Naming the unspoken
After bringing their strategy to life, a care and welfare organisation realised that its leadership team was not yet living up to its full potential, as unclear roles and responsibilities were slowing decisions and blurring ownership.
One-on-one interviews with every team member surfaced the same pattern from all sides: conflict avoidance. Issues weren’t named directly, feedback was softened before it landed, meetings ran long without real decisions, and despite individually motivated leaders, the team had never made its shared goal for the year explicit.
“A team starts moving forward when it stops talking around the issues and starts naming them together.”
We ran a full round of individual interviews before bringing the team together for a two-day offsite grounded in established team-effectiveness models like Lencioni, combined with experiential exercises designed to build trust and psychological safety quickly: structured vulnerability exercises, recognizing personal stress reactions, concrete feedback models, and scripts for courageous conversations. The team closed by co-creating its own team charter and rules of engagement, with committed actions and named owners.
The team left with direct, specific feedback for its own leader — including a clear ask to lead more decisively — and a set of actions it had committed to and owned collectively. Most notably, a team that had spent months talking around its issues started, for the first time, naming them out loud.
LQ team
Managing Partner
Founding partner - Director Research & Thought Leadership