Our leadership team gets highly defensive during IDS® because identifying the real issue behind the issue often points to personal performance failures. How do we build the safety to address these root causes without turning the session into a toxic personal attack?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

To solve the issue behind the issue, you must separate the person from the seat. When an issue is put on the board, it is easy for leadership team members to feel targeted, especially if the root cause is a failure in their department or a personal execution gap. This defensiveness stalls problem solving.

Start by framing every issue through the lens of the Accountability Chart, not personal capability. Before you begin discussing, identify which seat on the chart owns the process or metric in question. This shifts the focus from who is failing to what part of our structure is breaking down. Ask whether the issue is a training gap, a capacity constraint, or a structural flaw in the seat itself.

Next, enforce the rule of being humbly confident. This means the leader owning the area must be willing to say they do not have the answer or that their current approach is not working. As a team, you must commit to a help first mindset. The goal of IDS® is to solve the issue for the good of the company, not to assign blame or put someone on the defensive.

If a discussion starts to feel like a personal attack, the facilitator must pause the meeting and reset. Frame the problem as a shared operational obstacle. Ask the team how we can support the seat owner in resolving this bottleneck. When team members realize that admitting an issue results in help rather than punishment, the defensiveness will disappear, allowing you to dig straight to the actual root cause.