Recently, I was speaking to the leader of a large FMCG organisation.
He told me something I’ve now heard, in one form or another, from a number of CEOs.
Almost every leadership programme they’d invested in, including some prestigious, well-designed executive programmes, had failed to change behaviour in the business.
Strong frameworks.
Smart ideas.
Very little impact.
What frustrated him most was this: despite the evidence, his executive team kept asking for more leadership programmes.
Clearly, there is a problem that needs solving.
We’ve just been looking at the wrong problem.
Most people come back from these programmes feeling inspired, before walking straight back into the same team dynamics.
Leadership development usually happens away from the real work. You’re exposed to ideas as an individual, in a classroom. But performance doesn’t live there. It lives in meetings, conversations, and decisions under pressure, in the team.
Which points to a deeper issue.
In most organisations, what looks like a leadership problem is often a team problem showing up at the top.
Leadership absolutely matters. Leaders have disproportionate influence, especially in moments of uncertainty. People look to them more than anyone else.
But the idea that one individual can determine how accountable, open, or effective everyone else is places an unrealistic burden on leaders, and misunderstands how humans actually behave in groups.
What leaders shape are the conditions.
What teams shape are the behaviours.
People spend far more time with their colleagues than with their leader. They watch each other. They copy what’s rewarded, tolerated, or quietly ignored. Over time, a set of unspoken rules forms.
This is team microculture.
It’s why the same person can thrive in one team and struggle in another. Same capability. Same intent. Different dynamics.
And once those dynamics take hold, they can be stronger than any leadership programme. You can have a leader who invites openness, and still have silence dominate. Not because leadership failed, but because team norms are louder.
That realisation changed my work.
I stopped focusing primarily on developing better leaders, and started focusing on building better-functioning teams. Because performance doesn’t sit in one role, it lives in the collective intelligence of the group.
When teams take shared responsibility for how they think, relate, and work together, leaders stop compensating for the system. Decision-making speeds up. Accountability strengthens. Leadership strain eases.
Leadership rarely breaks first.
Teams do.
And when we work at the level where behaviour actually lives, between people, performance follows.
This shift, from individual leadership to collective intelligence, is what sits behind my current work on The Augmented Team.