This is going to be uncomfortable.
HI’m asking you to consider something that runs against every instinct you’ve developed as a leader: the organizational problems keeping you up at night—the ones you’re working so hard to solve—were likely created by decisions you made or approved.
Not through malice. Not through incompetence. Through the accumulated effect of rational choices that each seemed right at the time but collectively built an environment that now produces the outcomes you’re fighting against.
This isn’t blame. It’s leverage. If your decisions created the conditions producing dysfunction, then your decisions can create conditions that produce something different.
That’s actually liberating
—once you get past the discomfort.
The Invisible Cascade
A hospital CEO I worked with prided himself on keeping his executive meetings focused and efficient. In one such meeting, when his CFO presented concerning numbers from the customer service department, the CEO interrupted: “I’d rather you didn’t bring this to the meeting unless you’re also bringing solutions.”
He thought this was contained—a reasonable request for his direct reports to come prepared, made behind closed doors. It wasn’t.
Over the following months, something shifted. His VP of Operations stopped including early warning indicators in her reports, waiting instead until she had fully formed solutions. Her direct reports, noting this pattern, began sitting on problems longer. By the time this behavior reached front-line managers, customer complaints were snowballing because issues were being filtered and delayed until they became crises.
When the CEO finally noticed and asked why people weren’t surfacing problems sooner, he was genuinely surprised. He had never explicitly told anyone to hide problems. But his one reactive moment—which he thought was about meeting efficiency—had cascaded throughout the organization. Every level had learned what leadership actually rewarded, and they adapted accordingly.
What Leadership Models, Organizations Become
This pattern isn’t unique to that CEO. It appears in every organization I’ve assessed. Leadership behaviors—especially behaviors under pressure—become templates that cascade through every level of management.
In one manufacturing company, I was brought in because front-line supervisors seemed unable to hold their teams accountable. Performance issues festered. Procedure violations went unaddressed. The COO wanted to “fix the accountability problem at the supervisor level.”
The real story emerged when I examined the executive team. The COO had been consistently missing his committed technology upgrade timelines, causing cascading delays across operations. The Chief Sales Officer knew this was creating problems but remained silent in meetings, preferring to express concerns privately—where nothing happened. The CHRO had identified serious capability gaps but avoided raising them with production leadership to preserve relationships.
Each executive valued collegiality over confrontation. The result: directors learned to work around peer shortcomings rather than address them. Managers learned that raising difficult topics earned you a reputation as a troublemaker. By the time these unspoken rules reached the front line, supervisors had internalized exactly what the organization valued—harmony over accountability, relationships over results.
They weren’t failing to hold their teams accountable. They were modeling the exact behavior they’d learned from watching the organization above them.
As an aside, I’ve learned to replace the problematic, “Don’t come to me with problems, come to me with solutions,” line with a great little twist:
“Don’t come to me with problems unless you’re willing to help with the solution.”
The CEO Who Couldn’t Let Go
Another manufacturing client faced chronic succession problems. The CEO complained that he couldn’t focus on strategic work because his sales engineering team constantly needed his technical expertise on complex customer specs. “None of them can do what I do,” he explained. “If I don’t stay involved, we’ll make catastrophic mistakes.”
Then I pointed out something simple: every time he’d been working on these designs in his office for the past several months, he’d been alone.
The simplicity of the observation floored him. He was complaining that no one else could do the work while simultaneously never letting anyone else learn how. His working habits—not some inherent complexity—were creating the bottleneck he complained about.
When he asked himself, “Why don’t I just pull my sales engineers into my office whenever I’m working on these designs?”, he discovered the answer was… nothing. There was no reason. It just hadn’t occurred to him because he’d always worked that way.
This same pattern—inadvertent knowledge hoarding that creates the dependency leaders then complain about—appeared throughout the organization. Once the CEO recognized it in himself and changed his behavior, others followed. The capability gap he thought was permanent began closing within months.
The Leadership Vacuum That Creates Dependency
I worked with a logistics firm where leadership was frustrated that employees wouldn’t “take initiative.” New hires weren’t developing. Experienced staff seemed to need constant hand-holding. Everyone came to leadership for decisions that should have been made locally.
The diagnosis revealed that leadership had never created the conditions for initiative to exist. In their words, they’d been “pulled into day-to-day activities out of necessity” after key retirements. But that necessity had become permanent. They’d never established clear expectations, documented processes, or defined accountability. Employees didn’t know who was responsible for what. Training was unstructured—new hires didn’t know when they’d completed it or what “good” looked like.
Employees weren’t failing to take initiative. They were operating in an environment that had never defined what initiative should look like, never provided the information needed to act independently, never clarified what decisions belonged to them. Leadership had inadvertently created a system where success required leadership involvement, then blamed employees for not acting without them.
The frustrating part: leadership genuinely believed they wanted employees to act independently. They just hadn’t built the environmental conditions that would make independence possible.
The Leverage This Creates
Here’s why this matters: if your decisions shape the environment, and the environment shapes behavior, then you have enormous influence over organizational outcomes. You’re not fighting against intractable human nature or inherited culture. You’re modifying conditions you have authority to modify.
The CEO who learned his meeting behavior was cascading through the organization could change that behavior—and did. The executives who modeled harmony over accountability could start modeling direct conversation about problems—and they did. The CEO who hoarded knowledge unconsciously could start including others—and he did. The logistics leadership team could build the expectations and structures that would enable initiative—and they did.
In each case, the diagnostic work revealed the connection between leadership decisions and organizational outcomes. Once that connection was visible, leaders had a choice: keep doing what they’d been doing and get the same results, or change what they were doing and create space for different results.
That choice is always available. It’s only accessible once you accept that your decisions played a role in creating current conditions.
The Question to Sit With
Here’s what I ask executives to consider: What if the problems you’re experiencing aren’t obstacles to your leadership—they’re reflections of it?
Not because you’re a bad leader. Because you’re a leader operating inside a system, and leaders’ decisions shape systems, and systems produce outcomes. The outcomes you’re seeing didn’t emerge randomly. They emerged from the conditions you’ve created.
That’s not comfortable. But it’s empowering. Because if you created the conditions, you can change them. You don’t need different employees, a different market, or a different board. You need to understand what your current environmental design produces and what different design would produce instead.
The dysfunction you’re fighting is a signal. It’s telling you something about the system you’ve built. The question is whether you’re willing to hear it.
The Emotional Difficulty
Why is this so hard to hear?
Because you’ve invested your identity into building something. You’ve made sacrifices, worked weekends, taken risks, made difficult decisions. The idea that some of those decisions created the problems you’re now fighting feels like an accusation of failure.
It’s not. Every organizational system produces unintended consequences. Every set of decisions, no matter how thoughtful, creates some conditions that work against your goals. The question isn’t whether you’ve made decisions that produced unwanted outcomes—you have, because everyone does. The question is whether you can examine those decisions honestly enough to change them.
The executives who struggle most are the ones who need every decision to have been correct. They explain away evidence that their choices created problems. They find alternative explanations. They blame implementation or employees or circumstances. These explanations protect their self-concept as effective leaders. They also prevent them from accessing the most powerful lever for improvement they have.
The executives who improve their organizations fastest are the ones who can hear “this decision you made created this problem” without becoming defensive. They don’t need to have been right about everything. They need to be right about what happens next.
Dustin Snyder is the founder of Wayforward Associates, specializing in organizational diagnostics and change management for companies at critical inflection points. His Strategic Workforce Insight Mapping (SWIM) process provides leadership teams with actionable insights and implementation roadmaps that consistently generate workforce buy-in on necessary change.your organization could benefit from this approach, take 10 minutes to complete our Organizational Health Index.
