Turning Stuff Around

A blog about the grit, grind, and occasional glory of turnarounds.

Tag: business

  • Turnarounds Are Brutal on Weak Executives

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    Turnarounds Are Brutal on Weak Executives

    One of the most uncomfortable truths in a turnaround is that not everyone on the leadership team will be able to make the journey.

    That does not automatically mean they are bad people. It does not even mean they are “bad” executives in absolute terms. Some are committed. Some are loyal. Some work extremely hard. Some may even have been successful in an earlier version of the company.

    But turnarounds are not neutral environments. They are stress tests. And stress tests do not care much about intent. They expose whether a leader can diagnose clearly, move quickly, take ownership, simplify complexity, and drive change through resistance. They expose whether someone can operate at the pace and sharpness the business now demands, not the pace that was tolerated before.

    That is why executive quality becomes such a central issue in struggling companies. Once the business is under real pressure, the gap between “solid operator in stable times” and “leader who can help turn this around” becomes painfully visible.

    The hard truth is that most CEOs know this earlier than they want to admit.

    The mistake leaders make

    Where many turnaround leaders go wrong is that they wait too long to call the gap for what it is.

    They see the symptoms. A function lacks edge. Priorities are not translating into movement. The leader talks a good game but the output is consistently thinner than it should be. Plans are high-level. Follow-through is uneven. The team below them is not getting sharper. The same issues keep coming back dressed in slightly different language.

    But because the executive is trying, because the person is respected, or because replacing them feels destabilizing, and likely to dump even more load onto the CEO in the short term, the CEO hesitates.

    And instead of confronting executive quality directly, leaders tend to do one of three things: over-coach, over-structure, or over-hope.

    Over-coaching happens when the CEO starts doing too much of the executive’s work for them. Sharpening their thinking. Rewriting their plans. Sitting in their meetings. Creating clarity that should have come from the leader in the first place.

    Over-structuring happens when the system is made heavier to compensate for a weak executive. More check-ins. More layers. More reporting. More direct involvement from others. The company starts building scaffolding around a capability problem.

    Both over-coaching and over-structuring are damaging in a turnaround, but over-hoping is the most dangerous of the three. That is when leaders convince themselves that acknowledgment, effort, and good intent will somehow turn into step-change performance if they just given a little more time.

    Sometimes that happens.

    Usually it does not.

    What executive quality actually looks like under pressure

    In stable businesses, a surprising amount can be masked. A leader can survive on relationships, confidence, presentation skills, institutional knowledge, or being “good enough” in a system that is not under enormous strain.

    In a turnaround, those masks come off quickly.

    High-quality executives tend to do a few things very clearly:

    • They reduce noise. They take a messy problem and make it simpler, not more elaborate.
    • They create traction. Not presentations about traction. Actual movement.
    • They make trade-offs. They understand that in a stressed business, everything cannot be a priority.
    • They raise the standard around them. Their teams get clearer, faster, and more accountable.

    And, most importantly, when something is not working, they do not hide behind explanation. They absorb reality, adjust, and come back with a stronger answer.

    Lower-quality executives often do the opposite. They will add complexity. They will substitute activity for progress, and confuse effort with output. They will remain vague where precision is needed, returning with plans that sound directionally right but are thin on sequencing, ownership, and measurable impact. Their teams become more dependent on them, micromanagement starts creeping into the function.

    This is the real issue. Lower executive quality does not stay contained in the leader. It quickly spreads through the function, lowering standards, slowing execution, and making the whole team more dependent.

    Can they actually close the gap?

    Answering this question requires brutal honesty. You have to distinguish between a leader who is currently underperforming but coachable and one who is fundamentally not scaled for the moment.

    A coachable leader usually shows a few signs. They can absorb hard feedback without collapsing into defensiveness. They can translate that feedback into a sharper plan quickly. Their second version is meaningfully better than the first. They show learning velocity. And most importantly, their improved clarity begins to show up not just in them, but in the output of the function.

    A leader who is not scaled for the moment often shows the opposite. They acknowledge the feedback, but the underlying pattern barely changes. The language improves more than the execution. The plan sounds better than before, but still lacks the depth, edge, or force required. You find yourself having the same conversation again, just with more polished phrasing around it.

    That is usually your answer.

    How to handle it properly

    If you think you have an executive quality issue, the wrong move is to let it drift in a fog of vague dissatisfaction. That helps no one.

    The better approach is straightforward.

    First, name the gap precisely. Not “this is not where it needs to be.” That is useless. Be explicit. Is the issue strategic clarity? Pace? Prioritization? Ownership? Team leadership? Commercial edge? Functional depth? Say what is missing in plain English.

    Second, define what good looks like. The leader needs to understand the standard, not just the disappointment. What would a strong version of this look like in practice? What kind of plan, pace, decision-making, and impact do you expect?

    Third, force translation into action fast. Do not settle for verbal acknowledgment. Ask for the sharper plan. The clearer priorities. The sequencing. The owners. The timeline. The expected impact. In turnarounds, understanding is cheap. Translation is what matters.

    Fourth, watch the quality of the second move. This is often the tell. A strong executive may stumble on the first pass, especially under pressure. But once the gap is made explicit, they come back noticeably better. A weaker one often comes back more earnest, but not materially sharper.

    Fifth, time-box your judgment. Do not let this run indefinitely. Turnarounds do not have the luxury of endless executive development experiments. If the business is paying the price for the gap, you need to know reasonably quickly whether the person can close it.

    The CEO trap

    The biggest trap for CEOs is becoming the compensating mechanism.

    This happens all the time. You see the weakness, but instead of resolving it, you start carrying it. You rewrite. You reframe. You chase. You insert yourself deeper into the function. You become the source of clarity, urgency, and quality control that should have been coming from the executive.

    For a short period, this can create the illusion that the issue is manageable.

    It is not.

    All you are doing is hiding the cost temporarily while increasing your own load and teaching the organization that standards only hold when the CEO is personally in the loop. That is not a fix. That is borrowed time.

    The job of the CEO is to know the difference early, act on it cleanly, and avoid becoming the mechanism that compensates for a gap the business can no longer afford.

    That is one of the hardest calls in a turnaround.

    It is also one of the most important.

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  • Why Cadence Beats Heroics

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    Why Cadence Beats Heroics

    Turnarounds do not usually fail because the leadership team lacks intelligence. They fail because the business runs out of consistency before it runs out of ideas.

    I’ve seen this more times than I care to count. In the early days of a turnaround, energy is high. Everyone talks about urgency. Everyone wants action. The room fills up with plans, dashboards, workshops, priorities, and declarations of a “new chapter.” For a few weeks, sometimes the first months, it even feels like momentum.

    Then reality shows up.

    Sales miss targets again. A customer escalation blows up. Cash gets tighter. A key leader goes defensive. Decisions that seemed obvious on Monday are suddenly “more nuanced” by Thursday. And just like that, the organization starts slipping back into old habits.

    This is why I’ve learned to value cadence over heroics. While heroics are dramatic, cadence is boring. Heroics get attention, cadence gets results. And in a turnaround, boring wins.

    The Trap: Confusing Activity with Progress

    One of the most common mistakes in troubled businesses is mistaking motion for traction.

    When a company is under pressure, leaders often respond by increasing volume: More meetings, more updates, more initiatives, more escalations, more “alignment.” It makes things feel more productive because everyone is busy. But busyness is not recovery.

    The question is not whether your people are working hard (they usually are). The question is whether the business is moving, week by week, in a deliberate direction. Are the biggest problems being addressed in sequence? Are the same priorities showing up consistently? Are owners being held accountable on an operating rhythm that is impossible to ignore?

    If not, then all you have is noise.

    Why Cadence Matters

    Cadence does three things that most turnaround teams underestimate.

    First, it forces clarity.

    When you review the same handful of critical metrics every week, ambiguity starts to die. Excuses become visible. Drift becomes visible. Wishful thinking becomes visible. You stop debating abstractions and start dealing with facts.

    Second, it creates organizational muscle memory.

    A business in distress is usually suffering from some combination of denial, fragmentation, and exhaustion. People do not need more slogans. They need repetition. They need to know what matters, when it will be reviewed, who owns it, and what happens when results do not show up.

    Third, cadence lowers the leadership dependency.

    This is the part many CEOs get wrong. They think their job is to keep injecting energy into the system. It is not. Your job is to build a system that produces forward motion even when energy dips, because energy always dips.

    A turnaround that depends on the leader’s daily emotional intensity is fragile by definition.

    What Good Cadence Actually Looks Like

    A real turnaround cadence is not a bloated operating model with twelve committees and fifty KPIs. It is a disciplined rhythm built around the few things that actually determine whether the business stabilizes.

    That usually means:

    A short list of non-negotiable metrics. Cash. Pipeline quality. conversion. backlog. churn. delivery performance. margin. Whatever actually drives survival and recovery in your business.

    A weekly operating review. Not a storytelling session. Not a slide parade. A working session where owners report facts, gaps are confronted, and next actions are clear.

    A monthly strategic checkpoint. This is where you lift your eyes and ask whether the actions are adding up to a coherent shift, or whether you are just managing symptoms.

    Clear ownership. Every major issue needs a name next to it. Not a function. Not a department. A person. And visible follow-through because if actions disappear into meeting notes, your cadence is fake.

    That’s it.

    Your Real Job

    In a turnaround, you should not be the chief firefighter forever. That may be necessary for a short window, but it cannot become the operating model.

    Your role is to do three things:

    • Set the rhythm.
    • Protect the rhythm.
    • Model the rhythm.

    Set the rhythm by deciding what gets reviewed, how often, and with what level of rigor.

    Protect the rhythm by refusing to let distractions hijack it. Every struggling company has a dozen reasons to break cadence. A customer issue. A board request. An internal drama. A senior executive who wants “more time”. It’s fine to deal with the issue but do not abandon the rhythm.

    Model the rhythm by showing the organization that commitments matter. If someone misses repeatedly and nothing happens, the cadence becomes theater. And theater is deadly in a turnaround, because it creates the illusion of control while performance keeps deteriorating.

    Where Leaders Usually Blow It

    They overcomplicate.

    They make the cadence too heavy, too polished, too slow. By the time the reporting pack is ready, the facts are already stale.

    Or they under-enforce.

    They let people show up unprepared. They allow vague language. They tolerate chronic misses without consequence. They confuse being supportive with being soft.

    Or they keep changing priorities.

    This one is brutal. Every week brings a new “top priority,” usually driven by whichever problem screamed loudest most recently. The organization stops listening because it knows this week’s emergency will be replaced by next week’s emergency.

    Consistency is what gives cadence power. Without consistency, cadence is just a calendar invite.

    A Hard Truth About Momentum

    Momentum in a turnaround is rarely a breakthrough moment. It is usually the result of repeated, disciplined, almost unremarkable execution:

    A clean weekly review.

    A decision made on time.

    A missed target confronted early.

    A blocked initiative unblocked.

    A leader held accountable.

    A team seeing that this week’s commitments still matter next week.

    Do that long enough and the business starts to feel different. Not because of magic. Because people begin to trust that what is said will actually happen. That trust matters more than most leaders realize.

    When a company has been struggling for a while, people stop believing. They stop believing the priorities are real. They stop believing underperformance matters. They stop believing this time will be different.

    Cadence is how you rebuild belief without giving speeches.

    In the trenches, turnarounds are not won by the most inspirational plan or the loudest call to action. They are won by a leadership team that can impose a steady, credible rhythm on a business that has lost its footing.

    When the company is unstable, your job is not to create more motion.

    Your job is to create repeatable forward movement.

    That is the difference between a burst of activity and an actual turnaround.

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