Establish a Leadership Team

Workplace decisions cut across real estate, HR, finance, technology and the business — no single function can legitimately own them. A leadership team with an explicit mandate converts workplace strategy from a departmental project into an organisational decision process. It is also where trade-offs go to be decided rather than avoided: cost versus experience, standardisation versus local context, reduction versus connection. Without this body, those trade-offs are decided by default, by whoever moves last.

• During Discover, once governance design has defined the decision inventory
• When a workplace project is owned by one function and repeatedly overruled by others
• Before Define, where the first genuine trade-offs (hybrid logic, scenario selection) require decisions

• Executive sponsor (chairs or mandates the team)
• Senior representatives of business units, HR/People, Finance, CRE/FM and IT
• Workplace project lead (secretary, not member)
• Optionally: communications and sustainability leads

• Governance charter and decision-rights register
• Project definition document
• Candidate assessment: seniority, function coverage, decision authority, availability

1. Define the mandate in writing: which decisions the team makes, which it recommends, and which sit above it.
2. Select members for decision authority and functional coverage, not for enthusiasm. Every major trade-off must have its 'losing' side represented.
3. Set the cadence around decision moments in the method plan — end of Diagnose, scenario selection, concept confirmation — not around calendar habit.
4. Run an induction session covering the methodology, the decision inventory, the evidence plan and the team's own decision rights.
5. Agree working principles: evidence before opinion, documented decisions, no re-opening without new evidence.
6. Define the escalation mechanism for deadlock, connected to the governance charter.
7. Record every decision in a decision log that persists into Recalibrate.

• Members mandated to attend but not to decide — the team becomes a reporting theatre
• Missing functions whose absence will surface as veto power later (Finance is the classic omission)
• A chair who signals preferred outcomes before evidence arrives
• Decisions made in the meeting and unmade in corridors afterwards
• Cadence drift: meetings that update rather than decide

• Chartered leadership team with written mandate and membership
• Decision log structure
• Agreed strategic principles for how workplace decisions will be made
• Escalation mechanism

This team receives the consolidated evidence in Workshop I, sets key criteria in Workshop II, selects between scenarios in Define, confirms the concept in Workshop IV and approves the final Workplace Strategy. Its decision log becomes the assumption register's governance twin in Recalibrate — the record of why each choice was made.

Composing the team is political craft: balancing authority against group size, and representation against decisiveness. Knowing which absent voice will become tomorrow's veto is experience, not method.

• Confusing the leadership team with the steering group of the fit-out project — different decisions, often different people
• Selecting members by hierarchy alone, leaving functional blind spots
• Allowing delegation to deputies at decision moments
• No decision log, so decisions are relitigated each meeting
• Using the team to validate pre-made conclusions — members detect this within two sessions

A technology company formed a leadership team of eight for a three-country portfolio strategy, deliberately including the CFO's delegate with full decision authority and the most sceptical regional MD. When evidence supported closing one office, the sceptic was inside the decision rather than outside it. The closure decision held — because its most likely opponent had co-owned the criteria that produced it.