When we forget what we’re here to do

Leadership teams rarely fall apart because people stop working. They fall apart because the work stops meaning anything. Everyone stays busy. Meetings fill the calendar. Updates are given. Metrics are hit. And yet, somehow, nothing changes.

The company is still behind. Customers are still waiting. Revenue is flat. And the team, without quite realising it, has stopped asking what any of this is adding up to.

The problem is not laziness. It is distraction. People focus on their own function, their metrics, their updates. They protect headcount. They optimise locally. And somewhere along the way, they stop asking the only question that matters. Are we actually winning?

The moment the illusion broke

I once worked with a team in Serbia. We were building a mobile productivity suite. A serious project, meant to rival Gmail, Docs, and the rest. The planning sessions were intense. Every conversation circled the same question: how can we catch up with Google?

The team was motivated. They had ideas. Could we match this feature? Could we rebuild that flow?

Then someone asked a question that stopped the meeting cold.

“If we do all this, will we actually win?”

It came from the project manager. She had been quiet during most of the meeting. But when she said that, everyone looked at the table. The answer was obvious. No. We would not. Even if we delivered everything, we would still be behind. We would still be slower. Still smaller. Still chasing a player we could not catch.

That question broke the surface. We stopped pretending. We began asking whether we were solving the right problem at all. That shift eventually led us into experiments with early-stage AI. And soon after that, we recommended cancelling the product.

It was not defeat. It was alignment.

When the customer is no longer in the room

At Ubisoft, I inherited a team that had burned every bridge it could find. Development hated sales. Sales thought engineering was arrogant and unhelpful. One of my engineers told me, “Sales is destroying this company. They force bad decisions just to close a deal.”

From the sales side, the frustration was just as strong. They were tired of every conversation turning into a debate. Tired of fighting through process. Tired of trying to defend customer needs to colleagues who seemed more interested in structure than outcomes.

So I invited them to Malmö.

I sent them an email styled after a famous innovation conference in Finland. The subject said, “Only a complete badass would come to Malmö in February.” These were Parisians. I made it personal. I promised good food, good wine, and a serious discussion. Eight of them came.

I booked a meeting room and lined the walls with posters. Each one showed a customer problem. Not a sales issue. Not a development defect. Just product issues that neither team had solved. At the start of the meeting, the two sides sat apart. Laptops went up like shields. There was silence for thirty minutes.

Then someone spoke. Then someone answered.

And over the course of that day, the tone changed. The teams stopped defending positions and started trying to solve things together. By the end of the week, the vice president of sales told me my team had become their most strategic partner.

That is what happens when attention shifts from defence to purpose.

What results actually are

Results are not deliverables. They are not tasks completed, or roadmaps checked off. They are not the ability to say, “Our part is done.”

Results are the real-world impact of the work. They are a customer problem solved. A strategy moved forward. A company that has changed shape because its leadership was aligned.

Results are shared. No one owns them alone. They require departments to coordinate, to adjust, to carry risk together. When results are real, you cannot succeed while the company fails.

If your leadership team cannot say what success looks like for the business—not your department, not your domain, but the company—then you are no longer working together. You are just sharing a table.

The company that shipped itself off a cliff

I remember watching Nokia in the late 2000s. The company was still leading in global hardware shipments. Internally, teams were delivering. Software updates were being released. Metrics were being hit. But the market had already moved.

Apple had redefined the user experience. Android was gaining ground. And inside Nokia, no one could seem to say the obvious thing. Symbian was aging. The product was fractured. The architecture was blocking progress. And yet each team continued to deliver inside their own piece.

Engineers protected their code. Product managers defended their scope. Schedules were followed. No one slowed down long enough to ask, are we still winning?

By the time they did, it was too late.

That is what inattention to results looks like. Everyone working. Everyone losing.

When focus drifts

When a team loses sight of results, you cannot fix it with encouragement. You need structure. You need to reintroduce clarity.

Start by making the company outcome visible again. Not the function’s goal, not the department roadmap, but the actual direction the company needs to move. Ask your leadership team, “What are we trying to achieve together this quarter?” If the answers stay inside local metrics or delivery milestones, you already know what’s gone missing.

Every person at the table should be able to say what the goal is, what part of it they carry, and how they know if they are helping or not. If they cannot do that, they are not leading. They are executing.

That clarity only holds if your meetings reinforce it. If your leadership reviews are structured around department updates, you are teaching people to think in silos. Change the rhythm. Discuss progress by business outcome. Ask, “What have we done together to move this forward?” Make it impossible to succeed in isolation while the company is stalling.

And when someone defends a local win that undermines the shared goal, you do not stay silent. You ask directly, “Is this decision serving the outcome we all agreed to?” If it is not, you bring the conversation back to purpose. Not to win the point. To restore the standard.

That is how you rebuild results. Not by asking people to try harder. But by making sure everyone remembers what they were trying for in the first place.

When KPIs are not enough

I have met many managers and executives who believe that KPIs are the work. That if you define the right metric and assign it to the right person, the result will follow.

But KPIs are not purpose. They are measurements. They describe one slice of performance. If you give someone a KPI, they will hit it. They will optimise their process, close the ticket, polish the metric. That does not mean they are helping the company win. It means they are surviving the system.

People have more to give than that. But only if they understand what they are giving to.

The best teams I have worked with were not driven by dashboards. They were driven by purpose. The numbers helped. But the real fuel was clarity. The team knew what mattered. And the conversations were about impact—not activity.

When results become real again

Once a leadership team stops pretending, the work begins to change. People speak with more seriousness. Questions sharpen. Decisions take longer, but they hold. You stop solving for optics and start solving for consequences.

And when results do not come easily—as they often don’t—you still know what you are working toward. The team is not guessing. The conversation is not scattered. You are no longer wasting motion on something no one believes in.

Being attentive to results is not about being right all the time. It is about being willing to hold the purpose tightly enough that people stay honest. It is about knowing what the company is trying to become, and helping it get there.

One book, if you want to anchor your team

If there is one book I would recommend here, it is John Doerr – Measure What Matters. It is not about dashboards or reporting. It is about clarity. Doerr explains how to frame goals that make people care, and how to organise teams around outcomes that move the business—not just the meeting.

It is not a book about control. It is a book about purpose.