1. Are we still having productive discussions?

Like the executives who ran Ford Motor Company in the 1950s, top teams produce mixed results. One reason is the tendency top teams have to cascade toward a decision without adequately assessing alternatives, as was the case with the Edsel. Given this tendency toward group-think, it pays to assess the strength of your agreement or disagreement by responding to a few simple statements regarding your top team’s interactions. To make this easy, we suggest your team take a brief check-in survey adapted from management scholar Anneloes Raes. If your answers fall more to the right side of the scales, then you should ask whether your team is really just a group of lone wolfs or even one that sends results-impeding ripples across your organization.

2. Do we need to realign our priorities?

Studies show that high-level agreements about goals can mask deeper misalignments that affect top team performance. When these differences go unaddressed, teams are slower to make decisions and implement them or implement them in the wrong way. A key difference in how the Ford executives handled the V-8 and Edsel decisions, is that in the first case, they were willing to readjust their priorities, while in the latter, goals were never up for discussion. Once you begin having more productive discussions, make a point of checking in on your strategic priorities to ensure they are in alignment with your organization’s capabilities and your customers’ needs.

3. Have we become too isolated?

Just as members of a top team need to make sure they are aligned behind shared priorities, the whole top team should ask whether it is aligned and connected enough with the rest of the organization and the broader environment. In this sense, every member of the team should make organizational relationship-building a priority. Studies reveal why these relationship networks are essential: 90 percent of the information a top team uses to make decisions comes through informal channels rather than formal reports. Bringing fresh perspectives to strategic planning meetings whether through new data, or new voices such as Morsey’s, can help you avoid the blind spots that plague all teams.