1. Quantify the Unknowns
See where perceptions diverge - exactly how much and why it matters.
SUCCEED Together® Trust Framework
Quantify Leadership Blind Spots. Align Your Executive Team. Strengthen CEO Performance.
The Only Diagnostic That Gives Boards and CEOs a Clear View of Executive Alignment.
Trusted by companies worldwide.
What Makes SUCCEED Together® Different
Most leadership diagnostics tell you what your people think.
SUCCEED Together® tells you how your leadership team actually functions and what is getting in the way of performance.
For CEOs, it reveals the hidden friction points that are slowing the organisation - the issues you can’t see but your team feels every day.
For Boards, it provides an objective, data-driven lens into CEO effectiveness, alignment strength and leadership risk - without relying on anecdotal feedback or internal politics.
For executives, it shows what they need to do to work better with each other,
Unlike traditional engagement or culture tools, SUCCEED Together® goes straight to the heart of executive performance:
- How aligned your executive team is - really.
- Where priorities, behaviours, and expectations are out of sync.
- How the CEO’s leadership is experienced by the team.
- What the CEO needs to model for the organisation to operate at its best.
- Where early warning signs of strategic drift or leadership friction are emerging.
SUCCEED Together® gives Boards, CEOs, and executives the insight to remove friction, accelerate performance, and operate as a truly unified leadership team.
It shows CEOs exactly where their leadership creates impact and where subtle blind spots are holding the team back.
It gives executives a deeper understanding of how their peers and CEO experience them, what they need to do to collaborate, communicate, and execute at a higher level, and provides a safe framework for exploring issues they rarely discuss - unlocking hidden performance potential and increasing understanding of others across the team.
And it helps the entire executive team model the behaviours required to lead the organisation forward together.
What is SUCCEED Together®?
High-performance leadership teams are essential to an organisation’s success - but high performance is impossible without trust.
Today’s world moves at extreme speed. Complexity is rising. Interdependencies are dense. Executive teams must adapt and solve in real time if the organisation is to advance.
And at the core of this capability lies trust.
When employees trust their leaders and the organisation, they collaborate more freely, share information, support each other, and create genuine synergy.
But when trust is low, the safest response becomes self-protection: people hold back, avoid speaking up, and reduce their effort and commitment - silently slowing the entire business down.
And trust always starts at the top. The executive team sets the tone for the entire organisation.
If the CEO and executive team model alignment, candour, psychological safety and genuine support, teams replicate it.
If they model inconsistency, avoidance, or friction, staff mirror that too - amplifying the problem throughout the organisation.
This is where SUCCEED Together® becomes essential.
The SUCCEED Together® Trust Framework: Turning Trust Into Measurable Action
The SUCCEED Together® Trust Framework assesses six essential drivers of trust across individuals, the executive team, and the organisation.
But its true power is not the score - it is in revealing the perception gaps between the CEO and the executive team. These gaps create hidden friction, misalignment and execution risk long before they appear on the balance sheet.
SUCCEED Together® gives leaders:
- A shared language to talk about trust with confidence
- A structured, repeatable method for improving team effectiveness
- A data-backed pathway for changing behaviours, not just attitudes
- A way to have psychologically safe, evidence-based conversations without awkwardness or guesswork
With this clarity, your organisation can:
- Identify hidden trust issues before they become business problems
- Build a united executive team that moves in one direction
- Increase candour and transparency safely
- Lift performance fast through better behaviours, alignment and interactions
The Story Behind the SUCCEED Together® Data
When we look at all the data we have collected from executive teams over the years, one thing becomes very clear.
While the total SUCCEED Together global benchmark metric for leadership teams currently sits at 63.9% (63.1% for CEOs and 64.2% for executives), the real value lies in the gaps between CEO and team across the six trust drivers.
Major Blindspots Identified
The six essential trust drivers are quantified by the average perception gap between the CEO/Principal and the rest of the Executive Team. A positive gap highlights where the CEO is over-confident, indicating an Illusion of Reality. The larger this positive gap, the more the CEO is operating in an Echo Chamber, creating a massive risk of misaligned execution and strategic drift.
Conversely, a negative gap is where the CEO under-estimates their ability or their team's ability, signalling an Unleveraged Success. The larger the negative gap, the more likely the CEO is unaware of and failing to codify the team's successful, organic, high-performing behaviours.
Ideally, a minimal gap is achieved, which proves the executive team shares a single, common operating reality - the foundation for predictable and high-velocity execution.
SUPPORT GAP
Average
-0.57
CEO Under-Confident
For over-confident CEOs, the high score is a dangerous illusion. It provides a clear mandate: Stop assuming the team feels supported. Start understanding what they need rather than assuming what they need..
Self-critical CEOs often miss a crucial insight: a strong, supportive culture is already alive in their executive team - robust, resilient and driven by peers. Capture the peer-driven support practices of your highest-scoring teams and scale them across the organisation.
UNITED TO SOLVE CUSTOMER PROBLEMS GAP
Average +
0.61
CEO Over-Confident
The data reveals a clear pattern: many CEOs overestimate how aligned their executive teams are in solving customer problems, creating a Unity Blind Spot. Recognising this helps CEOs see where perceived unity is risky, where real cohesion is underused, and how to close perception gaps so their teams operate as truly aligned, high-performing units.
While a large negative gap is a massive, unappreciated success story. The team is united, but the CEO is not seeing or leveraging it.
CANDOUR
GAP
Average +
0.41
CEO Over-Confident
On average, CEOs are over-confident believing the team is more candid than the team members experience. This can be a critical risk to the business when the CEO is significantly disconnected from the team's reality. Furthermore when the team perceive they are being significantly more candid than their CEO experiences, it generates a lot of frustration and increases the rate of high-risk failure.
When candour scores are low, weak accountability and poor conflict resolution create unresolved friction that drags performance down.
CLARITY OF COMMUNICATION
GAP
Average
-0.08
CEO Under-Confident
When the CEO's message is unclear, the team is mentally stalled. Over-confidence in communication is a Failure-to-Execute risk. It prevents challenge, it halts reflection and it kills risk-taking. All the things required for the organisation to evolve and stay competitive.
While a negative gap where the CEO under-estimates the level of clarity, isolates the team's self-sufficiency, giving the CEO a different mandate: Don't try to fix the team's clarity; leverage it. Shift their focus from improving team communication to codifying and scaling the successful internal clarity practices so the organisation can grow.
EMPOWERED TO EVOLVE
GAP
Average +
0.7
CEO Over-Confident
CEOs tend to be highly confident their executive team is empowered to take risks, challenge plans, and adapt, while the team feels substantially less so. This is the classic organisational risk where innovation and change initiatives will be slow because the team doesn't feel empowered to challenge the status quo.
Companies that successfully embedded a culture of self-challenge and continuous improvement have near perfect alignment scores here (rare).
DEPENDABLE
GAP
Average +
0.49
CEO Over-Confident
On average, CEOs believe their teams are delivering on commitments and holding ownership more reliably than the team members themselves experience.
Where the CEO is substantially more confident of the team's ability to deliver than the team, they are setting themselves up for failure. This provides crucial evidence that the engine for execution is faulty.
The Dependability driver proves the diagnostic's value by showing the CEO precisely where they can and cannot rely on the team's self-assessment of execution.
The Three-Part Mandate Every CEO Receives
2. Focus Your Investment
Identify your biggest gaps in results and focus your efforts there - whether that means shifting specific clarity or candour workshops to improve alignment, executive coaching to improve CEO and executive behaviours, or workshops to work on cultural change or making broader systemic changes.
3. Prevent Strategic Drift
Identify alignment risks before they impact delivery, strategy, or customer outcomes.
How SUCCEED Together® Works
The framework uses a combination of diagnostics, development tools and facilitated conversations.
"SUCCEED TOGETHER® provided me with key tactics on how to improve trust in both teams I'm involved in. Having my team do the assessment has provided me with information I didn't even know were causing issues and then the tools provided has given me the opportunity to have open conversations with my team as well as tactical questions to ask my peers."
Director, Marketing, Midsize Industrial
"The workshop provided a good in depth characterisation of behaviours to build high trust. The SUCCEED TOGETHER® assessment was good to allow myself to reflect on my own current capabilities and growth areas. I am going to adopt the list of questions for my personal leadership toolkit and reflect on the slide deck."
Director, Accountancy Firm
"SUCCEED Together® has provided me with important information about the low candour in the team and the work that needs to be done to improve psychological safety which has been low historically.
What I am experiencing already is slightly improved team work and less silo thinking. The program also also highlighted the need for further leadership training and development."
CEO, Midsize organisation
For CEOs Ready to Shine the Light on Themselves
SUCCEED Together® is for CEOs willing to reflect on their own impact, model the behaviours they want to see, and lead a truly aligned executive team.
It’s also for Boards seeking visibility and for executives ready to step up and operate at a higher level.
Schedule a Call to Discover How SUCCEED Together® Can Unlock Your Leadership Team’s Potential. Alternatively, fill out this contact form.