The conversations behind the conversation

One of the disciplines I’ve developed in my coaching practice is setting aside time each week to reflect on what has emerged across my conversations. I’m not looking for obvious patterns, but to make sense of what leaders are grappling with, where organisations get stuck, and what might be useful to bring into future conversations. Over time, I’ve found that this reflection helps me synthesise what I’m hearing and, hopefully, bring greater value to each client.

This week, as I reviewed my notes and reflected on a range of individual and team engagements, I noticed that initially the challenges felt quite different.

One leader was frustrated that they were being held accountable for outcomes without feeling they had the authority to make the decisions required to achieve them. Another executive was concerned that decisions were taking too long and wondered why their team wasn’t ‘stepping up’ and showing greater ownership. In an executive team workshop, several people described feeling unclear about who was responsible for what, despite agreeing they had discussed it in the previous meeting.

On reflection, what struck me was that none of these situations was really about a lack of capability, commitment, experience or effort. Nor were they things you could put down to poor communication.

Instead, they seemed to sit in the space between.

The space between accountability and authority.

The space between delegation and trust.

The space between enterprise priorities and functional responsibilities.

As organisations grow, leadership becomes less straightforward than role descriptions and reporting lines suggest. Much of the real work happens where responsibilities overlap, expectations are interpreted differently, and competing priorities need to be balanced.

This becomes more pronounced as leaders take on broader organisational responsibility.

The nature of the role changes. The challenges become less technical and more relational. It’s less about having the answer and more about navigating competing expectations. Leaders are expected to advocate for their function while thinking about the organisation as a whole. They are encouraged to bring challenge and independent thinking, while also creating alignment around collective decisions. They are often making decisions without complete information, balancing short-term pressures with longer-term priorities, and responding to the needs of multiple stakeholders who may see the same situation very differently.

This is the reality of leadership in complex organisations.

Yet despite this reality, many leaders experience these challenges as personal shortcomings rather than organisational realities.

Senior leaders often tell me they need more clarity, more influence or more confidence. At the same time, executives conclude that their people need to step up, take greater ownership or think more broadly. While those observations contain some truth, they can also obscure what is really happening.

People are experiencing different sides of the same organisational reality.

The executive team believes responsibility has been delegated. The senior leader is still trying to understand where decision-making authority begins and ends. One person experiences autonomy while another experiences uncertainty.

It’s not about who is right or wrong. More often, it’s about recognising that people are experiencing the same situation from different vantage points.

In team coaching conversations, this is often where the discussion becomes most interesting. What begins as a concern about communication, accountability, or decision-making frequently reveals deeper questions about how the team works together. How are decisions really made? Where does authority sit? What challenge is expected? How is ownership understood? What assumptions are people making about trust, influence and responsibility?

Exploring these questions rarely produces simple answers. What it does create is a shared understanding of the trade-offs the team is navigating and a greater awareness of how different people are experiencing the same situation.

The strongest leadership teams I work with are not the ones that have resolved every competing demand. They are the teams that understand which tensions are theirs to hold and have developed the relationships, judgement and trust required to work through them together.

They also recognise that many of these challenges do not sit neatly within a single team. They emerge in the relationship between executives and senior leaders, where expectations, authority, accountability and influence are constantly being negotiated. When those conversations remain implicit, misunderstanding and frustration tend to fill the gap. When they are surfaced and explored openly, leaders are better able to navigate the complexity that comes with organisational life.

Leadership rarely happens in the neat spaces organisational charts describe.

More often, it happens in the space between.