Turning Stuff Around

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

Tag: leadership lessons

  • Your +1s Are Killing The Plan

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    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.

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  • The Hidden Turnaround Risk: Executive Seats Without Executive Weight

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    The Hidden Turnaround Risk: Executive Seats Without Executive Weight

    A common failure mode in a turnaround is that the CEO becomes the face of the turnaround, the voice of the turnaround, and eventually the only executive in the room people really listen to.

    At first, this can look like strong leadership. The CEO is decisive. Visible. Clear. The organization is relieved that somebody is finally driving.

    Then the downside shows up. The executive team starts shrinking in stature. Not necessarily in title. Not necessarily in effort. But in command. They still hold the role, but the organization increasingly sees the CEO as the person who can take a problem, make a call, and move the business forward.

    That is when the turnaround starts getting heavier than it should. Because the issue is no longer that the CEO is too involved. The issue is that the executive team is not leading with enough force.

    The real risk is not dependency. It is vacuum.

    People often describe this problem as over-reliance on the CEO. That is true, but it is incomplete. The more precise problem is that a leadership vacuum opens up underneath the CEO.

    This vacuum is not created by absence. It is created by executives who are present, but do not fully command their seat.

    This is why some CEOs end up looking like the strongest operator in every function. It is not always ego. Sometimes it is compensation for missing executive force around them. But that compensation becomes dangerous fast.

    In a turnaround, title is irrelevant. Weight is everything.

    Turnarounds expose whether an executive actually has the weight to lead under pressure.

    Some executives are perfectly competent in a stable environment and then go strangely light in a turnaround. They become overly careful. Overly deferential. Overly dependent on sponsorship from above. They start sounding more like presenters than leaders.

    That does not work.

    A turnaround needs executives who make the room feel more solid when they speak, not less. They walk into a messy situation and create clarity. They align people who are drifting. They make decisions others trust. They represent their function in a way that reduces the need for CEO intervention rather than increases it.

    Identifying the ‘featherweights’

    Many struggling execs are not lazy. They are not checked out. They are simply not bringing enough leadership mass to the seat.

    This usually shows up before anyone says it out loud. You will see some combination of the following:

    • The CEO keeps having to restate what “good” looks like in that function.
    • Cross-functional peers do not really defer to the executive because they do not feel strong ownership coming from them.
    • Important decisions drift upward instead of being taken at the function level.
    • The executive narrates problems well but does not impose shape on them.
    • The executive is busy, earnest, and engaged, but the business still does not feel led in that area.

    The last one if left unchecked, especially in a turnaround, is fatal.

    Why this happens

    There are a few common reasons:

    1. The CEO’s force becomes too dominant

    When a CEO is highly capable and highly involved, weaker executives can unconsciously recede. They start drafting behind the CEO instead of projecting their own authority. This is understandable.

    It is also unacceptable.

    A strong CEO cannot become an excuse for weak executive presence.

    2. The executive does not actually know how to lead in a stressed system

    Some leaders are good at managing within known lanes. They perform well when the business is stable, the cadence is normal, and the politics are manageable.

    A turnaround changes the physics.

    Now they need to decide faster, communicate more clearly, absorb ambiguity, challenge peers, and create motion in conditions that are much less forgiving.

    Not everyone can do that.

    3. The CEO tolerates “near leadership”

    This is a subtle trap. An executive sounds plausible. They say the right things. They produce the deck. They show effort. They are likable enough. They are almost there. But ‘almost there’ is dangerous because it delays recognition of the gap.

    Turnarounds are not won by near leadership. They are won by leaders who actually lead.

    What the CEO must do

    This is not solved by telling the exec team to “step up.” That is fluff. It is abdication dressed up as empowerment.

    The CEO has to become much more explicit about what it means to occupy an executive seat in a turnaround.

    Start by defining what leadership in that seat actually looks like, not in generic competency language but in operating terms. What decisions should this person make without you? What conflicts should they resolve directly? What business outcomes must they shape? What pace must they bring? What level of authority should peers and teams feel from them? Until that is clear, you will keep tolerating ambiguity.

    Then watch the room, not just the output. The numbers matter, but the room tells you a lot. When this executive speaks, do people align? Do peers trust them? Do others lean in because they feel direction, or do they still look upward to the CEO for the real answer? Executive effectiveness is partly operational and partly social. In a turnaround, both matter.

    Then stop rescuing the seat too often. Every time the CEO steps in to provide the authority that should have come from the executive, the organization learns the wrong lesson. It learns where the real power sits. Do that repeatedly and you hollow out your own team. There are times when intervention is necessary. But if you keep lending your authority to the same seat, you are probably masking a fit problem.

    And that’s the hardest part: being honest about fit. Some executives will not grow into the turnaround version of the role. And no amount of encouragement will change that. If a leader consistently fails to command their function, absorb pressure, create clarity, and drive independently, then the issue is not just development. It is suitability. That needs to be called what it is.

    The goal in a turnaround is not for the CEO to be the loudest, clearest, most capable person in every room. That will happen sometimes anyway.

    The goal is to build an executive team that can each occupy their seat with enough authority, clarity, and force that the business feels led across the table, not just from the center.

    When that does not happen, the CEO does not just become a bottleneck. The CEO becomes a substitute for missing leadership. And no turnaround scales when the CEO is forced to play half the executive team.

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  • 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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  • Trust Is Infrastructure

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    Trust Is Infrastructure

    One of the laziest ways people talk about trust in business is as if it belongs in the culture bucket. It gets treated as something nice to have. Important, of course, but vague. A leadership value. A team dynamic. A word on corporate wallpaper. You can sometimes get away with that in strong businesses. But in struggling ones, you cannot.

    In a turnaround, trust is not soft. It is operational.

    If people do not trust the numbers, decisions slow down. If they do not trust the workflow, they create workarounds. If they do not trust another function to deliver, they start checking, rechecking, escalating, and protecting themselves before anything has even gone wrong. That is when the business begins to clog. What looks from the outside like a performance issue is often, underneath it, a trust issue that has worked its way into the machinery.

    This is one of the reasons I have always found Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team so useful. Not because it is theoretically elegant, but because it is brutally practical.

    In a turnaround, you can see the model playing out in real time. The dysfunctions are not abstract. They show up in meetings, in handoffs, in forecasts, in missed targets, and in how leaders behave under pressure.

    And it all starts at the bottom of the pyramid: absence of trust.

    Why trust matters

    Trust in a turnaround is not about whether people like each other. That helps, but it is not the point. The real question is much more practical: can people rely on the system enough to move without constant friction?

    That friction starts with data.

    If every metric is open to interpretation, every decision becomes a debate. You end up spending half your time arguing over whose numbers are right instead of doing anything about them. Businesses in trouble cannot afford that. They need enough confidence in the underlying information that people can make decisions quickly, even if the data is not perfect. Perfect data is a fantasy. Trusted data is what matters.

    Then it shows up in workflows.

    A surprising amount of drag comes from people not believing the workflow will actually see the work through. So they hover. They chase. They pull extra people into meetings, and copy another six on emails just to create safety. They build side spreadsheets because the system of record does not feel reliable. None of this is irrational. It is what people do when the process has stopped earning trust.

    And then there is trust in handoffs.

    This is where many turnarounds get stuck. One function believes another is always late, always vague, or always making excuses. The result is predictable. Energy that should be going into customers, delivery, or product ends up being spent on internal protection. Teams stop acting like parts of one business and start acting like neighboring countries with weak diplomatic ties.

    That is not a culture problem. It is an operating one.

    It crumbles fast!

    What makes Lencioni’s model so relevant in turnarounds is that once trust breaks down, the rest tends to follow very quickly.

    First, teams become reluctant to engage in real conflict. Healthy conflict is direct, issue-based, and useful. What you usually get instead is guarded behavior, side conversations, political maneuvering, and frustration expressed in safer places. People stop challenging each other cleanly because they do not feel safe doing it. So the real debate never happens where it should.

    From there, commitment gets weaker. If people have not had the honest conversation, they rarely buy in to the decision. They may nod in the room, but they leave with reservations, private disagreement, or selective interpretation. In a turnaround, that is deadly. The business does not have time for leaders to be half-in and privately freelancing.

    Then accountability starts to collapse. This is one of the most visible symptoms. When trust is low and commitment is shallow, peers stop holding one another to account. They escalate upward, complain laterally, or simply tolerate underperformance because confronting it feels too costly. The CEO then gets dragged into refereeing issues that the team itself should be capable of resolving.

    And finally, attention shifts away from collective results. People start protecting their function, their narrative, their team, or their personal position. Sales blames product. Product blames commercial quality. Operations blames planning. Finance mistrusts everyone’s forecast. At that point the company may still be busy, but it’s no longer moving as one business.

    That is why the model matters. It explains why trust is not a soft cultural layer sitting off to the side. It is the foundation that allows teams to engage in real conflict, commit cleanly, hold one another accountable, and stay focused on collective results.

    The leader’s role in rebuilding trust

    This part is not glamorous. Rebuilding trust has very little to do with speeches and a great deal to do with operational discipline.

    First, make the numbers boring.

    By that I mean consistent, explainable, and stable enough that people stop arguing about what is real. One definition per metric. One source of truth. Minimal room for performance theater.

    Second, make workflows dependable. Not perfect. Dependable.

    If approvals always take too long, fix the approval path. If handoffs are fuzzy, define them properly. If teams are compensating for the same broken process every week, stop admiring their heroics and repair the process.

    Third, force real conflict into the room.

    This is where the Lencioni model becomes especially useful. If the leadership team is avoiding clean debate, you have to surface it. The goal is not more tension. The goal is more honesty. Better to have a direct argument about a broken handoff in the meeting than a month of passive resistance outside it.

    Fourth, insist on genuine commitment.

    Once the discussion is done, the decision has to become the decision. Not one version for the room and another in the corridor afterward. In turnarounds, alignment cannot be performative.

    Fifth, make peer accountability normal.

    If every miss has to be escalated to the CEO, the team is not functioning as a team. Senior leaders should be able to challenge one another directly and constructively without turning it into politics or waiting for the boss to intervene.

    And finally, keep bringing the conversation back to collective results.

    Not functional victories. Not who was right. Not who is protected. Results. A turnaround only works when the leadership team behaves like owners of the whole business.

    The payoff is bigger than it looks

    When trust starts returning, the first thing you notice is not usually morale. It is speed.

    People decide faster. Meetings get shorter. Side channels begin to fade. Escalations become cleaner. Cross-functional work becomes less defensive and more fluid. Leaders start disagreeing more openly, but with less politics. Accountability gets sharper because commitment is clearer. And the organization stops wasting so much energy on defensive motion.

    That is why I do not think of trust as a cultural afterthought in turnarounds. I think of it as part of the execution engine. Trust does not sit beside execution. It sits underneath it.

    Trust is infrastructure.

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  • You Don’t Have a Priority Problem. You Have a Consequence Problem

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    You Don’t Have a Priority Problem. You Have a Consequence Problem

    One of the more frustrating things about struggling businesses is that they are rarely confused about what matters.

    Ask almost any executive team in a turnaround what the top priorities are and you will usually get a fast, polished answer. They will tell you the business needs to restore growth, improve cash discipline, tighten execution, stabilize delivery, retain customers, or rebuild margins. In most cases, they are not wrong. The problem is that those priorities too often live only in decks, town halls, and leadership conversations. And once the meeting ends, the system tells a different story.

    What you will find many times is that targets are missed. Deliverables slip. Owners come back the following week with explanations, context, and reasons why things did not move as expected. Everyone nods, the item rolls forward, and the business carries on.

    That pattern repeats for weeks or months. At some point leadership starts asking why the organization is not aligned, why urgency is not landing, or why nothing seems to stick. And usually the answer is simpler than they want it to be:

    It’s not a priorities problem, it’s a consequences problem.

    In troubled companies, this distinction matters a lot. Priorities without consequence are just aspirations. They may sound serious, but the organization quickly learns that failing to deliver against them does not materially change anything. And once people learn that, the words coming from the top lose weight.

    That is why I have become increasingly skeptical when leadership teams insist that the issue is a lack of clarity. Most of the time, there is plenty of clarity. What is missing are the mechanisms that make clarity matter.

    You can see this very clearly in weekly operating reviews. The same issues keep showing up. Pipeline quality is not where it should be. A product milestone has slipped again. A major initiative is blocked. On paper, these things are treated as critical. In practice, they are handled as discussion topics. The person responsible explains what happened, leadership asks a few questions, and everyone moves on. Nothing changes in ownership, nothing changes in oversight, and nothing changes in the level of scrutiny. So the organization takes the hint. These priorities may be important in theory, but they are not important enough to trigger action when missed.

    That is a dangerous place for any company to be. In a turnaround, it is lethal.

    Part of the reason this happens is that many leaders misunderstand consequence. They hear the word and think punishment. They think it means public humiliation, aggressive confrontation, or firing people at the first miss.

    It doesn’t.

    Good consequence is not theatrical and it is not emotional. It is structured, visible, and predictable. It simply means that when commitments are not met, something changes. The miss is acknowledged clearly, the reason is diagnosed, and the response is concrete. Oversight increases. Scope narrows. Resources are reallocated. Ownership is reconsidered. The system shows that commitments have weight.

    That is all consequence really is: proof that the business means what it says.

    Without that proof, priorities drift into the realm of corporate theater. Everyone learns the language of urgency, but nobody changes behavior. Leaders start repeating themselves more forcefully, hoping intensity will compensate for the lack of follow-through. It never does. Repetition without consequence only teaches the organization to wait out management’s latest concern.

    This is where turnarounds often stall. Not because the strategy is unclear. Not because people are lazy. But because the operating environment allows underperformance to pass through without enough friction. The business keeps talking about the right things, but it does not create enough pressure behind them to alter outcomes.

    The CEO’s role here is bigger than many realize. In the end, consequence is a leadership choice. It is set in real time, in the moment when someone reports a miss. If the response is vague, overly sympathetic, or endlessly deferential to circumstances, the standard drops. If repeated misses are tolerated without any structural response, the organization notices. Very quickly, people understand whether targets are real or just decorative.

    That is why consistency matters so much. Consequence cannot depend on mood, politics, or who is in the room. If one executive is challenged hard while another is allowed to slide, credibility disappears. Once that happens, accountability starts to feel selective, and the whole thing degrades into politics. The only version that works is the one that is consistent enough to become part of the operating fabric of the company.

    When that starts happening, the culture changes surprisingly fast. Meetings become sharper. Language gets more precise. People escalate problems earlier because they know slippage matters. Ownership becomes clearer because ambiguity is no longer safe. Not everyone likes this shift, of course. It creates discomfort. It exposes capability gaps. It forces harder calls on people who may have been protected by vagueness for too long. But that discomfort is not a sign that something is wrong. In many turnarounds, it is the first sign that the system is becoming honest.

    And honesty is a prerequisite for recovery.

    A business cannot improve performance until it is willing to face performance plainly. Not with drama, and not with blame, but with enough seriousness that people understand results are not optional. That is the piece many leadership teams skip. They spend time trying to perfect the message, refine the priorities, or sharpen the narrative, when what the organization really needs is evidence that missed commitments will no longer dissolve into polite discussion.

    So if you are sitting in a business that keeps talking about focus, urgency, and alignment, but the same issues keep resurfacing week after week, do not start by rewriting the priorities again. Start by asking a more uncomfortable question: what actually happens here when someone does not deliver?

    That answer will tell you far more about the health of the turnaround than any strategy deck ever will.

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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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  • Tenure: A Double-edged Sword

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    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.

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  • The Change Tolerance

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    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.

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  • Small Wins, Big Impact

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    Small Wins, Big Impact

    Beginning a turnaround is like staring at a half-finished jigsaw puzzle of the Mona Lisa. You’ve got a few key pieces in place—a hint of her nose and mouth, some scattered fragments of the lake in the background—but the full picture is still elusive. Being able to see the end state, and formulate a strategic plan to get there is critical. But when it’s time to set out, I’ve found small wins to be incredibly powerful at building momentum to steer the ship in the right direction.

    Small wins give you something to hold onto when the bigger picture feels out of reach. They help you—and the team—believe that change is possible, one step at a time. Especially in turnaround situations, small wins are critical for restoring confidence, building hope, and reminding everyone that progress is possible. And as progress happens, the end result begins taking shape in front of their eyes.

    In my experience, the most important decision you can make as you set out on your turnaround, is the decision to move—before “analysis-paralysis” grips you and the team. The key is to stop waiting for the stars to align to tackle everything at once. But to look for the first small thing you can fix, and fix it. The fix becomes a win; the win sparks momentum. And momentum powers continued progress.

    At my company, for example, after assessing the different areas that needed fixing, each function head set out to achieve one small win within three to four weeks. In the people function, we fixed company communications. In the commercial function, we addressed pricing. In finance, we made incremental cost-control improvements. And each of these small wins demonstrated progress towards our shared goal of turning around the company. (More on these moves later in the blog.)

    In turnarounds, finding problems, is like finding sand at the beach—they’re everywhere. Don’t focus on fixing everything. Instead find your next small win, then build from there.

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