Before You Grab the Bathing Suit, Do This (Mid-Year Leadership Pulse Check)
My kids are about to wrap up the school year. Bathing suits are coming out. Vacation calendars are filling up. And before you know it, you'll be loading up the van and checking out for a few weeks.
I get it. You've earned the break.
But here's what I see happen every year: leaders go on vacation, come back in August, blink twice, and suddenly it's Q4. The second half of the year moves fast. And most leadership teams don't pause long enough to ask whether they're actually set up to make it count.
Before you check out, check in.
The Pulse Check Most Leaders Skip
This isn't about scheduling a strategic offsite or rolling out a new 90-day plan. It's much simpler than that. It's about taking an honest, zoomed-out look at your leadership team before the calendar runs away from you and the summer carries everyone in different directions.
Here are three questions to ask yourself and your team this week. Not next quarter. This week.
Question 1: What's Going Well, and What's Not?
Sounds simple. Most leaders can't actually answer it.
That's because we're too close to the work. Too emotionally tangled in the wins and the losses. The goal here is to zoom out and give yourself consultant-like context, where you're not judging anyone (including yourself), and not bringing the weight of last Tuesday's hard conversation into the assessment.
Just look. What's working? What isn't?
If you can take that zoomed-out view of how your team is functioning, you'll start to see the actual patterns underneath the noise. And patterns are what you can solve. Individual incidents are what you put out fires for.
Question 2: Where Are We Lacking Clarity?
Most leadership teams don't lack effort. They lack clarity. Everyone is working hard on slightly different versions of the priorities. Everyone is solving slightly different versions of the problem.
Ask yourself:
Do my leaders know what matters most right now?
Do they have a shared sense of what's going well and what isn't?
Do they understand what actually has to change?
Before you move forward with any solution, make sure you've got clarity first. Without it, you'll spend the second half of the year running fast in mildly different directions and wondering why nothing feels like it's landing.
Question 3: Where Are We Lacking Alignment as a Leadership Team?
Clarity is the foundation. Alignment is what gets built on top of it.
And when I say alignment, I don't just mean strategy. Strategy is the easy part. I'm talking about leadership philosophy. How you approach employees. How you handle conflict. How you make decisions when no one's watching. How you solve problems together.
Alignment has to work across all levels of your team, up and down the line, and over time.
Because here's the truth: a leadership team that isn't aligned doesn't fall apart in one big collapse. It frays slowly. Decisions get re-litigated. Direction shifts depending on who's in the room. People stop trusting that what was agreed to in the meeting will actually happen.
If you're not aligned now, the second half of the year will expose it.
Here's What to Do With This
Block 30 minutes this week. Just you, or you and your leadership team. Pull these three questions up. Answer them honestly.
If the answers come easy and everyone's on the same page, fantastic. Enjoy the vacation. You've earned it.
If the answers feel murky, or if your team gives you three different versions of what's going on, that's not a problem to push off until September. That's the work waiting for you in the second half of the year.
The leaders who finish strong in Q3 and Q4 are the ones who paid attention in May and June.
Your Mid-Year Reality Check
If you're reading this thinking, "I'm honestly not sure how aligned we are," that's worth sitting with. The leaders who address that question now have a very different second half than the leaders who wait until something forces the conversation in October.
Ready to Get Clear Before Summer Takes Over?
If you ran your team through these three questions and the answers surfaced more questions than clarity, contact me to discuss your situation. Sometimes an honest conversation about what's actually going on with your leadership team before the summer takes over can make all the difference.
Want more leadership insights like this? Join other mission-driven leaders who get Steve's weekly newsletter with practical strategies, real client stories, and the frameworks that actually work. Subscribe here and never miss the latest thinking on leadership transformation.