Founding Director ·
Reflections on three years of operational team data
Over the last three years, we’ve run our CCI diagnostic, a structured read on a team’s Clarity, Culture, Interdependence and Team Learning, inside organisations across aviation, financial services, healthcare and the charity sector. Each report is a snapshot of one team at one moment: what it believes about itself, and what its people say when asked honestly.
We’ve started reading these reports not as separate engagements but as a body of evidence. The sample is still modest, a handful of teams rather than a national study, so we hold these conclusions lightly. But the pattern that emerges is consistent enough to be worth naming, and it runs against the story most leadership teams tell about themselves.
The short version:
Teams rarely fail on purpose. They fail on connection.
Clarity is rarely the problem.
The single most reliable finding across our reports is that people know why their team exists. Ask a team to rate whether its mission is understood, and the scores come back high, often the highest of any measure on the page, and in our strongest teams close to the top of the scale. People can tell you the goal. They believe in it. They can usually explain how their own role connects to it.
This is important because it quietly dismantles a comfortable assumption. When a team is underperforming, the instinct is to go back to strategy: to re-clarify the vision, rewrite the objectives, run another offsite about purpose. Our data suggests that for most teams, this is effort spent on the thing that is already working.
The weakness sits elsewhere.
The weakness is in the connective tissue.
In report after report, the lowest-scoring category is Interdependence, the connective tissue of how people coordinate, share and rely on one another. A team can comprehend its mission at eight or nine out of ten and, on the same survey, rate how well it actually coordinates several points lower. The gap between knowing the mission and working as one to deliver it is the defining performance problem we see.
Underneath that headline, the same specific failures recur.
Information doesn’t flow.
Of every dimension we measure, information sharing is the one most likely to score lowest. People know the destination, although not what their colleagues are doing to get there. Knowledge arrives late, or after the event, or not at all. Coordination can’t outperform the information it’s built on.
Listening is claimed, not practiced.
“We listen more than we speak” is one of our most consistently weak items. The qualitative feedback is sharper still: people describe colleagues who listen but don’t actually hear. The meeting happens, positions don’t move, nothing changes. Listening is the most overrated team skill and the least genuinely practiced.
Psychological safety comes in islands.
Safety is real, but it’s uneven. It tends to exist inside sub-groups and trusted pairings rather than across the whole team. People will raise the hard thing with the person next to them, but not in the room where the decision gets made. An average safety score can look healthy while masking pockets where difficult issues never surface.
The difficult conversation gets avoided.
Across teams, the fear of raising difficult issues reappears as a limiting factor. Teams are conflict-avoidant until an issue becomes too big to ignore, at which point it arrives as a crisis rather than a conversation.
Goodwill is not a system.
The most important thing our follow-up work has taught us is what happens after a team starts to improve, and it’s the finding we’d most want a leadership team to sit with.
When we resurvey, culture and psychological safety are usually the first things to move. People feel safer, kinder, more willing to seek feedback. That’s real progress and worth celebrating. But in several cases, those cultural gains did not translate into better coordination or accountability. People felt better about each other, even as the team still struggled to execute.
The reason is uncomfortable. Goodwill is not a system. Feeling safe enough to name a problem is not the same as having a mechanism that resolves it. In one team, improved safety mostly meant people now felt able to say out loud that decisions were being made outside the formal structure, that accountability was selective, that values were breached without consequence. The honesty was new. The dysfunction was not.
We’ve come to call this the accountability vacuum: the space that opens when a team has warmth but no structure, no decision register, no clear governance, and no agreed-upon consequences when commitments are missed. Warmth alone doesn’t fill it. In fact, warmth devoid of structure can entrench the problem, because everyone is now too considerate to force the issue.
What this means for how we develop teams
If the pattern holds, it reshapes where the effort should go.
It means the reflexive investment in re-clarifying purpose is often misplaced. Clarity is table stakes; most teams already have it. The leverage is in the connective tissue: the unglamorous mechanics of how information moves, how people actually listen, how decisions get made and owned.
It means culture work and structural work have to travel together. Building safety without building the mechanisms to act on what safety surfaces produces teams that are more honest about their dysfunction but no better at resolving it. Psychological safety is the permission to speak; accountability is what makes speaking worth it.
And it means the questions worth asking a leadership team are more concrete than “are we aligned on the vision?” Better questions: Where does information actually get stuck? Who listens but doesn’t change their mind? Which decisions are really made outside this room? What happens, precisely, when someone doesn’t deliver?
Where we go next?
This is the start of something, not a finished view. As the evidence base grows, we want to test whether these patterns hold at scale, and where they break: whether the clarity-execution gap looks different in a crisis-driven team than a stable one, whether the accountability vacuum has an early warning signal we can measure.
For now, one reflection stands out above the rest. The teams we work with are rarely short on talent, and seldom short on purpose. What holds them back is the space between people: how well they connect, share, listen and hold the line together. That space is harder to see than a strategy deck and harder to fix than a values statement. It’s also where the performance is.
