Why your last leadership initiative tanked!
If you've ever invested in a team workshop about communication, launched a leadership framework, or put your managers through a leadership program and felt quietly disappointed by the results, you're not alone, and it's probably not what you think went wrong.
Most founders I speak to put it down to timing: "We were too busy to really implement it." Or they put it down to people: "Some of my team just aren't motivated." A few of the more honest ones admit they're not sure what happened — it felt useful at the time, then life got in the way and nothing really shifted.
Here's what I've come to understand after years of walking into businesses where something isn't working: the initiative itself was probably fine. The problem is that it was designed by a certain personality type with certain experience and generic, and your team isn't generic. Often the leader loves it, but it falls flat when presented to their team.
The assumption nobody talks about
Every leader leads through the lens of how they naturally operate. The way you absorb information, the way you make decisions under pressure, the way you structure your day and communicate expectations — that feels normal to you because it IS normal to you. So you build systems, set standards and deliver feedback through that same lens, often without realising it. You choose programs that suit your style.
The problem is that the people around you aren't wired the same way. Some of them process information slowly and need context before they can commit. Some are energised by new ideas and possibilities, while others need certainty and a locked-in plan before they can execute. Some communicate directly and efficiently; others read directness as aggression. None of this is about attitude or effort — it's about how people are genuinely wired to operate, and when that wiring hasn't been decoded, even the most capable team will create friction that nobody can quite explain.
A leadership program or a framework that doesn't account for this will give everyone the same tools and expect the same results. Which is a bit like giving a left-handed person right-handed scissors and being puzzled when their cutting isn't clean.
What it actually looks like in practice
I worked with a founder recently who came to me with a specific concern about their Assistant Manager. She was exceptional with customers — warm, perceptive, effortlessly building rapport. But with staff, she was blunt and direct in a way that was leaving people unsettled. The founder and their senior manager had tried addressing it, but nothing was landing. They assumed it was a personality problem, maybe even a values problem.
When we profiled the management team, something became immediately clear: the Assistant Manager's communication style wasn't a flaw — it was a strength applied in the wrong context, without awareness. Her directness worked brilliantly in customer interactions where efficiency and confidence were valued. With her staff, who were wired for warmth and collaborative decision-making, that same directness was being experienced as dismissiveness. She wasn't being difficult. She was being herself, without understanding how herself was landing on people who processed the world differently.
Once the team could see this in the data — not as a personality judgement but as a natural behavioural pattern — the coaching conversation changed entirely. It wasn't about fixing her. It was about building her awareness of when her natural style served her and when it needed to flex.
A separate client had a different but equally common pattern: a senior manager came to me frustrated because their leader kept changing direction, shifting priorities, introducing new ideas, and moving goalposts. The team were stressed, deadlines were slipping, and trust in the leader's decision-making was quietly eroding.
When I profiled the leader, the pattern was immediately visible. He sat strongly in the Perceiving preference in 16 Personalities — naturally curious, possibility-focused, energised by new thinking — and scored high on Vision in his leadership profile. He genuinely could see things his team couldn't yet see, and his instinct was to keep the options open until he was certain. To him, this felt like good leadership: considered and thoughtful.
To a team of structured, deadline-driven people who needed certainty to function well, it felt like chaos.
The fix wasn't about asking him to stop thinking creatively. It was about building a boundary between his thinking space and his team's operating space. Once something was locked in with the team, it stayed locked in unless there was a genuinely critical reason to revisit it. When new ideas emerged — and they always did — he learned to ask first: "Is this something we could actually change at this stage?" And critically, the team were given explicit permission to say no if the timing would derail their work.
A small structural shift. A significant change in how the team functioned.
Why profiling changes everything
Neither of these situations would have resolved with a generic leadership workshop. The workshop might have covered communication styles in theory and given everyone a framework to discuss, but without understanding the specific wiring of the specific people in that specific room, the insights stay abstract and interesting rather than transformative.
When you profile your team — when you can actually see how each person makes decisions, processes information, responds under pressure and communicates naturally — leadership becomes far less guesswork. You stop trying to motivate everyone the same way and start meeting people where they actually are. You stop wondering why your clear instructions aren't landing and start asking whether your version of "clear" matches how that particular person receives information.
This matters not just for the team you have now, but for the team you're building. Hiring and promoting based on gut feel and surface performance is one of the most common and costly mistakes I see founders make. Behavioural profiling before an offer goes out gives you a picture of how a candidate is wired relative to the role, the team, and the leader they'll report to. That picture doesn't guarantee a perfect hire — nothing does — but it dramatically reduces the chance of discovering six months in that someone who looked right on paper operates in a way that quietly creates friction in all the wrong places.
Where to start
If you've tried leadership initiatives before and felt like they didn't quite land, the question worth asking isn't "what's wrong with my team?" — it's "do I actually understand how my team is wired and how that wiring interacts with my own?"
That's always where I start. Before any advice, any program, or any intervention, I decode the behavioural and structural patterns that are shaping performance. Because once you can see the actual pattern, the solution becomes specific, practical, and far more likely to stick.
If something in your team feels off and you're not sure what's actually driving it, that's exactly the conversation I'd like to have.