22 Jan The Missing Conversation in Leadership Teams
“The color of the water is the color of the receptacle.” — al-Junayd (9th century); cited in Ibn Arabi, Fusūs al-Ḥikam
You have sat in enough meetings to know the difference.
You know the meeting where something real happened — where the thinking in the room shifted, where someone said the thing nobody had been willing to say, where you left with more clarity than you arrived with. You probably remember exactly which meeting it was.
And you know the other kind. The meeting that could have been an email. The meeting where the most perceptive person in the room said almost nothing. The meeting that ended on time, covered the agenda, and changed nothing.
Most leadership teams I work with are having far more of the second kind than they realise — and have quietly stopped expecting otherwise.
Before reading further let me ask you five questions to explore your meetings:
- Do your leadership meetings consistently surface the topics that matter most — or do urgent operational items reliably crowd out the important ones?
- Is there something your team has needed to discuss for months that keeps not quite getting named?
- Do people leave your meetings with more energy than they arrived with, or less?
- Could a thoughtful observer, watching your last three leadership meetings, tell what your organisation is genuinely trying to do — and why it matters?
- When did your team last have a conversation about how well it is leading — not what it is delivering, but how it is meeting the moment?
If any of these landed, this essay is for you.
What is actually happening in the room
What we notice as bothersome, misalignment, unclear strategy, or lack of commitment, is rarely the real problem. What I find underneath it, almost every time, is simpler: a team that has stopped genuinely thinking together.
This matters more now than it did ten years ago. The polycrisis — the overlapping pressures of economic volatility, geopolitical instability, technological disruption, and social trust in freefall — has done something specific to leadership teams. It has postponed the reflective work. Team development gets shortened or cancelled when the quarter gets hard. The offsite gets crowded out by a strategic urgency. The conversation about how well we are leading gets deferred indefinitely because there is always something more pressing.
And so, without announcement, a lower quality of collective thinking becomes the new normal. Teams stop imagining something better is possible. They press on.
This is the condition I want to name — because it need not be so. And the solution is not a tree-hugging offsite or a session built around relational niceties. It is something more structural, and ultimately more demanding.
Three problems are at work, and they sit at different depths.
Time is the surface problem. Meeting formats are locked in — too many, often online, almost always overloaded with operational content. The weekly leadership call running ninety minutes through a standing agenda. The quarterly review consuming two days in update mode. The annual strategy session that produces a document rather than a direction. Time is real, but it is not where the problem lives.
Design sits one level deeper. Most leadership teams operate with a single mode of meeting: the operational review. They have inherited it, never examined it, and sustain it through inertia. The format shapes what is possible in it — and an operational review format, however well-run, will not produce strategic clarity or genuine relational understanding. It was not designed to.
Maturity is the deepest layer. Leadership teams, like individual leaders, operate from different paradigms — reactive, proactive, or generative. Reactive and proactive teams are, in a precise sense, operating from the same paradigm: the world is a problem to be managed and moved past. They differ only in how quickly and skilfully they respond. Generative teams do something different. They work with the complexity they are inside — they slow down to see it, name it, and meet it from a wider perspective. This is not a personality type or a cultural preference. It is a developmental capacity. It can be built. Most teams have never tried.
What wisdom offers
Al-Junayd of Baghdad said it in the ninth century: the color of the water is the color of the receptacle. Three centuries later, Ibn Arabi drew out the implication. If the believer truly understood this, he wrote, they would recognise that the same reality appears differently in every vessel that receives it — not because the reality changes, but because the receptacle does.
The same conversation. The same words in the room. One person opened by them; another more entrenched. The difference was never in the words.
This is not a mystical abstraction. It is a structural observation with direct consequences for how leadership teams meet. The quality of what a gathering produces depends on the quality of presence that people bring to it — and presence, in this tradition’s understanding, is not automatic. It requires preparation. Something to mark the transition from the world outside to the attention this conversation requires.
The Islamic tradition builds this into its architecture of prayer: ablution (the ritual cleansing of head, ears, eyes, nose, mouth, lower arms and feet with water), a private opening sequence before communal worship begins. This is not ritual for its own sake; it is a designed pause and reset between the momentum of the day and the quality of attention that what follows deserves. Japanese organisational practice carries a related intuition in the social practice of nemawashi — the deliberate testing of a proposal with various stakeholders before a decision, so that when agreement comes it carries genuine weight rather than the appearance of it.
The structural claim across traditions is the same: the container shapes what it holds. A meeting designed for information transfer produces information transfer. A meeting prepared for collective inquiry — by those who have actually arrived — produces something different.
Three design shifts that change what is possible
These are not ideas. They are practices. Each one is specific enough to put in the calendar.
Separate the meeting types.
Operational review, strategic inquiry, and genuine team reflection are three different conversations. They require different conditions, different pacing, different kinds of attention. Running all three in the same ninety-minute weekly call produces none of them well. The operational review will always win — it is concrete, it is urgent, and there is always more of it than fits the time available.
The shift: protect distinct formats with explicit purposes. Here a basic blueprint from which you can adapt to your specific context:
- The weekly call is for operational coordination.
- Once a month, a longer working session — two to three hours — for strategic thinking on one question, not five.
- Once a quarter, a half-day for the team to look at itself: how are we leading, not just what are we delivering. Put these in the calendar before the year fills up. They will not happen otherwise.
Slow the opening — and mean it.
Most leadership meetings begin at full operational speed. The first item on the agenda is introduced within ninety seconds of the meeting starting, and the group is immediately in reactive mode — responding to content before anyone has actually arrived.
The shift is small and the resistance to it is disproportionately large. Two to three minutes at the start of every meeting for a single orienting question: What has kept me busy or worried the past week? What is the one topic I would need support with? What is one thing I liked about our last meeting; what is one thing we can upgrade this time around? The specific question matters less than the practice of asking one. It changes the tone of everything that follows.
Make the invisible conversation visible.
In almost every leadership meeting I have sat in, the most important conversation lives one level below the stated agenda. The budget discussion is really a conversation about whose work the organisation values. Below the restructuring debate can lie a conversation about power between functions that has not been had directly. The performance review is really a conversation about a standard beyond numbers that was not made explicit.
The shift: create a standing practice of naming this as an act of leadership, not a confrontation. I notice we keep returning to this question from different directions. What is the conversation underneath it? This takes ten seconds to say. It takes maturity to say it without it becoming an accusation. That maturity is precisely what develops through repetition.
The maturity question
Design changes are the easier fix. They can be implemented tomorrow. They will make a measurable difference quickly.
But a team’s dialogue ultimately operates from the paradigm its members have developed — individually and collectively. A reactive team will reproduce reactive conversations regardless of the format. An operationally sophisticated team will fill a strategic inquiry session with operational thinking in strategic language. The design creates the conditions. The maturity determines what fills them.
Research on senior leadership teams — across decades and thousands of groups — points to five recognisable levels of collective maturity.
- At the first, the team is fractured: competing agendas, low trust, meetings as political performance. Factions form around the strongest personalities. The most important conversations happen in the corridor, not the room.
- At the second level, the fractures are papered over but the silence is deafening. Members comply, update, and depart. The difficult things are known and unspoken.
- The third level — where the majority of executive teams sit — might be called operational competence: the team coordinates well, manages its interdependencies, and delivers. But it does not genuinely think together. Strategic debate is polite and brief. Challenge is managed rather than welcomed. Members identify primarily as heads of their functions, not as stewards of the enterprise.
- The fourth level represents a genuine transformation — not an improvement on the third, but a different mode of operating entirely. Members hold themselves accountable for outcomes beyond their own function. Disagreement is substantive and survives the meeting without becoming personal. The team learns from failures rather than managing their appearance. Information moves freely across boundaries because the implicit competition for the CEO’s attention has dissolved.
- At the fifth level, something rarer emerges: the team’s collective intelligence consistently exceeds what any individual in it could produce alone. It models, for the wider organisation, the culture it is trying to build. Research suggests roughly one in five senior leadership teams reaches the fourth level. Fewer still reach the fifth — and when they do, it is rarely sustained without continuous tending.
Most teams I work with are somewhere in the third level — coordinating efficiently, occasionally glimpsing what genuine collective thinking might feel like, and having stopped asking whether something better is possible. The shift toward it is not a single intervention. It is a sustained practice — and it begins with an honest account of where the team actually is.
Where to go next
Two things exist to support this work.
The first is a practical starting point. The Leadership Team Dialogue is a facilitation guide for senior teams — a structured half-day conversation built around the questions most teams are not having. It can be run by the team leader, without external support. If the five questions at the opening of this essay landed, this is the place to begin.
Download The Leadership Team Dialogue — Facilitation Guide →
The second is the longer work. A team maturity assessment — mapping where your team currently sits and what the development arc toward more generative collective leadership looks like in practice — is in development at The Leadership Space. If this is territory you want to explore, reach out directly.
Dr.Alper Tengüz is the founder of The Leadership Space — Ancient Wisdom × Modern Mastery. He works with senior executives and leadership teams navigating the polycrisis, from Istanbul.