The Ceiling Nobody Chose
THE LEADERSHIP EDGE NEWSLETTER October 2026 | Your Guide to Exceptional Leadership
By Don Frericks · CEO Advisor & Executive Leadership Coach
"It's a good business." The numbers are fine. The EBITDA goals get met. But that's not the whole story. Actually, that's part of the problem.
I keep running into a certain kind of family-owned business. It hits its profit targets. Shareholders are satisfied. But it hasn't grown in years. They win some new customers and lose some old ones. Little net gain year after year. We live in a world that believes "grow or die," and sooner or later someone at the table starts asking whether flat is really flat, or the early stage of a slow decline. A business that keeps trying to grow without growing starts to lose confidence in its own strategy.
Nobody in this story is lazy or careless. The family members in senior roles typically work as hard as anyone, and they want growth as much as anyone. Still, the executive team isn't functioning the way the business needs it to. So what does it take for a business to start winning when it hasn't done so in a long time?
Family rules and business rules
Running a company as a family is unique and complex. Family relationships and business relationships run on different rules. The family may say, "He's our leader." The business says, "We need to evaluate performance." Accountability gets applied differently. Family members often carry a protection no other executive has, because their place isn't reviewed the way everyone else's is.
That protection isn't a flaw. It's often why the business exists and why it has lasted. But it changes how everyone around the table behaves. People learn which conversations are safe and which aren't.
Family businesses are often built to last, and many do. But lasting and growing are not the same thing. A business can be durable, profitable, and quietly stalled at the same time.
Why feedback can't solve it
The usual playbook says give the leader feedback and watch for change. If nothing changes, decide they're the wrong person for the job. In many family businesses, neither option is really on the table. Employing family is a value, and it isn't going away. Often the leaders are already being coached and making real progress, yet they're working within limits that effort alone won't remove. Push harder and you get frustration. Remove them and you get a family conflict that doesn't solve anything.
So I've learned to ask a different question. Not "How do we fix the leader?" but "What is the leadership system doing, and where is the leverage?"
What the system is doing
Here's the pattern I see most often. In a family business, the person at the top didn't necessarily get there because decision-making is their strongest skill. When the hardest decisions sit unmade, the people waiting on them experience delay or dismissal, and over time they get deflated. It isn't indifference. The pressure at the top can be intense, and the fear of failing the family is real.
Meanwhile, the rest of the executive team often has strong leadership skills, but not enough trust in each other to disagree openly. Conflict goes underground. Disagreements arrive at the top unresolved, and the leader, sensing a divided group, hesitates to step in. Each side waits for the other. Decisions stall.
The organization feels it. The senior leaders who report to the executive team feel it first. Engagement slips, not because of any single decision, but because people lose confidence that the top of the organization can steer. Even good changes don't land, because they don't touch the dynamic underneath. And executives can feed it without meaning to: every stalled or unexplained decision becomes another hallway conversation about what's wrong. Talking about the dysfunction keeps the dysfunction alive.
Over time, the team settles into an unspoken agreement to perform at the level the system can support. Nobody chose this. Everybody stays beneath it. It's a ceiling nobody built on purpose.
Where the leverage is
One person improving alone doesn't fix a system. It takes a collective shift across the whole executive team. Each executive has to choose to become more capable, individually and together, even while the ceiling is still there. Three shifts matter most.
Build trust. Trust is the most important leadership asset, and vulnerability is the trust multiplier. Patrick Lencioni's model of team dysfunction is a useful map: it starts with an absence of trust, which leads to fear of conflict, which leads to weak commitment. Stalled teams usually trace those first three steps exactly: no trust, no open disagreement, and no decisions anyone owns. Harvard Business School's Amy Edmondson studied 51 work teams and found that psychological safety was associated with learning behavior. Teams that feel safe to speak up learn more. A team that isn't learning can still hit its numbers. It just can't grow past them.
Have real debate and dialogue. Not updates, not positioning, but honest conversation about the hard things. Disagree with the idea, not the person. Stay curious and collaborative. Here's a simple test: if the most important disagreement happens in the hallway after the meeting, the meeting didn't do its job.
Resolve disagreement before it reaches the top. When the team arrives united, the leader can decide. When it arrives divided, the leader has to referee. One norm helps a lot: no issue goes up until the people involved have worked it through together and can bring either a shared recommendation or clearly framed options.
This sounds basic. None of it is easy. It's the hardest kind of work because no one is required to do it. In my experience, without a strong leader holding a group accountable to rise, most groups don't reach their potential. So the team has to supply that momentum itself. And when it does, it makes it easier for the person at the top to lead, too.
Every leadership team I've worked with has some form of dysfunction. It's not just family businesses. If you lead a family business, or work in one, ask yourself: where is there a ceiling nobody chose? And who is holding the team accountable to rise above it?
Sources
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
Lencioni, P. (2002). The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable.
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