Name the Phase

"The Leadership Discipline Your North Star Depends On."

Here is something I see in organisations more than almost anything else. Leaders who have a compelling vision, a clear North Star, genuine commitment to where they are headed, and yet their people are not focused on the right things. Priorities are scattered. Everything feels urgent and nothing feels clear. People are working hard but the energy has a frantic quality to it, like a lot of movement without a lot of traction. And the leader, understandably, starts to wonder whether they have a people problem. Whether they need better systems, clearer KPIs, stronger accountability structures.

They usually do not have a people problem. They have a phase problem.

What I mean by that is this. The vision is there but nobody has named what this particular season of the journey requires. Not the destination, the terrain. What this phase demands in terms of decisions, behaviours, priorities and expectations. And in the absence of that clarity, people do what people always do. They construct their own version of what right now requires, drawing on their own experience, their own instincts, their own reading of what the leader seems to value this week. I have sat with leadership teams who could articulate their vision beautifully and then, when I asked what this season specifically required of them, gave me five different answers. Everyone agreed everything was urgent. They just disagreed, mostly without realising it, about which urgency mattered most. That is not a people problem. That is a leader who has not yet named the phase. And until they do, no amount of accountability infrastructure will fix what is essentially a clarity problem.

Karl Weick spent decades studying exactly this dynamic. His central finding is both simple and confronting: people in organisations do not wait for a briefing to form a view of what is happening (Weick, 1995). They are already making sense of their situation continuously, drawing on what they observe, what they hear in corridors, what their leader's tone suggests, what was not said in the last meeting. That sensemaking does not pause because the leader has not spoken. When leaders name the phase clearly, they give people an accurate frame to work with. When they do not, the sensemaking continues anyway, just without accurate information, and people fill the gap with whatever is available. Which is exactly where scattered priorities and frantic misaligned energy come from.

The North Star tells your people where you are headed. The phase tells them what the journey requires right now. You need both. Without the North Star, naming the phase is just project management. Without phase clarity, the North Star remains an aspiration your team cannot translate into today.

What a phase actually is

A phase is the specific season of the journey you are currently in, and the demands that season places on your people, your decisions, and your culture. It is the terrain between here and there, and it matters because different terrain requires different things from people.

A foundations phase rewards patience and precision. The work is to establish the fundamentals, clarify roles, build the relational trust that everything else depends on. Leaders who push for pace here are not being ambitious. They are being expensive. A transition phase asks people to hold ambiguity without collapsing into it, to understand that the discomfort of mid-move is not a sign that something is wrong. A growth phase calls for pace and initiative in a way the other phases do not, and Ralph Stacey's work on complexity reminds us that even in uncertain environments, clarifying what can be agreed on changes how people operate (Stacey, 2007). The agreement that growth is what this season requires is itself a form of leadership clarity.

Each phase has different requirements and different behaviours that serve it. If the phase has not been named, nobody knows which conditions are actually in play, and people default to whatever felt right last time.

The cascade nobody talks about

The Leadership Pipeline framework makes plain that at each level of an organisation, leadership carries a specific responsibility to provide the clarity the level beneath it needs to function well (Charan, Drotter, Noel, and Jonasen, 2024). When a senior leader has not named the phase, that absence cascades. Every level beneath them is improvising. The team leader cannot give their people something they do not have, and so the confusion compounds as it moves down the organisation, each layer adding its own interpretation to an already unclear picture.

I have seen this in organisations that look, from the outside, like they are functioning well. The strategy deck is polished. The town hall was compelling. And yet something is not landing. Decisions are being relitigated. Good people are starting to wonder whether this is the right place for them, not because the vision is wrong but because they cannot find solid ground in the present.

What naming the phase actually makes possible

Decisions become easier to make and evaluate because every phase has implicit criteria for what a good decision looks like. In a foundations phase the question is whether a decision builds what you need to stand on. In a growth phase the question is whether it creates momentum. When the phase is named, those criteria become shared. People stop second-guessing each other and start moving in the same direction.

Expectations become honest. If people know they are in a transition phase, the difficulty of the present moment has a name and a frame. Being mid-move is tolerable. Being lost is demoralising. Those are very different experiences and the difference between them is almost entirely down to whether the leader has named the terrain.

And purpose becomes recoverable. When people know what phase they are in and why it matters in pursuit of the North Star, their effort has somewhere to land. That is the difference between frantic energy and focused momentum, and it is available to any team whose leader is willing to name the season they are in.

How to actually do this

Before you can name the phase for your people, you need to have named it clearly for yourself. Leaders who are moving fast tend to operate on an implicit understanding of the season they are in without ever making it explicit, even to themselves. So the first move is a genuine pause, long enough to ask some honest questions. What is the primary challenge of this season? How do you know, and what are you perhaps not wanting to look at? What does this phase require from your people, not what they are currently doing but what this moment actually calls for?

Then name it out loud, in plain language, to the people who need to hear it. Tell them what season you are in, what it means for how you operate, and what it requires from all of you. Connect it to the North Star so the phase has a reason and the vision has a present-tense expression. Then return to it, because phases shift, and part of your responsibility as a leader is to notice when the terrain has changed and name that transition before your team has to guess it.

Three questions worth sitting with

What phase is your organisation in right now? Can you name it honestly in a single sentence?

If you asked three people on your team the same question independently, would they give you the same answer?

What decisions are you currently making that belong to a different phase than the one you are actually in?

Clarity about the present is not a luxury. It is the ground your people stand on as they pursue something worth building toward.

Your team does not need you to have everything resolved. They need to know what this season requires. Name the phase. Give the effort somewhere to land.

CASCADING CLARITY TOOL

References

Charan, R., Drotter, S., Noel, J., and Jonasen, T. (2024). The leadership pipeline: How to build leadership at every level of the organization (3rd ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Stacey, R. D. (2007). Strategic management and organisational dynamics: The challenge of complexity to ways of thinking about organisations (5th ed.). Pearson Education.

Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Sage.