#414 – October 5, 2025
Dealing with Drift, Stutter, and Isolation
Hello, fellow strategists! Leaders often feel stuck or adrift, trapped by old patterns, roles, or structures. In this edition, we explore how to design your senior team strategically, foster trusted inside influencers, and create connected workplaces. These ideas can help your people stop stuttering and rebuild momentum across the organization. Enjoy!
Quick Takes
Shaping Your Senior Leadership Team
Why do outstanding individual team leaders fail to perform as a collective? Even the best organizations can stumble when their executive teams become too large, too political, or too vague about purpose.
Writing in Harvard Business Review, consultants Ron Carucci and Jarrod Shappell note that many leadership tables are filled with people who have titles but not necessarily the right mix of roles to deliver on strategy. Decisions drag. Priorities blur. Turf battles quietly drain energy.
They recommend starting with a deceptively simple question: “What is this team actually for?”
Their redesign advice boils down to three principles:
- Clarify who’s in—and why. Not everyone who reports to the CEO or ED needs to be part of the strategic core. (Some can advise you directly, not as part of the senior team.) Include only those who decide organization-wide trade-offs and set shared direction.
- Design, don’t just arrange. Build your senior team deliberately—small enough to solve problems in real time, large enough to cover the capabilities that matter most. Composition should reflect your strategic intent. And be careful to clarify boundaries while integrating functional “seams”.
- Let strategy dictate design. The shape of your top team should mirror your organization’s priorities. When strategy shifts, so should the team’s composition.
Carucci and Shappell’s central message applies as much to public and nonprofit organizations as to corporations: Vanity titles, historical reporting lines, and inherited structures may shape the team you have, but they shouldn’t define the team you need to succeed.
Inside Influence:
Fostering Your Own Natural Connectors
Influence doesn’t always come from the top. We’re all a bit weary of talk about “influencers” on social media, but what about the ones sitting right inside your own organization?
These internal influencers aren’t appointed or self-promoting. They’re the peers people trust most — the ones whose opinions quietly shape how others think, feel, and act. When they’re positive, they’re priceless. When they’re cynical, they can drain morale faster than any memo. So it pays for leaders to understand and nurture their informal power.
Leaders need to spot and support the insiders who quietly move your culture forward. Here are some ideas on How to Leverage the Power of Internal Influencers from Workvivo’s Caitlin Kirwan:
- Spot the real influencers, not just the visible ones. Influence is about credibility. Ask employees whose advice they trust or whose opinions they value (outside of leadership). Patterns will reveal the natural connectors whose words carry weight.
- Listen before you enlist. Don’t recruit them just to push your next initiative; start by hearing their perspective. Involving them early builds buy-in and brings out ground-level insights that formal channels often miss.
- Build community, not a club. Once identified, bring influencers together as partners, not mouthpieces. Create open conversations where they can shape, not just share, your messaging.
- Give them stories worth spreading. Empowerment isn’t about slogans or toolkits—it’s about meaningful participation. When influencers help co-create a new policy, system, or event, they naturally speak about it with authenticity, credibility and pride.
- Keep the loop alive. Regularly check in with your internal influencers to hear what’s resonating (or not). Feedback from their informal networks can be an early-warning system for how change efforts are landing in real life.
Every organization has its hidden hubs of trust — people who carry informal authority because they’re respected, not because they’re senior. These inside influencers can bridge leadership gaps, amplify engagement, and strengthen culture if you treat them not as a communication channel but as partners in shaping it. Smart leaders engage the messengers their people already believe.
Harsh Truths Learned From Long Experience
Daniel Pink is a best-selling author known for his works on business, work, creativity, and behaviour. In this fast-paced YouTube video, he shares 40 Harsh Truths I Wish I Knew In My 20s. Here are a dozen you may know but bear repeating:
- Don’t work with jerks.
- You’re not the main character in other people’s lives.
- Don’t craft a resume, build a body of work.
- Raw talent is overrated, persistence is underrated.
- Consistency beats intensity
- Mediocrity is the real threat.
- Simplify. And focus on what you can control.
- It always takes longer than you expect (Hofstadter’s Law).
- Luck is more important than you realize.
- Ask more questions. And when in doubt, reach out for advice.
- Stop waiting for permission.
- If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.
8020Info Drill-Down
Combating Isolation at Work:
Five Practices for More Connected Teams
If loneliness is quietly reshaping our communities, it’s also reshaping our workplaces. Disconnection erodes trust, collaboration, and creativity — the very things that help teams thrive. But Kristin Gleitsman and Luis Velasquez, writing on HBR.org, explain that leaders can intentionally rebuild connection by embedding it into everyday work.
Here are five research-backed ways to start:
- Build team cohesion through shared identity.
Tell and retell the team’s story — moments of grit, learning, or success that remind people who they are together and why their work matters. Shared stories, organizational rituals and celebrations strengthen belonging and trust. - Design collaboration to build trust.
Treat relationships as core infrastructure. Pair newcomers with buddies, kick off projects with short “connection sprints”, and rotate team collaborations intentionally. Purposeful interaction turns coordination into cohesion. - Model humanity to build resilient teams.
When leaders show openness and empathy, it signals safety, which makes it easier for others to share honestly and support each other. Consider starting meetings with quick check-ins. - Operationalize belonging through organizational practices.
Bake connection into your processes: include belonging questions in onboarding or reviews, and hold quarterly “culture calibrations” where teams reflect on what’s working and what’s drifting. When systems reinforce connection, culture follows. - Set the tone by acknowledging your own need for connection.
Isolation and loneliness affects leaders too. Share authentically, seek peer support or coaching, and model vulnerability. When leaders go first, others follow.
The Takeaway: Connection isn’t a “soft” practice — it’s strategic infrastructure. In a world of quiet disconnection, leaders who intentionally weave belonging into daily work will not only strengthen culture but also spark trust, creativity, and resilience across their organizations.
For Your Reading List: How to Get Unstuck
Almost everyone feels stuck in some way. Anatomy of a Breakthrough is Adam Alter’s guide to breaking free from the thoughts, habits, jobs, relationships, and even organizational models that block progress. Drawing on research and instructive anecdotes, he explains how to escape a state where you’re stuttering. With persistence and small consistent steps, you can break free by overcoming three core sources of friction: unhelpful emotions, unhelpful thought patterns and unhelpful behaviours.
Closing Thought: And Fly!
“Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.” — Alejandro Jodorowsky (via Recomendo)
AI Disclosure: This newsletter was hand-crafted and personally curated. In addition to using online research tools, the author made some use of ChatGPT and Gemini Pro for polishing the prose and headings.