Turning Stuff Around

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

Tag: change management

  • Your +1s Are Killing The Plan

    in

    Your +1s Are Killing The Plan

    One of the costliest mistakes senior leaders make in a new role is diagnosing the business without honestly diagnosing the people expected to move it.

    That means diagnosing your +1s early: the people one layer below you who are supposed to turn direction into movement.

    At first, this rarely looks like a mistake. In fact, it feels like momentum. The strategy gets sharpened. The priorities get simplified. The message gets clarified. The town hall goes well. The leadership meetings sound aligned.

    But a few months in, not much has actually changed.

    Very often, leaders tell themselves the plan ‘just’ needs more time, or tighter follow-up, or stronger cadence, or better communication.

    Sometimes that is true.

    Often it is not.

    Often the real problem is that the +1 layer is too weak to carry the plan.

    Nodding is not execution

    This is what makes the mistake so easy to miss.

    A weak execution layer does not usually look broken at first. It often looks cooperative.

    People nod. They use the right language. They agree with the priorities. They show up to the reviews. They sound reasonable. But the work does not move.

    Decisions do not travel cleanly. Cross-functional issues do not get resolved. The same topics come back again and again. Things that should have become action remain discussion.

    You see it when a pricing decision is agreed in the room but never reaches sales behavior. Or when a cost action is approved but somehow comes back three weeks later as a discussion. Or when a customer issue is “owned” by everyone and resolved by no one.

    The real early diagnosis

    When you enter a new leadership role, one of your first jobs is to determine whether a real execution layer exists beneath you.

    Not on the org chart. In reality.

    Can your direct reports actually drive? Do they command their domain? Can they create movement inside their area? Can they make decisions, create clarity, resolve friction, and keep their part of the business moving without repeated intervention from you?

    And then the next question matters just as much: do they have strong enough people under them?

    Because your plans do not travel through titles. They travel through chains of people. If that chain is weak, at any point, the result is the same. The plan stalls.

    This is where many executives lose months. They assess the business in detail but assess the people layer too politely, too slowly, or too narrowly. They look at how the team sounds in the room instead of whether the team can actually force execution through the system.

    If the execution layer is weak, the strategy is trapped

    A lot of plans fail this way. Not because they were wrong. Because they had no transmission mechanism.

    The strategy sits in decks, reviews, offsites, and all-hands meetings. It is understood well enough to be repeated, but not carried well enough to become operating reality. So the leader starts leaning in harder. More chasing. More follow-up. More intervention. More direct involvement in issues that should have been handled below.

    At first, this feels like leadership.

    It is not.

    It is substitution.

    And substitution does not scale.

    Once the leader starts compensating for missing force in the layer below, the organization learns the wrong lesson. It learns that motion only happens when the top person personally injects it. That creates dependency, slows the business down, and hides the real problem for longer than it should.

    What to look for

    The question is not whether your team understands the strategy. The question is whether they can carry it with actions that produce forward motion and measurable results.

    If the answer is repeatedly no, then the issue is not communication. And it’s not “one more workshop away” from being solved. It is a people problem at the core of execution.

    And if you delay calling it that, the business will pay for your hesitation.

    When you enter a new role, do not just diagnose the business. Diagnose the execution layer immediately under you, and the layer under them. This is true for any senior position.

    Test whether it is real.
    Test whether it can carry weight.
    Test whether decisions will actually travel through it and become action.

    Because if that layer is weak, your strategy is not wrong. It is trapped.

    Tags:

    , , , ,

    Share this post:

  • Why Cadence Beats Heroics

    in

    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.

    Tags:

    , , , , ,

    Share this post:

  • Tenure: A Double-edged Sword

    in

    Tenure: A Double-edged Sword

    Every organization has its ‘village elders’—those long-tenured employees who have been with the company for 10, 15, 20 years (or more!) Their tenure brings a wealth of knowledge, deep trust, and a sense of solidity that can anchor an organization. But what happens when that anchor becomes a weight that holds it back?

    Edge 1: The “Bad“

    Tenure has a tendency to breed stagnation. Over time, tenured employees can develop a resistance to change as they try and keep things “as they’ve always been”. This mindset defaults to the known and familiar, while pushing back on the new and riskier. Fresh ideas may be dismissed too quickly, stifling innovation and fostering a culture of complacency.

    It’s easy to picture this: an aspiring young developer consults a tenured principal. She demos something new, something innovative, only to be advised to use the existing tech. “We’ve always done things this way” she hears. The fire dies out. The idea is lost.

    Edge 2: The “Good”

    But tenure isn’t all bad. Just as it can stifle progress, it can also be one of your greatest assets.

    Beyond being beacons of trust and continuity, tenured employees are also incredible sources of historical knowledge. These individuals often hold key insights that can help you avoid repeating past mistakes. They’ve been-there-done-that, and can provide a historical lens into what’s worked and what hasn’t for the company. Their institutional memory can serve as a safeguard, offering advice that could prevent you from unknowingly stepping onto the same landmines of the past.

    The Turnaround Context

    In a turnaround, both “edges” can make or break your efforts. On the one hand, a turnaround demands agility, fresh thinking, and a willingness to challenge the status quo. On the other, not learning from past mistakes and avoiding known pitfalls can be very costly—almost detrimental—to creating the trust and momentum needed.

    So, should tenure be curbed or promoted? The answer is both! And the key is balance.

    Maintaining the Balance

    Maintaining the balance is not as complex as you may think. First, you will need a good measure of the tenure ratio which, as its name suggests, measures the proportion of tenured people within a given group (a team, a division, or the entire company.) Start by defining the number of years that constitute tenure for your company (this varies by company size, industry, and the organization’s current growth stage). Once defined, measuring the ratio is straight forward:
    For the purpose of the exercise, let’s assume that tenure is reached after 4 years. Now consider a team of 12 developers, of which 7 have been with the company for over 4 years. Your tenure ratio for this team is therefore 60%, indicating a strong concentration of long-tenured employees.

    Applying this calculation to the rest of your teams, gives you a clear picture of tenure concentrations throughout your organization. And from there you can plan your balancing initiatives. Here are a few of those initiatives that have helped me in these situations:

    • Reassign individuals: balance tenure across teams
      The benefits of this are obvious: under-tenured teams enjoy an injection of expertise, and tenured teams are exposed to fresh ways of thinking and new perspectives. The challenge with this initiative is, well, that tenured people resist change (and moving desks), so this needs to be managed carefully.
    • Realign work: mirror tenure with subject matter
      Alternatively to reassigning tenured members, encourage them to become subject-matter experts of critical systems and shift their focus to maintaining them. While maintaining systems may seem mundane, it often involves complex technical challenges that benefit from the expertise of tenured employees. Furthermore, it indirectly supports innovation by giving the rest of the team the room to move faster on other newer initiatives.
    • Reprocess for ideas: purposefully enable fresh perspectives
      Beyond reassigning individuals, and realigning work, be sure to implement processes that encourage questioning of the status quo, exploring new ideas, and overseeing their implementation. Though the initial reaction to the words “process” and “innovation” appearing in the same sentence is often an eye-roll, when they enable individuals to speak up about new ideas and ways of doing things—and be heard—they are good! Especially in more tenured organizations that may require that foundation to break the default thought cycles.

    Tenured employees can be your greatest allies or your biggest roadblocks, depending on how you engage them. Consulting them early and often helps you leverage their wisdom while avoiding past pitfalls. With that in mind, leadership plays a crucial role in balancing tenure. By fostering a culture of collaboration and openness, leaders can ensure that tenured employees feel valued while encouraging innovation and adaptability. The goal isn’t to sideline or discredit their experience but to channel it in ways that drive progress and enable your goals.

    Tags:

    , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Share this post:

  • The Change Tolerance

    in

    The Change Tolerance

    One of the first variables to measure, as you assess turnaround readiness, is the organization’s change tolerance. In other words, how much change can your organization handle before resistance turns into disengagement or even chaos? It is very much like a rubber band—stretch it too far and it breaks.

    Some organizations have a high tolerance and thrive on bold, sweeping transformations. Others have a low threshold, where even minor shifts can trigger disruption. Understanding where your organization stands on this spectrum is crucial. And the most critical element is your people. Consider the following key questions:

    Culture

    • Are people engaged?
    • Are there silos (geographical, functional or otherwise)?
    • How political is the organization?
    • Is there trust in leadership?
    • Does information flow freely throughout?

    Most of these questions can be answered by walking the halls and talking to team members. You’ll be positively surprised at what people share with you if you take the time and interest.

    People

    • Do we have the right skills and capabilities?
    • What is the talent pool looking like and can we lean on it more?
    • How fatigued—or fed-up—are people?

    Sit down with your HR team and function heads to explore these questions. If needed, augment your learnings with interviews with your leadership team’s direct reports.

    Leadership

    • Do you have the right skills and capabilities on the team?
    • Is the team cohesive?
    • Is there trust and healthy conflict, or only artificial harmony?
    • Is there buy-in to your plans?

    Beyond your own observations, I recommend seeking an objective, coach-led assessment—especially if you suspect lack of trust in the team, as people will hide their true colors in this setting. (If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading “The 5 Dysfunctions of A Team“ by Patrick Lencioni. It’s been my go-to model, and has worked wonders with every team I’ve led.)

    Building Change Tolerance

    Getting a well-informed reading on your people and leadership team should be a top priority. Remember, people challenges are often the most difficult and resource-intensive to address. They are also the most impactful to the rest of the organization, and have the potential of completely derailing your turnaround plans.

    Once you’ve assessed the change tolerance, ask yourself whether it aligns with the level of change your turnaround requires. If the answer is yes—great (consider yourself lucky!) But more often than not tolerance will be too low. If that is the case, then you have a bigger, more immediate challenge to tackle: increasing the change tolerance.

    Increasing tolerance isn’t done overnight. It requires intentional trust building—especially true if you’ve been parachuted into the organization from the outside. Since trust is built slowly, by delivering on promises, small wins matter even more and can help you build early momentum. This will demonstrate that change is both manageable and doable, and will ultimately allow you to stretch the change tolerance further.

    Finally, always stretch carefully. Continuously assess the tension with your team, and work to increase the organization’s capacity and resilience to change. Over time, culture will become more adaptive and capable of handling larger more transformative changes.

    Cranking up the change tolerance is an ongoing task. As the saying goes, change is the only constant, and this has never been truer than in today’s fast-paced world. Keep challenging the organization to achieve more—but ensure you’re doing so on the right foundation.

    Tags:

    , , , , , , , , , ,

    Share this post: