Your strategy is only as good as the leadership system that has to deliver it.
When a business gets harder to lead, the problem is not always where it first appears.
Growth, acquisition, transformation and scaling all place new demands on a business, and on the people leading it. Sometimes the signs are obvious. Too much still comes back to the chief executive. A capable senior team is not operating as one. Decisions slow. Functions pull in different directions. The strategy is sound and execution keeps fragmenting.
MaSatori works with founders, CEOs and senior people carrying real responsibility for a business, and with the leadership teams around them, to find 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
“Sharon has brought a rare combination of insight, challenge, encouragement and practical guidance that has helped us build alignment, strengthen our ways of working and create real momentum as a team.”
Caroline O’Connor, Communications Director, on forming a new leadership team
MaSatori is a specialist systemic leadership and team development practice, led by Sharon Strickland-Clark. Read about Sharon
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.
The situations we are most often called into
Four situations that come up again and again in first conversations. They are composites, so nobody is identifiable.
A business two years into a buy-and-build. Three acquired leadership teams, one strategy, and no shared way of reaching a decision. Integration is behind schedule. The board has started asking why, and the honest answer is not in the integration plan.
A professional services firm that has doubled in five years. The founding partners still resolve anything difficult. Talented senior hires arrive, find there is nowhere to actually lead, and leave within two years. Each departure costs more than anyone has fully calculated.
An organisation eighteen months into a transformation. Accountability moved. Decision rights did not. The same three issues escalate to the executive team every month, each one presented as new.
A scaling business where the founder has become the constraint. Everyone knows it, including the founder. Nobody has been able to change it, because the behaviour that looks like over-involvement is actually compensating for accountability the organisation never designed.
If one of these is recognisable, start with what is producing the pattern. Which of our services you need can wait.
One example of how that actually goes. A founder who had built a young, capable senior team around him was still personally leading every high-stakes commercial proposal, because he had no evidence yet that the team could hold work at that level. We turned a previously lost proposal into a live test instead of debating the question. What the team produced surfaced things the founder himself had not seen, and gave the organisation access to intelligence no one person held alone. Read the full story on Leadership Teams
When capable people are held inside a difficult system
Most organisations we work with are not short of intelligent, committed leaders. The difficulty tends to emerge in the spaces between them.
A behaviour that looks unhelpful in isolation often makes complete sense within the system around it. A leader who holds too much may be compensating for unclear accountability. A team that avoids disagreement may be protecting relationships, status or certainty. Functions that defend their territory are frequently responding rationally to the targets they have been given.
That is why another competency framework, an off-site, or a well-intentioned instruction to collaborate more tends to change less than everyone hoped.
Before you change the behaviour, you have to understand what is producing it.
We work where the pattern lives
The temptation, when a business gets harder to lead, is to fix the person or the behaviour at the point where the problem shows up. Often that is not where it is being produced.
Sometimes the constraint sits with an individual. Sometimes within the leadership team. Sometimes every team is functioning reasonably well and the difficulty lives between them. And sometimes the wider organisation keeps recreating the behaviour everyone is trying to change.
There is no predetermined service to fit you into. Read the three routes below as three places the constraint tends to live, rather than three products to choose between. We start with the business challenge, work out which it is, then work at the level capable of changing it.
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 leadership 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
Development happens through the work, not away from it
Leadership development is usually separated from the work leaders are trying to do. We put them back together.
A live decision becomes the material for improving decision-making. A real stakeholder tension exposes the competing priorities underneath it. A genuine disagreement becomes practice at working with difference. A strategic challenge shows what a team returns to when certainty disappears.
The organisation itself becomes the developmental environment. Work that was going to happen anyway becomes the place where capability grows.
What should become different
We agree what matters at the start and look for evidence as the work progresses. Depending on the challenge, that usually means some combination of:
Faster, more durable decisions · Fewer unnecessary escalations · Clearer decision rights · More useful challenge · Stronger coordination across functions · Less dependency on one or two people
Insight is valuable. Insight that changes how the organisation operates is worth considerably more.
The situation. A senior operations leader had become the person everything travelled through, from HR issues to daily crises to decisions that escalated out of habit. What we did. We clarified what genuinely needed their judgement, introduced simple thresholds for the rest, and protected time for the strategic thinking that had disappeared. What changed. More responsibility sat with the team, escalations fell, and the leader reported feeling calmer and more in control. Read more on Senior Leaders
The situation. A senior leadership team had lost a shared account of itself, and the conversations that mattered were happening after the meeting instead of in it. What we did. We helped the group build a shared purpose and a working Team Charter, then watched a second pattern emerge. Much of what the team still wanted to change did not actually belong to the team. What changed. The team grew more coherent, and the next phase of the work shifted to the relationships around it rather than inside it. Read more on Leadership Across Teams
The situation. A director team running a membership organisation valued collaboration strongly, and still struggled to practise it once real interests and boundaries were genuinely in conflict. What we did. We worked with the gap between believing in collaboration and having the shared capability to do it under pressure. What changed. The team could finally name the difference between the value and the skill, and began building the second. This is Leadership Teams work
Who you would be working with
MaSatori is led by Sharon Strickland-Clark, a Senior 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.
More about Sharon and MaSatori
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.