Leadership development usually works. The system it returns to undoes it.
MaSatori is a systemic leadership and team development practice, led by Sharon Strickland-Clark. We work with founders, chief executives and senior teams in businesses where growth, acquisition or transformation has made the organisation harder to lead than it used to be.
Leaders come back from good programmes with real intent. The accountability is still unclear. Decision rights have not moved. The incentives still reward the behaviour everyone agreed to change. Within a quarter the old pattern has reasserted itself, and the conclusion drawn is that the development failed, or that the people are not strong enough. Usually neither is true.
Harvard Business School’s Michael Beer and colleagues found the same thing: the learning rarely fails on its own terms. People return to an organisation whose direction, decision-making and coordination still produce the old behaviour, and within months they have reverted to it.
We start by finding where the difficulty is actually being produced, whether that sits with the leader, the team, or the wider organisation, and then work at the level capable of changing it.
Recent work includes:
- A founder-owned technical consultancy, scaling beyond the founders’ direct control
- A specialist owner-led finance business, moving real authority below the owner for the first time
- A mission-led advocacy organisation of around a hundred staff, rebuilding its leadership after fast growth
- The UK arm of a global manufacturer, mid-way through a major operational expansion
- A mid-sized services business, shifting from top-down to devolved departmental leadership as it scales
You may already know what needs to happen
You may be less sure the organisation can currently do it.
- The strategy is clear. Execution fragments across functions, and the plan slips a quarter.
- Decisions take weeks, then get reopened. The cost is rarely the meeting time. It is the delay, and what the delay signals to everyone watching.
- Too much still depends on the chief executive. Growth is now limited by one person’s calendar.
- Capable functional leaders run their own areas well and struggle to run the organisation together.
- Collaboration works until pressure rises, which is when it needs to work most.
- Growth has increased interdependence faster than the organisation has learned to manage it.
These are rarely solved by asking people to try harder. And they do not usually mean you have the wrong people.
Capable people, held inside a difficult system
Most organisations we work with are not short of intelligent, committed leaders. The difficulty emerges in the spaces between them.
A behaviour that looks unhelpful on its own often makes complete sense within the system around it. A leader who holds too much may be compensating for accountability the organisation never designed. A team that avoids disagreement may be protecting relationships, status or certainty. Functions that defend their territory are usually responding rationally to the targets they have been given.
Almost everyone is behaving sensibly. The aggregate is still dysfunction.
That is why another competency framework, an off-site, or an instruction to collaborate more tends to change less than everyone hoped. Before you change the behaviour, you have to understand what is producing it.
About the name
Ma is the Japanese idea of the meaningful space between things, the interval that gives everything around it its shape. Satori is the moment of seeing clearly. The name describes where the work happens and what it is for. Read more
We work where the pattern lives
Sometimes the challenge sits with an individual. Sometimes within the leadership team. Sometimes every team is functioning reasonably well and the difficulty lives between them. Sometimes the wider organisation keeps recreating the behaviour everyone is trying to change.
Read the three routes below as three places the challenge tends to sit, rather than three products to choose between.
Senior Leaders
When the approach that got you here is no longer quite enough
Individual work with leaders navigating complexity, transition and consequential decisions, building the range a senior role now asks for.
Leadership Teams
A collection of good leaders is not automatically a good leadership team
Systemic team coaching with senior teams, working on decision quality, accountability, productive disagreement, and the work no member can do alone.
Leadership Across Teams
When the organisation has outgrown leading from the centre
Work on direction, decision rights and coordination between interdependent teams, so leadership happens closer to the work instead of travelling back to the top.
Not sure which? Working that out is the point of the first conversation. Arrange one
What it looks like when it works
A founder had built a young, capable senior team around him and was still personally leading every high-stakes commercial proposal. He had no evidence yet that the team could hold work at that level, and no obvious way to get it.
Rather than debate the question, we tested it. A proposal the business had already won became a live exercise, chosen because the founder had written that version himself and knew exactly what a winning response looked like. What the team produced went beyond his own, and surfaced things he had not seen.
That is the pattern across most of our work. Depending on the challenge, it shows up as faster and more durable decisions, fewer unnecessary escalations, clearer decision rights, more useful challenge, stronger coordination across functions, and less dependency on one or two people. We agree what matters at the start and look for evidence as the work progresses.
Insight is valuable. Insight that changes how the organisation operates is worth considerably more.
Read the full story on Leadership Teams
Who you would be working with
MaSatori is led by Sharon Strickland-Clark, a Practitioner in Systemic Team Coaching® and an ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC), with more than twenty years in leadership and organisational roles before founding MaSatori.
She works with senior leaders and leadership teams in organisations navigating growth, complexity and change, and is particularly interested in the point where highly capable people meet problems that cannot be solved by getting better at what they already do well.
Start with the problem, not the programme
Arriving without a defined brief is fine. Whether this becomes work with an individual, a team, or something across several teams is part of what we work out together.
Bring us the challenge. Perhaps the business has grown faster than the way it is led. Perhaps your senior team is working hard but not sufficiently together. Perhaps collaboration disappears the moment pressure rises. Or perhaps something feels harder than it should, and you cannot yet see why.
Those are all good places to begin.
A 45-minute conversation, no charge, no obligation. We will help you work out where the pattern lives and what needs to become possible next. We will also tell you if we are not the right people for it.