When something feels off in the business, you look at the numbers. Then you look at the strategy. You commission the analysis, you run the offsite, you refresh the plan.
And often the real problem is nowhere in any of it.
Because the thing often limiting your company isn't usually in the strategy. It's in how your people do or don't work together, and it never shows up cleanly in a report. The numbers tell you something is wrong. They rarely tell you what, and almost never why.
By the time a people problem reaches the financials, it has been growing, unnamed, for a long time.
I think of these as hidden risks.
They don't sit on any dashboard. A leadership team that competes instead of pulling together. A culture where the truth has become unsafe to say. Each one suppresses what your company is actually worth, and you can't see it by staring at the P&L.
Let me show you how expensive one of these can get.
I heard a story this week from Jim Brown, founding partner of OrgHealth and a former partner at Patrick Lencioni's Table Group, that I haven't been able to shake.
A new manager was parachuted into a chemical plant. He gave an instruction: put the contents of the incoming tanker into tank number seven. Several people in the room knew that if those chemicals went into that tank, it would be ruined. A million dollars of waste.
They nodded. They said nothing. It happened. Within a year, the plant closed.
Why did they stay silent?
Maybe they'd been punished for speaking up before. Maybe they were angry. There are a dozen reasons, and as Jim put it, every one of them traces back to the leader.
That is what a hidden risk looks like from the inside. It never appears as a line on a report. It shows up as a culture where it felt safer to watch a million dollars burn than to correct the boss.
Now the other side, because this works in both directions.
Jim worked with the Canadian arm of a global business that had been told bluntly by headquarters: you are the highest-cost producer in our worldwide network.
Fix it or we close you, and 500 jobs go. Nothing changed in the strategy.
What changed was the leadership team. They started meeting weekly to surface the single most pressing bottleneck in the system, and they stopped competing for the biggest budget and the best department. They began moving people, and then money, to wherever the company needed it most. Within one year they went from the highest-cost producer to the lowest.
Same market. Same business. The entire swing came from removing a hidden risk that no financial statement had ever named.
Here is the uncomfortable part for any leader:
When these risks exist, the instinct is to blame the people:
But the culture that made silence safer than honesty is built, on purpose or by neglect, by the person at the top. If you are the leader, the hidden risk is yours before it is theirs.
So look past the numbers and the strategy for a moment. Ask a harder question:
Where in my company is it currently safer to stay quiet than to tell me the truth?
That is where your hidden risk is living, and it is almost certainly costing you more than you think.
The leaders who find these before the numbers do are the ones who never end up explaining to a board why the plan didn't work.
Andrea
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