EXECUTIVE TELEMETRY • 3 MINUTES

Step 1 of the Kuma 14-Day Leadership Friction Framework

Where is your leadership team quietly losing speed?

Growth creates drag. When companies scale, decisions stall, meetings multiply, and founders become bottlenecks. Answer these 12 operational statements to isolate your team’s dominant friction vector and restore execution velocity.

Statement 1 of 12 Estimated: 3 min

Dimension 1: Decision Velocity & Autonomy

Operational decisions stall while teams wait for direct co-founder or CEO sign-off, even when the call sits squarely within a leader’s domain.

How often is this true in your leadership team?

Your Leadership Telemetry Is Compiled

Enter your details to open your on-screen dashboard and export your 2-page executive PDF memo. The full report also goes to your inbox. Your individual answers stay confidential.

Your Leadership Friction Index 0/ 60

Dominant friction pattern:

Your four-dimension breakdown, the cost of delay and your first action are one step away.

Full Name Please enter your name.

Work Email Please enter a valid email address.

Company Name (optional) Please enter your company name.

Funding Stage (optional)

Kuma Executive Data CommitmentKuma Executive Data Guarantee

Your details travel over an encrypted connection and are used only to deliver this scan and follow up with you. Individual scores are strictly confidential and will never be shared or commercialised.

All diagnostic data is encrypted and permanently purged from our active diagnostic servers after 30 days. Individual scores are strictly confidential and will never be shared or commercialised.

Your individual responses are confidential. We use your details to deliver your report and follow up on your results. Privacy Policy.

See our Privacy Policy.

Taking this with a co-founder?

Instant on-screen 4-dimension breakdown, plus a 2-page board-ready PDF memo you can export the moment you finish.

Encrypted in transit
Used only for this scan
30-day automated purge
Never sold or commercialised

Your diagnostic breakdown

Leadership Friction Scan results

Telemetry generated under Kuma Partners Privacy Standards. Responses are used only to produce this breakdown and to follow up on the scan.Telemetry generated under Kuma Partners Privacy Standards. Raw individual responses scheduled for automated purge within 30 days.

Act 1 • The diagnostic verdict

Where you stand

Overall Friction Index

0/ 60

Friction by dimension

Each dimension scores from 3 to 15. A higher score means more friction. Not Sure answers are left out and the rest are scaled to the same range.

Act 2 • Balance sheet impact & operational constraints

The cost of inaction

Act 3 • Intervention & strategic alignment

The path forward

Why this matters commercially

Structural failure risk

Harvard Business School research found that 65% of high-potential start-ups fail as a result of conflict among the founders.

Harvard Business School, Noam Wasserman, The Founder’s Dilemmas (2012)

Runway and velocity dilution

In a McKinsey survey of 1,228 respondents, 61% said most of their organisation’s decision-making time is used ineffectively. That time is paid for out of runway.

McKinsey & Company, Decision making in the age of urgency (2019)

Price it for your own team with the Leadership Friction Cost Index →

Founder centrality drag

As companies scale, founder over-centralisation turns from the engine of the company into its most expensive bottleneck.

Kuma Partners observation. Related reading: Chris Zook and James Allen, The Founder’s Mentality (Bain & Company)

Dominant friction vector

Immediate micro-intervention

Signal it worked

The executive perception gap

Most leadership teams believe they are aligned on priorities. In our work with scale-stage teams, founders, COOs and functional VPs tend to feel friction in different places, even when they agree in the room. A self-assessment from one leader exposes the symptom. Calibrating across the whole leadership team shows where the structural divide sits.

The next step: the Kuma 14-Day Leadership Friction Scan

Confidential 1-on-1 executive interviews. Diagnostic conversations with each executive to isolate unstated friction and silent vetoes, mapped into a cross-functional friction heat map.
Mandate clarity. Clear authority boundaries between the CEO, CTO, CPO and go-to-market leads.
Debrief and 90-day alignment compact. Type 1 and Type 2 decision rights and a zero-passive-veto operating agreement, agreed in a facilitated session.

Identifying friction is step one. Dismantling it requires external leverage.

You cannot untangle a silent veto from inside the room. When co-founders are also close friends, direct operational challenge feels like a personal attack. Dismantling this requires an external, neutral operating framework to separate personal loyalty from executive execution.

The Kuma 14-Day Leadership Friction Scan cross-calibrates this diagnostic against confidential, 1-on-1 interviews across your entire C-suite to isolate the true root causes of execution drag and install a decision architecture that holds.

Sven Mulfinger • Lead Partner, Kuma Partners

Executive advisor and strategist to scale-stage leadership teams across Europe.

sven@kuma.partners • LinkedIn Profile

Schedule 30-Minute Debrief →

Confidential • Direct with Sven Mulfinger, Lead Partner • Unvarnished executive telemetry

Or learn more about the 14-Day Executive Alignment Sprint →

Cross-Executive Calibration

Invite Your Co-Founder or C-Suite Peer to Take the Scan

Co-founders and functional leads often feel friction in different places, so one self-assessment shows one perspective. Generate a private link to compare where your perceptions of internal drag, mandates and silent vetoes align.

Kuma Strategic Telemetry • Quarterly Dispatch

A private, low-frequency briefing for founders and C-suite executives on decision velocity, executive team alignment and scale-stage operating systems. Zero spam, strictly executive-grade insights.

Strictly confidential. 1 email per quarter. 1-click unsubscribe at any time.

Schedule a confidential 30-minute telemetry debrief

Direct booking: www.kuma.partners/#contact

Kuma Partners Executive advisory & leadership alignment for scale-stage leadership teams Operating internationally: New York • London • Munich • Barcelona • Lisbon

Direct partner contact Sven Mulfinger, Lead Partner sven@kuma.partners | www.kuma.partners linkedin.com/in/svenmulfinger

Schedule Debrief →

Kuma Operating Framework • Reference

The Anatomy of Leadership Friction in Scale-Stage Ventures

Developed by Sven Mulfinger and the partners at Kuma Partners, the Leadership Friction Scan measures the gap between executive intent and what the organisation actually does. As a company grows, the cost of coordinating its leaders tends to become a larger limit on speed than the market itself.

Read the four vectors, definitions and sources

1. The Silent Veto and artificial harmony

Decisions agreed in the executive meeting are quietly eroded outside it. When co-founder friendships blur executive mandates (CEO, CTO, CPO), the team trades peer accountability for polite comfort, and speed suffers.

2. Founder centrality drag

The founders remain the clearing house for reversible operational calls. Execution speed defaults to the founders’ calendar, and initiatives stall while they wait for sign-off.

3. Defensive silos

Functions retreat into local targets and optimise for their own metrics rather than company outcomes. Activity stays high while unified progress stays low.

4. Executive energy and bandwidth burn

Leaders spend more energy on internal politics, consensus loops and meeting churn than on the market, which breeds cynicism and fatigue.

Definitions

What is the Silent Veto in executive teams?

The Silent Veto happens when a decision agreed inside the executive meeting is quietly undermined outside the room through passive compliance, delayed execution or corridor pushback. It is the clearest symptom of artificial harmony in a leadership team.

How does founder centrality create leadership friction?

Founder centrality drag happens when reversible operational decisions default inward to the CEO or co-founders. The leadership team becomes a queue, execution speed is capped at the founders’ calendar, and decision latency spreads across every function.

What is the 12 to 60 Leadership Friction Index?

The Kuma Leadership Friction Index scores twelve statements from 1 to 5 across four vectors: Decision Velocity & Autonomy, Strategic Cohesion vs. Defensive Silos, Cognitive Bandwidth & Energy Drain, and Principled Candor vs. The Silent Veto. Totals run from 12 to 60: High-Flow Velocity (12 to 25), Operational Drag (26 to 42) and Critical Systemic Gridlock (43 to 60).

Sources: Noam Wasserman, Harvard Business School, The Founder’s Dilemmas (2012) • McKinsey & Company, Decision making in the age of urgency (2019)Diagnostic framework © Kuma Partners