Turning Stuff Around

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

Tag: management

  • Regression to the Mean Fools the Best Executives

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    Regression to the Mean Fools the Best Executives

    Regression to the mean is one of those ideas that sounds academic until you experience it yourself. The theory is simple: extreme outcomes tend to drift back toward the average. For example: A bad quarter is followed by a slightly improved, less bad quarter. A sales team that imploded in April looks somewhat better in May. A support function that melted down last month steadies in the next one.

    The trouble starts when leaders confuse that drift with improvement.

    Consider the following scenario: A business falls apart. Everybody wakes up, pressure rises, activity spikes, and a few obvious fixes get rammed through. Then the next month looks a bit better and people start talking as if the business is turning. “Success!” the executives proclaim, as they start to attach meaning to the mild improvements they’ve made.

    Usually, that isn’t success. Usually it’s the business stopping to be unusually bad.

    Noticing this dynamic matters a lot in a turnaround. Because the whole point is to change what “normal” looks like. You are trying to move the company’s operating mean. You are trying to make better performance routine instead of occasional. And what you don’t want to do is watch a weak system crawl back to its usual level of mediocrity.

    That sounds obvious when written down. Inside the company, it is much harder to see, especially when people are tired and behind plan. A team under pressure will grab at anything to ease the situation. They’ll call targets unrealistic, they’ll frame pressure as counter-productive, or call plans too ambitious.

    The issue is not whether the current pressure feels uncomfortable (of course it does!) or whether the plan is actually wrong (it probably isn’t.) The issue is that the organization is asking you to lower the bar to match what it can currently deliver.

    The request sounds sensible enough on the surface. But buried inside that request is often a much harder truth: The business has not yet been staffed, led, or organized to produce the ambition being asked of it.

    If the market is weaker than expected, if the economics do not hold, or if the strategy itself is off, then adjust. That is just competent management. But if the ambition is directionally right and the team underneath it is too junior, too slow, too dependent, or too politically soft to carry it, then cutting the target becomes a very polished way of protecting the existing mean.

    You get relief immediately when you do that. Forecast tension drops. The room gets calmer. People sound more constructive again. But the machine itself stays where it was. You have not solved the problem. You have simply redefined the problem downward until it fits the current organization.

    That is why modest improvement should make you more analytical, not more relaxed. Ask the hard question: what actually changed? Did execution get stronger? Did decisions move faster? Did accountability land lower in the system? Did the team below the top layer start carrying more weight?

    If the mechanism did not change, you are probably looking at reversion, not progress. And if you mistake reversion for progress, you make very expensive decisions. You lock in weaker targets. You tolerate weaker leaders. You congratulate a business for crawling back to a level that was never good enough in the first place.

    That is how average companies stay average. They misread the bounce, call it recovery, and then sand down ambition until it fits the people and structure they already have.

    In a real turnaround, the job is bigger than getting off the floor. The job is to build a different floor. A new normal. A business that performs at a higher level repeatedly, predictably, without drama.

    Until then, be careful with relief. It has a way of arriving before real progress does. happens, every small rebound deserves skepticism.

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  • The Captain Should Not Have to Row

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    The Captain Should Not Have to Row

    There is a specific kind of fatigue that shows up in a turnaround.

    It is not burnout.

    It is the fatigue that comes when the business needs momentum, but too much of that momentum still depends on you.

    Most leaders do not talk much about this part. They talk about clarity, urgency, standards, and accountability. All important. But there are stretches in any serious turnaround where you are simply not getting enough back from the machine.

    The output is thin. The follow-through is uneven. Decisions keep returning upward. Too much still depends on you.

    And your own energy starts to flatten.

    That is not a mood problem. It is an operating signal.

    Low energy is often a management symptom, not a personal failure

    Leaders are often told to manage their energy better. Sleep more. Exercise more. Delegate and protect time. Reset. All good and important.

    But in a turnaround, persistent deflation is often telling you something more specific: the organization is consuming more leadership energy than it is returning in execution.

    That usually means the execution system is leaking energy in one of three places:

    • Too much still sits at the top. Decisions, escalations, clarifications, and momentum keep coming back upward.
    • The team is active, but not forceful. Work is happening, calendars are full, updates are being given, but not enough is landing with weight.
    • Or you are re-driving decisions that should already be in motion. The same issues keep returning. The same handoffs keep weakening. The same commitments need to be re-energized.

    That combination is exhausting because it creates a terrible ratio: high effort, low transfer.

    When that ratio stays bad for too long, leaders start blaming themselves for not feeling sharper, more optimistic, or more motivated.

    But that is usually the wrong diagnosis.

    If your energy is draining faster than the business is moving, the problem is usually not your resilience. It is the execution design around you.

    The mistake is acting stronger than the system

    There is a bad version of leadership here.

    The leader senses the slippage, feels disappointed by the pace, but responds by becoming performatively upbeat. More speeches. More slogans. More “let’s go” energy. More visible confidence meant to compensate for a machine that is not pulling hard enough.

    It rarely works.

    People can feel the mismatch. The business knows when execution is weak. Overcompensating emotionally does not create trust. It often does the opposite. It makes leadership look detached from the operating truth.

    The better move is quieter, harder, and more useful.

    Acknowledge the drag privately. Diagnose it coldly. Then reduce the number of things that are draining you without producing movement.

    What to do when your battery is low

    The wrong instinct is to ask, “How do I get my energy back?”

    A better question is, “What is consuming leadership energy without creating enough forward motion?”

    That shifts the lens from self-management to operating mechanics.

    Start with four moves.

    1. Cut the fake work

    When execution slips, organizations often produce more administrative activity to prove they are serious. More meetings. More trackers. More update loops. More status language.

    Most of it is useless.

    You do not need more evidence that the business is behind. You need fewer rituals that convert leadership attention into paperwork instead of progress.

    Every recurring touchpoint should answer one question: does this create movement, or just visibility?

    If it only creates visibility, challenge it.

    2. Identify where momentum dies

    Turnarounds do not usually stall everywhere equally. They stall in specific joints.

    A decision gets made, then weakens at handoff. A priority gets announced, then diluted in translation. A cross-functional dependency appears, then nobody really owns it.

    Map those points without mercy.

    You are looking for where effort enters the system and dies before turning into execution. That is where your energy is being wasted too.

    3. Stop personally carrying work that should be institutionally carried

    This is the hardest one.

    Strong leaders often compensate for weak teams by becoming the glue. They clarify, chase, connect, push, unblock, and remind. It works for a while. Then it starts breaking the leader.

    If you are repeatedly needed to force the same categories of progress, you are not helping the business scale through difficulty. You are teaching it dependency.

    That has to be interrupted.

    Some things need direct intervention. Fine. But repeated intervention in the same zone is not heroism. It is a structural warning.

    4. Narrow the battlefield

    When your own energy is low, breadth becomes dangerous.

    This is where many leaders make things worse. They keep every initiative alive because all of them matter in theory. The result is predictable: diluted attention, shallow pressure, no real breakthrough anywhere.

    In these moments, narrowing is not weakness. It is how you create force again.

    Pick the few areas where real movement changes the tone of the business. Then over-bias there until output becomes visible again.

    Momentum is an energy source only if it is real.

    When execution is lagging and your energy is flattening, do not default to self-help.

    Sometimes the most useful sentence a leader can say to themselves is this: I am not deflated because the mission is wrong. I am deflated because too much energy is being lost in transmission.

    That distinction matters.

    Treat your fatigue as data.

    In a turnaround, low leader energy often means the system is absorbing too much and returning too little. That is not just something to endure. It is something to diagnose.

    The ship still has to move.

    But it should not require the captain to row.

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  • The Rise of the One-Person Value Factory

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    The Rise of the One-Person Value Factory

    For years, companies have tried to solve the same organizational problem: how do you reduce friction, remove bureaucracy, and get valuable work into the hands of customers faster?

    Amazon had the two-pizza team: no team should be so large that two pizzas could not feed it. Then came the idea of single-threaded teams: one team, one mission, one leader, one clear problem to solve. Netflix and others pushed versions of pods, squads, and cross-functional cells.

    The names differ, but the intent is the same: smaller teams have fewer handoffs, fewer dependencies, and less room for responsibility to disappear into the group. Companies keep trying to create smaller units of execution because big organizations naturally create drag. Anyone who has worked inside a large company knows how this happens. Product sits in one place. Engineering sits somewhere else. Data has its own queue. Legal needs to review. Marketing needs a brief. Finance needs a business case. Leadership needs alignment. By the time an idea becomes something a customer can actually touch, half the energy has leaked out of the system.

    AI changes the shape of this problem.

    AI makes existing teams more productive. That is true, but it is probably the least interesting part. The bigger shift is that AI allows one capable person to do work that previously required a small team. One person can research a market, analyze customer feedback, draft a product concept, build a prototype, test it, review results, and iterate. Not perfectly. Not always. Not in every domain. But well enough and often enough, that the unit of value creation inside companies is going to shrink again: From department, to team, to squad, to pod, and now, in some cases, to one person.

    This is the rise of the One-Person Value Factory.

    By that, I do not mean a freelancer inside the company. I also do not mean a heroic individual bypassing the organization, or someone doing ten jobs badly. A One-Person Value Factory is a person with enough context, judgment, tools, and authority to take a problem from insight to shipped value with minimal dependency on the machinery around them (the key phrase being shipped value).

    AI is going to create a lot of activity that looks like progress: More documents, more analysis, more dashboards, more content. But none of that matters unless it reaches a customer, improves the business, removes friction, saves money, creates revenue, or changes behavior. The One-Person Value Factory is not measured by how much it produces. It is measured by how quickly it turns ambiguity into useful output.

    That has real implications for organizational design. The old model assumes that execution requires coordination across specialties. The One-Person Value Factory model will increasingly assume that execution starts with autonomous value creators, supported by specialists only when needed. Instead of assembling a team around every idea, companies will ask a different question: can one strong operator take this far enough before we involve the machine?

    This is where management will need to change. Managers will not just allocate people to projects. They will need to decide where autonomy is safe, where synchronization is necessary, and where control is slowing the company down. And this is where the hard part begins.

    AI reduces production friction. It does not remove organizational friction. In fact, it may make synchronization harder. If ten people can each move five times faster, the organization does not automatically become fifty times faster. It may simply become ten fast-moving parts creating confusion in parallel. That confusion can show up as duplicate work, inconsistent customer messages, conflicting experiments, brand drift, security gaps, compliance risk, and customizations that do not add up to company progress. The bottleneck will move: It used to be production, increasingly, it will be synchronization.

    I believe this to be the next organizational challenge. How do you let One-Person Value Factories move fast without turning the company into a bag of disconnected experiments? You certainly don’t slow them down. The answer is to be much clearer on the few things that must be synchronized. Strategy must be synchronized, so people know which problems matter. Standards must be synchronized, so people understand the guardrails around architecture, quality, risk, data, compliance, and brand. Customer experience must be synchronized, so the company does not feel like a collection of unrelated products.

    But the work itself should not be over-synchronized. In my opinion, this is where many companies will get it wrong. They will see the risk of AI-enabled autonomy and respond with committees, approval flows, and more governance. They will take a technology that can compress weeks into days and wrap it in a process that turns days back into weeks, if not months. They will take the Lamborghini and hitch it to a horse-drawn carriage.

    We are living through an era where time has become even less neutral. Decisions require movement before everyone is comfortable. They require fast diagnosis, fast action, fast feedback, and fast correction. You do not get to wait until the structure is perfect. You need traction while the structure is still messy. That makes the One-Person Value Factory especially powerful.

    The question becomes: who in the organization can be trusted to own a problem end to end?

    Those people will become disproportionately valuable. Not because they “know how to use AI.” That will become table stakes. They will be valuable because they combine business judgment, customer understanding, execution discipline, and enough technical fluency to move without constant translation.

    The organizational question is no longer only “how do we build better teams?” It is also “how do we design a company where one person can create meaningful value without being trapped by the machinery around them?”

    That is not a small shift.

    The company of the future may still have teams, pods, functions, and leaders. But the atomic unit of progress will get smaller. And in many cases, it will be one person with context, judgment, AI leverage, and permission to move.

    That is the One-Person Value Factory: not a person doing everything, but a person able to move value through the system before the system slows it down.

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  • 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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  • 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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