The Seasonal Team.

The storm that comes up over open water.

For a long time, everything grew. The business came to us. Success had a rhythm, and we mistook that rhythm for the way good people simply are. Then the weather changes. Not slowly, but the way a storm comes up over open water. A market shifts, a deal falls through, growth that used to arrive on its own now has to be hunted. And the very conditions that once made everyone look strong begin to expose them.

Leaders feel it first as unease. Then the unease goes looking for a name, and the easiest name is a person. People get sorted into boxes. This one still fits, that one no longer does. More gets said about people than to them. And before anyone has asked the real question, the exit conversation is already being rehearsed in someone's head.

This paper follows The Seasonal Leader. That one argued that organisations move through seasons, and each asks for a different kind of leader. This one turns the same lens one layer down, onto the team. Because the real question is not whether someone has stopped performing. It is whether the season has turned underneath them, and they have not yet found the words for it.

The labels we reach for too quickly.

When unease appears, we look for something to attach it to. The easiest thing is the person. In boardrooms people get simplified at speed. Someone becomes "not entrepreneurial enough", "too operational", "too corporate", "not scalable", "stuck in the old way". Each label feels like an explanation. Most are simply the friction of a changed phase, given a name.

Labels are comfortable because they are tidy. They locate the problem inside one person, which conveniently means the rest of the system, including us, gets to stay the same. Behind many of those labels is a quieter truth: people bring different energy, strengths and pace in different phases of growth.

Two halves of one move.

When the storm hits, most organisations do one sensible thing. They look at the top. They ask whether the leadership still fits the season, and often they change it. That was the argument of the first paper, and it still holds. But changing the leader is only half the move. A new seasonal leader does not, by appointment alone, bring the organisation back to the season that matches its vision. Underneath that leader sits a whole organisation of people, and they are in seasons too.

So the real task of the seasonal leader is not only to lead differently. It is to go deeper, into the people. To understand before expecting to be understood. A person can be talented, loyal, experienced and genuinely capable, and still struggle, because the organisation has entered a phase that no longer fits the way they do their best work. That is not failure. It is a seasonal mismatch.

What actually changes when the season turns.

When people say someone "changed", they are almost always wrong. The person is remarkably consistent. What changed is the environment around them. Four things in particular.

Take the most common version. For years the business arrived on its own, and people could be reactive. Then growth stops being automatic, and the same people are asked to be proactive, to go out and win the work, to sell. It was in the job description, but it was never necessary, so it never became real. Faced with work they cannot yet do, or quietly do not want to do, capable people freeze. And from the outside, freezing looks exactly like failure.

The five energies of a team member.

Just as leaders have seasons, the people around them tend toward distinct kinds of energy. Most of us are strongest in one or two. The aim is not to label anyone permanently, but to understand which energy a person is built for, and which one the organisation now needs.

Read these honestly and a familiar pattern appears. The Pioneer you adored in year one is the same person you find chaotic in year four. The Steward who anchored you through a hard winter is the same person who feels slow the moment you accelerate. They did not move. The season moved around them.

Not underperformance. A change of season.

This is where the unease comes from. A Scaler dropped into a sudden crisis looks too slow. A Pioneer in a maturing organisation looks disruptive. A Steward in a turnaround looks like they are clinging to the past. None of them got worse at their work. The season began asking for a different energy than the one they naturally bring.

And here is the hardest part, the part we almost always miss. Often the person cannot name it either. They only feel that it no longer flows, that work which used to be effortless now drags. That wordless feeling, on both sides of the table, is what quietly turns a change of season into a verdict.

Left unspoken, the doubt grows. It is invisible, because there is no single event to point to. It is gradual, eroding over months. It is personal, because both sides feel judged. And it compounds, because doubt changes how we treat someone, more oversight and less room, which suppresses the very strengths we hired them for. Move the same person into the right season and the old strength tends to return.

I judged too quickly. It is what keeps me sharp.

I should be honest, because I have made this mistake myself, and it is exactly that mistake that keeps me sharp now. I have spent most of my career inside growth companies. Growth has a culture of its own. High energy, always on, a relentless growth mindset. Live in that climate long enough and you start to believe it is simply how good people work.

Then the weather changed, and people who were brilliant when the work came to them were suddenly asked to go out and find it. They slowed down. They froze. And I judged quickly, because in the end it is always about performance, isn't it? I waited for some formal review moment to raise it, when I should simply have talked about it there and then. That was an earlier version of me. I have learned from it, and the lesson is simple. Understand before you expect to be understood.

It is also why I no longer believe in the annual appraisal as a ritual. By the time you sit down for it, the moment to act has usually passed. A leader should sit with their people regularly, every month, as a matter of course. Not to judge, but to stay close. That rhythm does not stop seasons from turning. What it does is make sure no one is ambushed.

FIT, and how to tell a mismatch apart.

In my work as interim CEO and executive search partner, I have learned to slow down the moment the doubt appears, and to run it through three questions before it becomes a verdict. I call it FIT. Its motor is the same line as before. Understand before you judge.

That third step matters most, because underperformance and a season mismatch need opposite responses. One calls for feedback and a plan. The other calls for a different challenge, or an honest and respectful goodbye. Here is how each tends to show up.

The person everyone started doubting.

The unease was accurate. The story he had attached to it was not. The company had crossed from building to scaling. She was a Pioneer, exceptional in open space, energised by ambiguity, fast where there was no map. The new phase rewarded the opposite: process, repeatability, a predictable rhythm. Her instincts had not dulled. They had simply stopped matching the room.

We did not write a performance plan. We had a season conversation, honest, direct, and without blame. We named the season she is built for, and the season the company had entered. Two real options were on the table, and both were good.

They chose to re-match, and within a quarter the old spark was back. But the exit could have been the right answer too. What made it a success was not that she stayed. It was that the choice was made in the open, with calm, with her worth intact, by two people who understood each other. We almost performance-managed a problem that was really a placement problem.

Key takeaways for boards, founders and leadership teams.

Respecting what someone has given while being honest about what the next phase needs is one of the hardest things leadership asks of us. It is also one of the most human. If the honest conclusion is that someone no longer fits the season your company is in, that is not a failure. It is only a failure if it is never made discussable. Name it early, keep it human, and people become more conscious of where they truly belong.

A note on lineage. The idea that organisations move through phases builds on the work of Ichak Adizes and Larry Greiner. The five energies share the spirit of team-role thinking, such as Belbin. The synthesis, the seasons of a team member and the FIT lens, is my own.