The CEO had been running his business for eleven years. He knew his leadership team well — or thought he did.
What he wanted was a leadership day that actually meant something. His team had done workshops. They’d had strategy days. The feedback was always good. But he couldn’t point to anything that had changed as a result.
He booked Franchise Face-Off for his team of sixteen.
What happened in the room
Within the first round, a pattern emerged that the CEO recognised immediately.
His two most senior leaders — both highly capable, both well-regarded — were dominating every decision. Not aggressively. They weren’t shutting anyone down. But the rest of the team was deferring to them without question, waiting to take their lead before committing to anything.
The middle layer of the leadership team — the people the CEO was counting on to step up as the business grew — were executing well but not leading.
By round three, the pattern was locked in. The two senior leaders were carrying the team.
The debrief conversation
When we drew the line between what happened in the simulation and how the team operated in the business, the room went quiet.
The CEO already knew there was a dependency problem. What the simulation did was make it visible to everyone at the same time, in a way that couldn’t be argued with. They had all just lived it.
“I kept waiting for someone to tell me what to do. And then I realised — that’s what I do every Monday morning.”
What the CEO did with it
The CEO used the simulation as the opening conversation for a broader leadership development initiative he’d been planning. He didn’t have to explain the problem to his team — they’d already seen it.
The six months that followed included structural changes to how decisions were made and escalated, deliberate development work with the mid-level leaders, and a follow-up simulation six months later to see what had shifted.
The answer, he told us, was: quite a lot.
Details in this story have been changed to protect confidentiality. The dynamics described are drawn from real sessions — patterns we see regularly across different industries and team sizes.
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