THE STRATEGIC PERFORMANCE TEAM DIAGNOSTIC
A Self-Assessment for
CEOs and Executive Directors
Five patterns that kill strategy before it starts.
See which ones are running your team.
New Science. Ancient Wisdom. Better Business.
Why Team Performance Matters
You have smart, capable people around your leadership table. You have a strategy. You may even have a plan everyone agreed to. So why does execution keep stalling in ways nobody can quite explain?
Because strategy doesn’t fail in the market first. It fails in the space between your senior leaders—in the assumptions never surfaced, the trust never tested, the hard conversations that didn’t happen, and the patterns everyone can feel but nobody names.
Research from HBR and Workpath found that executives report feeling 82% aligned on strategy—but actual measured alignment sits at just 23%. That fourfold gap is where strategic performance suffers first. Not in the plan. In the room where the plan is supposed to come alive.
And the cost isn’t abstract. McKinsey’s research shows that organizations with aligned, effective top teams are nearly twice as likely to achieve above-median financial performance and grow 2.5 times faster than peers. The inverse is equally true: when your team isn’t functioning as a team, every strategic initiative pays the price.
This diagnostic is designed to surface what’s actually happening inside your leadership team. It examines five patterns I encounter most often in my work with CEOs and executive directors—patterns that persist in plain sight, with talented people at the table, for years. Not because anyone is failing. Because the causes run deeper than most leaders suspect, and they come from places most consultants never look.
The score is not the end goal. It’s perspective. What you can see, you can
address. What you can’t, runs the show without your permission.
How to Use the Team Performance Assessment
For each of the five patterns, you’ll find a description of the dynamic, a set of diagnostic statements, and reflection questions. The diagnostic statements tell you where the pattern lives in your team. The reflection questions start to tell you why.
Rate each diagnostic statement on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 means you strongly disagree and 5 means you strongly agree. Don’t overthink it—your first instinct is usually the most honest one. A note on honesty: This assessment is only as useful as you are truthful. The most common mistake leaders make in self-assessment is answering based on what they intend or aspire to rather than what actually exists today. Rate the current state. Aspiration is important—but it’s not the same as reality, and confusing the two is how blind spots form.
Consider doing this with your team. This diagnostic is designed for individual reflection, but its power multiplies when leadership teams complete it independently and then compare notes. The places where perceptions diverge are almost always the places where the most important work needs to happen.
What’s Next
You now have something most leadership teams never develop: an honest picture of the relational patterns driving—or undermining—your strategic performance. That awareness alone changes how you lead. Here’s what you can do with it.
Name the pattern. That’s not a small thing. Most of these dynamics persist precisely because no one calls them what they are. Acknowledging that your team’s alignment is assumed rather than tested, that avoidance has become habitual, or that you keep reaching for structural fixes when the issue is relational—that’s not weakness. That’s the first act of leadership.
Share this with your team. Not as a judgment—as a conversation starter. Have each person complete the assessment independently and compare scores. The patterns this diagnostic reveals are rarely a surprise to the people living inside the organization. They’ve felt it. They just haven’t had language for it.
Pick one pattern. You don’t fix everything at once. Identify the pattern that’s most active and ask: what would it take to move this score meaningfully in the next six months? That’s your highest-leverage investment in strategic performance.
Build the infrastructure. Not another offsite. Not a personality quiz that lives in a drawer. Real, evidence-based tools that give your team a shared language for how each person thinks, communicates, and operates—especially under pressure—and a sustained commitment to using that awareness as a strategic asset, not a one-time event.
If this assessment confirmed what you’ve been sensing—or revealed something you hadn’t seen—and you want to go deeper, that’s exactly what CEO Strategy Coaching & Team Performance is built for. Not coaching as therapy. Not coaching as a remedial exercise. Coaching as strategic infrastructure—an ongoing investment in the relational capacity that makes strategy executable. It sits inside the strategy, not alongside it.
Reach out at erin@erinsedor.com or visit ErinSedor.com. Let’s talk about what’s possible.
Erin Sedor is a CEO Strategy Coach and executive advisor with 30+ years of experience helping organizations build strategy that works—by building the teams that carry it. She is the creator of Essential Strategy, the ESQI 360, and the Quantum Intelligence framework for conscious, adaptive leadership.