This is the hardest of these diagnostics to run on yourself, and I want to be straight with you about why before you start.

The others point at someone across the table from you. A manager who stalled. A salesperson who's busy and never closes. You can watch them from the outside. This one is different. It looks at a team and the person leading it, and if that person is you, you are the last one who can see it clearly. Not because you lack honesty. A leader sits inside their own weather and feels it as normal.

So here is how to use it. Don't fill it in yourself. Hand it to your HR lead, or a mentor, or an advisor whose judgement you trust, and ask them to sit in on two or three of your leadership meetings with this tool in front of them. Let them score what they actually see, as it happens. Then have them walk you through it honestly. Not what they think you want to hear. What happened when a decision had to be made, when someone disagreed, when the pressure came up. An outside read on your own team is worth more than a confident one from the inside.

Here is what they will be looking for. A team can fail in ways that look nothing like failure. The meetings are calm and agreeable, and the same decision comes back around two weeks later. Nobody argues, and nothing sticks. Or the mood of the whole team tracks one person's mood day to day, and people read the tone before they raise anything real. Or the good ones go quiet, then go looking, and you're always dealing with "a problem person," just a different one every few months.

None of that shows up as a crisis. It shows up as a team that's somehow always a little stuck, and you can't name why.

When you see those signs, the instinct is to fix the team. Team building. A communication workshop. A 360. Move the difficult person on. And for a few weeks it lifts. Then it drifts back to exactly where it was.

It drifts back because the team's behaviour is often a read-out of the person leading it. I've seen this in businesses of every size, from small teams up to a 48,000-person bank, and the mechanism is the same. The team learns how to survive the leader, and that learned behaviour is what you're watching. Work only on the team and you're treating the read-out, not the cause. The pattern reasserts every time.

The diagnostic reads four patterns an observer can actually see.

The Control Loop: decisions go up and rarely come back down.

The Weather System: the team's mood forecasts the leader's mood.

The Artificial Harmony: everyone agrees in the meeting and complies slowly afterwards.

The Quiet Exit: no conflict, just attrition, and your strongest people leave first.

Most teams light up more than one. That's expected. It usually means a single pattern, the leader's, is showing up in several places at once.

It's a ten-minute read, no login, built originally for exactly this: the HR person on a leadership team, watching and scoring what the leader can't see in themselves. As a reader, it's yours to pass on. So don't open it and start answering. Send it to your observer, and let them run it while they sit in.

I'll see you in the next one.

Theo

Grab the Worksheet Below 👇