Leadership Malpractice: The Reassessment Loop

What happens when leadership ignores its own data?

In medicine, we have a name for seeing that the patient is not improving and repeating the same treatment anyway.

Malpractice.

It carries consequences. Board review. Licenses. Courtrooms. The name exists because the profession decided that refusing to adapt in the face of evidence is not a style. It is a failure of duty.

Leadership runs the same loop every day and has no name for it at all.

The engagement survey comes back bad. Leadership responds. Next survey comes back bad the same way. Same response, louder. The talent keeps leaving, the safety concerns stay unreported, the timeline keeps slipping, and the reassessment data says exactly what it said last quarter. The action never touched the cause the first time. It gets repeated anyway.

No board reviews that decision. No one loses a license over it. It is not even a line item. The cost lands on the people in their charge, quietly, in resignations and silence and burned-out high performers, and the ledger never assigns it to the decision that caused it.

A physician who ignores the reassessment is negligent. A leader who ignores it is just busy.

Refusing to adapt in the face of your own data has a name. We use it in my profession. I see no reason the standard should drop the moment the patient is an organization.

This was originally published on my LinkedIn and can be read here.