Everyone’s Leading — But Not in the Same Direction

‍Misalignment doesn’t always create noise — but it spreads quietly, and often across the whole organisation.

We see it often — the board believes the executive team is delivering the strategy. The exec team assumes the senior leaders are aligned and executing. Meanwhile, the senior leaders are quietly wondering what the strategy actually is this quarter.

Everyone’s working hard, everyone’s well-intentioned but the signs start to show. Priorities begin to compete, projects stall or overlap, meetings multiply without bringing clarity, decision-making slows or drifts upward, and trust between layers begins to quietly erode.

This isn’t a personality issue — it’s a leadership maturity issue. And it's surprisingly common in growing, high-performing organisations.

At Amicus, we use our Leadership Excellence Framework — a 16-box grid — to help leadership teams surface and solve misalignment. Often, the gaps aren’t in ambition or commitment, they’re in understanding. Different groups are working to different assumptions about what matters most, who owns what, or how leadership should look at each level.

One organisation we worked with had capable, well-respected individuals at every tier. The board wanted pace, the executive team were pushing hard, but the senior leadership group lacked clarity — not just on direction, but on how they were expected to lead. Everyone assumed alignment but no one had slowed down to test whether behaviours, priorities and expectations were genuinely shared.

We helped them map their leadership spine, assess maturity, and refocus efforts from top to bottom. It wasn’t about writing a new strategy. It was about making the existing one deliver. Most businesses don’t fail on vision, they fail on follow-through (it’s often easier to admire the problems than to solve them). But once direction was clarified and expectations reset, decisions sped up, energy refocused, and people started pulling together with purpose, not just effort.

These aren’t cosmetic changes. This is the work that allows good organisations to perform exceptionally well, consistently and cohesively.

So what should leaders be asking themselves?

• Do we all share the same understanding of the intent, and the main effort, right now?
• Do our behaviours reflect the level of maturity the business now demands?
• Do we trust people to deliver, or are we quietly holding the reins too tightly?