A four-year study of a professional services firm’s leadership team, based on nearly 760 hours of observation and more than 300 interviews, found that when performance faltered, executives acknowledged their worries privately but not to one another, and their team did not challenge the resulting strategic vision. At a retreat, no one questioned the chief executive’s diagnosis or asked what a shared leadership model would mean in practice; project teams that later surfaced unwelcome data were blamed rather than heard, and the firm was eventually acquired.
The findings were published by MIT Sloan Management Review in its Fall 2026 issue, in an article by Declan Fitzsimons, Gianpiero Petriglieri and Jennifer Petriglieri dated 1 September 2026.
Source: MIT Sloan Management Review, 2026-09-01.