What if you’ve already formed the wrong picture?
A client arrived at a recent coaching session with a noticeably different level of positive energy. Turns out, 48 hours earlier, she had resigned from her current role, having just accepted another senior role at an alliance partner. The new role is within the same industry, and she'll be working with people she "knew by reputation".
It had taken no time at all for the word to get out that she was joining the new organisation. Her connections began reaching out immediately with unsolicited, well-meaning opinions. Recommendations to align with certain people and to watch out for others. Information about where hidden tensions were likely to impact her new responsibilities. A heads up on what she is walking into. By the time we spoke, she had formed a detailed picture and had already started shaping her approach in response.
I asked her one question: how do you know you can rely on that information?
I knew by the pause that followed I'd hit a nerve.
Confirmation bias shapes what we notice, how we interpret our environment, and how quickly we move from observation to conclusion. In a new environment, where almost everything is uncertain, if we're not careful, that process can run on overdrive. Very quickly, we confirm what we already suspected and start acting in ways that make sense to us. How that looks to others depends on how well we've assessed the situation.
This is particularly acute for experienced leaders. The more history we carry, the more material our bias has to draw on. We assume that we've seen it before. We know how it goes. And we do the thing that worked last time, but in a place where the dynamics may be entirely different.
There's no doubt that history is a useful starting point. Curiosity is what makes it reliable.
There are particular 'signals' that help identify the reliability of our knowledge.
Most organisations have a stated and an actual decision-making structure, and they're rarely the same. There are 'tells' like what gets decided in rooms we're not in, what comes back changed without explanation, and who gets consulted before anything is approved. The strategy on the wall tells us what the organisation aspires to be. Decisions in motion tell us what it actually optimises for.
What happens when someone pushes back? Does dissent surface directly or through proxies? Does it get heard, managed, or neutralised? The answer tells us how much of what you'll hear in meetings is genuine and how much of the real conversation is happening elsewhere.
Is there a difference between what people say in public vs private? The gap between these two is one of the most reliable indicators of psychological safety in a system. A leader who says the same things in both is most likely to engender trust. A significant gap tells us something about the environment we're operating in and what will be expected of us.
Misalignment at senior levels rarely looks like open conflict. It looks like parallel conversations, diverging mandates, and decisions that take longer than they should. Watch what happens in cross-functional collaboration. That's where alignment, or the absence of it, becomes visible.
Every organisation has an implicit relationship between urgency and sustainability. Some teams operate in a permanent sprint while others have a genuine capacity to pace appropriately. Knowing which one we've walked into matters for how we lead and what we can ask of the people around us.
Whether we're new to a place or have been there for years, the work of noticing what's actually happening and responding to that is continuous. The environment doesn't hold still long enough for a one-time interpretation.