What I look for in the first 30 days with a leadership team

The first month is not about fixing everything. It is about seeing clearly.

When I start working with a leadership team, I am not leading with answers or frameworks. I am watching how the system actually behaves under pressure. What people say matters. What they avoid matters more.

A few patterns show up almost every time.

Where decisions bottleneck: Usually one or two people are carrying far more than they should. Not because they are controlling, but because the organization quietly trained everyone to defer to them. Speed suffers, and so does trust.

Where roles are fuzzy in practice: Titles look clean on paper, but ownership is ambiguous day to day. Important work gets done, yet accountability floats. This is where resentment and burnout tend to form.

Where leaders are doing each other’s jobs: Often out of care, competence, or loyalty. It keeps things moving in the short term and quietly caps scale in the long term.

Where conversations stay polite instead of honest: This is rarely a values problem. More often it is a timing, safety, or clarity problem.

Where the strategy sounds right but does not guide decisions: If priorities do not change how time, money, and attention are spent, they are not priorities yet. They are intentions.

None of this means something is broken. This is what growth looks like before it organizes itself.

The real work of the first 30 days is not alignment theater. It is creating enough shared clarity that leaders can make cleaner decisions, trust each other more, and stop carrying what is not theirs.

That is when momentum returns.