Which member of your team is the one with the ‘high performer’ reputation? I’m guessing the answer comes to you almost automatically. Most teams have at least one. 

Sometimes we find the high performer’s standard drops. 

We find ourselves surprised.  Usually we ask “What happened to them?” 

I think that the “surprised” reaction is worth pausing to consider. The high performer reputation is established by how well a person’s strengths, commitment and role are aligned at a given point in time. And it gets carried long after that original fit has shifted. 

As the role expands, the high performer invests greater effort to cover the gap - until someone notices or the effort is no longer sufficient. Conversely they may have outgrown the role and performance drops. The visible outcome may be the same but the underlying cause isn’t.

So, how do you know whether your organisation is making best use of the capabilities across your team?

Lately I’ve been working with some technical leaders and their teams. There’s something I’ve noticed, to varying degrees, across all the teams. The leader has very specific, highly valuable and genuinely scarce expertise. They have built their career on it. But now they’ve risen to a level of seniority that demands they move beyond the hands-on resolution of technical issues. For some, that was a significant challenge that they worked hard to achieve. Others are still grappling with it. In both cases, that effort falters when an issue arises that requires them to step back into the role of technical expert.

One of the benefits of working with the same team over a long period is the opportunity to see patterns in the way they interpret information and respond.

Recently, during a conversation with a Senior Leader, I commented on the common interventions they leaned on when a certain problem arose. There was nothing wrong with their ideas, but it occurred to me that, while they helped address the immediate challenge, they weren't necessarily recognising or addressing what might be creating the issue in the first place.

I started thinking about how we tend to build automatic, almost reflexive responses to situations that look familiar based on where we think problems live in the organisation. 

For example, 1:1 coaching assumes that at least some of the problem sits with the individual. Facilitation might assume it sits with the collective. Organisational design might assume it’s structural.

“He’s got charisma, but not charm”

It seems like an innocuous statement, a throwaway line. Still, it stopped me in my tracks during a client meeting last week.

I had to ask myself the difference and whether I had mistakenly been using them interchangeably. Turns out, I had been inadvertently combining two ideas into one. Where charisma is the way we draw people to us, charm is how interested we are in others.

The conversation came about as we reflected on the impact a new CEO was having on an organisation we both knew well. It had undergone significant change since they arrived, and we were analysing why.

On the surface, it was a conversation about CEO transition.

A few weeks ago, I asked a question I've asked many times before.

"Has the feedback been shared with the individual?"

The knowing glances around the room told me the answer before anyone spoke.

On the surface, it was another discussion about executive coaching. A briefing about a plan to support a senior leader through a significant development opportunity: it was a very well-intentioned, familiar conversation.

Over the years, I’ve learnt to trust my recurring observations before I can explain them.

This week, two seemingly unrelated coaching conversations kept colliding in my mind, but it took me a while to understand why.

I've noticed a shift in my coaching conversations.

Not with every leader, but often enough to make me think.

In the past, people have sought coaching for clarity, confidence or both (even when they name it something else). They have openly sought another perspective, a better question, or someone to challenge their thinking. Baked into that was an assumption that enough of the right information would make the right decision obvious.

Increasingly, I'm seeing something different.

I've been fascinated by questions for a long time.

Enough to write a book about them. Enough to create a deck of conversation cards. Enough that many people assume asking great questions is the heart of what I do.

They're not wrong.

A well-timed question can change the direction of a conversation. It can expose an assumption, surface something that's been sitting just below the surface, or help someone see a situation from a completely different angle. Questions create movement when people have become stuck in familiar ways of thinking.

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.