I often hear the same thing in my first conversation with a CEO. They start by talking about their teams. "Functions are working in silos." "Managers do not collaborate enough." "Everyone protects their own area." "Decisions take too long to filter through." "We need to rebuild cohesion." So we talk about structure, management, accountabilities and how information flows. Then, fairly quickly, I ask a different question. And how does your executive team actually work together?

Leadership is not a performance. It’s how you show up. The executive committee meeting had just ended. Papers were being put away, people were already moving on to the next urgent issue, when he said quietly: “People keep telling me I need to work on my presence. That I don’t embody the role enough. That I need to show more leadership.” He may have expected me to diagnose the problem. To comment on his voice, his body language, the way he entered a room. I didn’t. Because I d

Not long ago, a business leader confided in me, almost apologetically: “I feel alone. But I don’t really have the right to complain about it: it’s simply part of the job.” Perhaps he expected me to reassure him. To remind him that he had an executive committee, business partners, peers and a family around him. I did not. Because we almost always treat a leader’s loneliness as a symptom. An abnormal situation that should be made to disappear through more conversations, a peer

For the past 18 months, I have seen the same pattern play out in the executive committees I support. We talk about AI, tools, use cases and productivity gains. We build a roadmap. A few months later, adoption is still far slower than expected. Because even a well-designed roadmap only addresses part of the problem. When an organization introduces AI, everyone, consciously or otherwise, asks themselves a very simple question: “Will this tool help me do my job better… or make p