Questions CEOs Ask

The clearest signal is not how busy everyone is, it is where decisions stop. If work that belongs to leaders you pay well keeps coming back up for a yes, decisions are bottlenecked, however capable those leaders look on paper. It is rarely one person's doing. It is how decisions, ownership and approvals have been set up, and that can be changed.

Escalation is almost always a trust and clarity problem rather than a competence problem. Leaders escalate when they are unsure which outcome actually matters, or when they have learned that a decision made without you gets reversed. Both are fixable, and both are invisible until somebody measures them.

Smart teams escalate when the cost of being wrong is higher than the cost of asking. That is a design problem in how decisions are framed and how mistakes are handled, not a hiring problem. Changing it means changing what you do when someone decides without you.

It is any point where the organization's speed is limited by how decisions are routed. It often runs through the top of the organization, not because anyone is doing their job badly, but because the way work is set up sends too much there. It shows up as slow decisions, work waiting on approval, and leaders who are busy but not accountable.

Look at where decisions are made before you look at strategy. Flat growth alongside real effort usually means execution is stalling between the decision and the doing, not that the plan is wrong. Measure how work actually moves through your leadership team before you change the plan.

Most often it is neither on its own. It is a gap between a strategy nobody disputes and an execution system nobody owns. That gap is measurable, which is the point of starting with a diagnostic rather than a workshop.

Goals fail most often at the follow-up, not at the setting. The moment to correct a drifting goal passes quietly, and by the time a quarterly review surfaces it the quarter is gone. What fixes it is a shorter loop with visible ownership, which is what the Executive Impact System installs.

You own the conditions, they own the behavior. If the two of them have not been given a shared definition of what success looks like, asking them to sort it out privately usually deepens it. Start by establishing whether the relationship is repairable, because that answer changes everything you do next.

The test is whether both people can still describe the same events the same way. When two leaders describe the same meeting differently and both believe their version, the relationship needs structured repair, not another conversation. When one of them has stopped engaging entirely, you are making a personnel decision, not a repair decision.

Quiet friction is more expensive than open conflict, because nobody escalates it. It looks like slow decisions, careful meetings, and information that stops moving between two parts of the business. The cost shows up in execution speed long before anyone calls it a conflict.

There is nothing wrong with people having their own way of communicating, and trying to stamp that out is the wrong fight. The work happens before it becomes a problem: agree up front what is acceptable and what is not, where the guardrails are, and what happens if someone operates outside what everyone agreed. Once that agreement exists, someone stepping outside it is no longer a question of style. It is a question of trust and ownership, because they helped build the agreement and then decided not to honor it.

Transitions all produce the same condition: a capable leader deciding faster than they can think. The fix is not working longer, it is reducing the number of decisions that require you personally, before the pace increases rather than after. That is the work, and it is the same work whether the trigger is a sale, a merger or a succession.

You cannot promise outcomes, but you can promise process, and that is what people actually stabilize around. Tell them what you will decide, when, and how they will hear it. Uncertainty is tolerable; unpredictability is not.

Run the same diagnostic on each candidate leader rather than relying on your read of them. It shows where each one actually stands with the people they would lead, which is the variable that decides whether a promotion works. It also tells you specifically where to invest in the person you choose.

A standard 360 lists forty competencies and leaves you to work out what matters. This measures three things that gate each other, Trust then Proactivity then Productivity, and ends with one behavior to change and a 90-day plan. It is also not a fixed instrument: custom questions are added per engagement from what the kickoff call surfaces about your organization.

TP3 is GPS Leadership's performance model: Trust, Proactivity and Productivity, which together drive profitability. Each dimension gates the next: where trust is low, leaders withhold information and execution slows; where proactivity is low, every decision escalates; where productivity is low, effort produces activity rather than outcomes. Read more about TP3.

It is how a change holds after the diagnostic and the coaching. Most change is not lost in the delivery, it is lost in the follow-up, and by then the moment to correct it has passed. The Executive Impact System gives leaders an automated, metrics-based way to track behavior change and hold the organization accountable to what it agreed.

Fourteen days from the intake call to the debrief. It starts with a 45-minute intake call, then rater identification and the survey window, and ends with a 90-minute debrief and coaching session. Each stakeholder spends about fifteen minutes giving their feedback.

Yes, and the process is built so they can be. Responses are anonymous, and direct reports, peers and other colleagues are only ever reported in groups of at least three, because the smaller the group, the easier it is for someone to guess who said what, rightly or wrongly. The two exceptions are your direct supervisor and, if they take part, the CEO. Both are told before they answer that their feedback is identified, because they have a direct hand in your career and development, and you need to know exactly what they think of you. We have yet to work with a team that held back.

We offer to meet with the team before the survey opens and answer their questions, concerns and hesitations directly. We record that session so anyone who could not attend can watch it and share it across the organization. Most hesitation disappears once people hear how their answers are protected from the people protecting them.

We check for that pattern, and even when it happens it is still data. Someone who rates everything a 1 is usually telling you they are not taking this seriously and do not think much of you. Someone who rates everything a 5 may be afraid of what happens if they say anything negative. Either way, it tells you something about that relationship that you did not know.

It is not for leaders who want a workshop without evidence, and it is not for organizations where the person being assessed has not agreed to it. It also does not fit a leader with no real leadership team underneath them, because there is no delegation gap to measure.

You get a report, a debrief, and a 90-Day Leadership Impact Plan. If you continue into coaching within seven days of the debrief, the full diagnostic fee is credited toward your first 90 days.