Your team has never agreed, out loud, what its real problems are.
You could name them right now. So could half your team. Saying them out loud has never happened, and the business is built around keeping it that way.
You already know which ones apply.
Your real problems rarely look like problems. They look like this.
There’s a decision from last quarter everyone knew was a mistake. Nobody said so.
You’re still living with it.
There’s one person everyone works around. Meetings get arranged to avoid them.
Your best people have noticed.
The same issue comes back every quarter. Different words, same issue.
Nobody expects it to change any more.
The honest conversation happens after the meeting. In the corridor, in twos.
Never in the meeting.
A new starter named it in their first week. Everyone smiled.
Six months on, they’ve stopped noticing too.
Seven questions on what your team tolerates.
Read personally by Magnus Wood.
Answer as things are, not as they should be.
Who reads your answers.
Magnus Wood spent thirty years inside corporates and startups. Managing Director, CMO, board level. He watched capable people go quiet, and whole businesses arrange themselves around what was safe to say. It happened to him too, and he did not notice. He has a name for it now. Domestication.
Most leaders get domesticated by the organisations they lead. Wild Leadership is the work of becoming dangerous again. Not reckless. Grounded. Dangerous.
He writes about it every week, and works directly with a small number of leaders and their teams. The Recognition is how that work begins. It is also, for most people who take it, the whole of it. That is fine. The read is yours either way.
“Clear, elegant writing about the need for leadership to be organic instead of mechanical.”
Some Recognitions point at a day.
When the answers show a team organised around problems it could stop tolerating, the read will say so, and name the day built for it. The Clearing. One day, with Magnus, in which the team names its biggest problems out loud, refuses in writing to keep tolerating them, and aims its nerve at the next quarter.
The day carries a stake. No Refusal, no Reclaim, no invoice.
If the read suggests it fits, Magnus will say so. If it does not, he will say that too.
Know someone whose team this describes? Send it on.