and money addressing the wrong things.

The free diagnostic below takes less than 10 minutes. It will show you which of the five domains is producing the strongest signal in your organization and give you a prioritized starting point. A Signal Conversation takes 30 minutes and goes deeper, identifying exactly which of the 12 factors underneath your top domains are driving the problem and what to address first.

Take the free Signal Diagnostic 35 statements. Five domains. Under 10 minutes. It will show you exactly where your organization is losing performance and which areas need attention first. A Signal Conversation turns those results into a specific action plan. Click here to take the Signal Diagnostic.