Are You Getting The Full Picture?

Your team is making up stories about you right now.

Not gossip, but context.

When you share the what without the why, people don’t just sit with the gap. They fill it in with whatever makes sense to them.

My husband taught me this with a mailbox.

After we moved to our current home, I put outgoing mail in our mail box and raised the little flag. He asked why I put up the flag, and I told him it signals the mail carrier there’s something to pick up. He thought the flag meant mail had been delivered.

After some quizzical looks, it clicked: he’d never lived in a residence with a roadside mailbox. He’d had apartments, old homes with mail slots, and suburban mail centers.

He had no context for how the flag worked, so he invented one. He’s smart, his logic made sense, and he was completely wrong.

This happens on executive teams all the time.

A CTO at a client recently asked sales and operations leaders for input on a technology change that might impact customers. They gave it: too much disruption, bad timing. IT went ahead with the change anyway, and the disruption happened exactly as predicted.

The problem isn’t that IT went ahead with the change; it’s that the leaders never learned why IT proceeded despite their input.

So they created their own context. The story they’re now telling themselves is that IT doesn’t actually care about their expertise, the customer experience, or cross-functional input at all.

Maybe IT had a compelling reason—a security issue, a compliance deadline, something urgent that outweighed the disruption—but that reason never got shared. And now “IT doesn’t listen” is the operating narrative, and it will shape every future conversation about collaboration, every request for input, and every assumption about intent.

Context isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s how you keep smart people from writing stories that undermine trust.

What decision have you and your team made rcently that your peers might be misreading because they don’t have the full picture?

Looking to increase the cohesion, trust, and impact of your leadership team? Reach out and let’s discuss The Compass Team Experience and how I can help.