Knowing where you stand: where is your company, really?

Something isn’t working. The numbers lag the plan, growth is flatter than expected. The first thing that happens: the leadership team jumps to the solution. A new strategy. A reorg. A different tool, a new format, maybe a new leader.

One step gets skipped almost every time: the most important one.

You don’t plan a mountain hike without knowing your starting point

Nobody plans a demanding hike without first checking start, destination and distance. In companies, it’s oddly normal to skip exactly that: people debate the goal and the route without agreeing on where they actually stand.

It catches up with you later. When strategy turns into a series of slides, the leadership team has stopped leading, and that doesn’t start with execution, it starts with a skipped reading of where you stand. Three questions get it back.

Question 1: where do we stand right now, really?

Not “how was the quarter?”, but: what is limiting us right now? Are we keeping pace with our own growth, or is the organisation trailing the speed? Does cash flow carry the next steps? Are we on familiar terrain, or in a market we don’t yet understand? Do we have the people and capabilities for what’s coming?

The answers decide what kind of change is even needed: better execution or new capabilities? Fine-tuning or rebuilding? A quarter of speed or a year of foundation? Skip this, and you treat every problem with the same reflex.

Question 2: what kind of growth do we want?

Where is this growth meant to lead, concretely? “More revenue” is not a direction. New markets, a more resilient business model, less dependence on individual heads, an organisation that runs without the top constantly stepping in: those are directions. Only once it’s clear what kind of growth we mean can you judge what it demands of the organisation.

Question 3: what does that require of leadership?

Now, and only now, the question of who leads makes sense. Because there is no single right leader. There is only the one who fits the position and the destination. A turnaround needs different heads than an orderly expansion. Judge people before position and destination are clear, and you’re judging against a gut feeling instead of a need. (Where leadership itself becomes the bottleneck is covered in How leaders hold back their company’s growth.)

The real lever: a shared picture

What almost no leadership team says out loud: each member holds a different picture of where the company stands and where it should go. Nobody says it, because everyone assumes it’s obvious.

Take a leadership team I worked with. Four functions, four sharp minds and four different answers to the simple question “where do we stand right now?”. Sales saw a scaling case, engineering a stability case, finance an efficiency case. Each optimised rationally in their own direction. Together they pulled the company apart. Not from incompetence, but from a missing shared picture.

As long as that’s missing, every decision gets renegotiated in the background, because everyone argues from a different starting point. This is exactly where strategy becomes behaviour, not PowerPoint makes the difference: a shared read on the situation is the precondition for a strategy to land in daily work at all.

So it doesn’t stay an offsite

The biggest risk of taking your bearings is that it stays a one-off offsite and fades three weeks later. For exactly this I build small AI agents together with millionsteps: keeping the three questions alive as a living read on the situation inside the leadership team, instead of a once-a-year offsite.

This week

One step: ask your direct reports, separately, the same question: “where do we stand right now, in one sentence?”. Compare the answers. The differences are your real agenda.

This reading is the heart of a discovery call: sparring, not a consulting deck: structured, honest, with a clear picture at the end. Over a full quarter we go deeper in the Growth Program and in the Growth Circles.

Frequently asked questions

Why do leadership teams jump straight to solutions?

Because a solution signals that you are able to act, while an honest assessment first exposes uncertainty. New strategy, reorganisation, new tool. That looks like leadership. The cost: every problem gets the same reflex, without anyone clarifying what kind of change is actually needed.

What belongs in an honest assessment of where the company stands?

Not the question "how was the quarter?", but what is limiting us right now. Are we keeping pace with our own growth, or is the organisation lagging behind it? Does cash flow carry the next steps? Are we on familiar ground? Do we have the people for what is coming? Those answers decide whether you need better execution or new capabilities.

In what order do we clarify position, direction and leadership?

Exactly that order. First where we stand, then what development we want, and only then what that demands of leadership. Assessing people before position and direction are clear means measuring against a gut feeling instead of against a need. The sequence is the substance of the exercise.

Why does every member of the leadership team see the situation differently?

Because nobody says it out loud: each person assumes their own picture is self-evident. In one team of four functions, sales saw a scaling case, engineering a stability case, finance an efficiency case. Each optimised rationally in their own direction, and together they pulled the company apart. While that shared picture is missing, every decision gets renegotiated in the background.

Is there such a thing as the right leader for a company?

Only in relation to position and direction. A turnaround needs different people than an orderly expansion. The question of leadership therefore only becomes meaningful once both are clear, before that it measures against nothing.