What To Talk About
The Maturity of a Leadership Team: Knowing What to Talk About
I had an epiphany recently.
When I think about my best clients, the ones with strong, high-performing leadership teams, I noticed something simple but powerful:
They hardly ever talk about specific customers.
The Difference Between Mature and Developing Teams
In younger or less mature companies, leadership meetings often get hijacked by individual customer stories:
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“This client is upset about pricing.”
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“That customer didn’t get their order.”
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“We need to make this one client happy.”
These conversations feel productive, but they’re tactical. They belong one or two levels down in the organization...where they can be solved quickly by the people closest to the issue.
Mature leadership teams think differently.
They’ve learned to separate running the business from improving the business...working "on" vs "in" the business.
What Mature Leadership Teams Talk About
Instead of getting stuck in customer-level detail, they focus on patterns, not people.
They talk about:
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The systems that cause issues - not the customers who experience them.
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The goals that will move the company forward - not the noise of the day.
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The strategy, the structure, and the scorecard - not one-off complaints.
When they do talk about a customer, it’s because that customer represents a trend or a lesson that impacts the business model.
The Power of Pushing Issues Down
One sign of leadership maturity is knowing what to delegate, and trusting the process.
A leadership team that regularly dives into customer problems is signaling one of two things:
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They don’t trust their managers to handle it, or
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They don’t have clear processes for handling it.
Fix either one, and suddenly your leadership meetings get lighter, more strategic, and more valuable.
Big Picture Conversations Lead to Big Picture Results
When leadership teams stay focused on direction - vision, strategy, resources, and performance - they create space for others to lead.
That’s how accountability grows. That’s how culture strengthens. And that’s how the company scales.
The best teams don’t ignore customers, they just make sure customer issues are solved at the right level.
They spend their time leading the business, not managing the details.
Ryan Giles
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