I found myself (in a former role) being one of the leaders in a business unit, that while strategically very important, was hemorrhaging cash. As the person responsible for product and operations, I immediately set to work getting a plan in place that would “turn things around.”
We did all the right things to get to a plan: we held a global offsite, built a plan using everyone’s contributions, and agreed to key priorities. We then started to watch the results carefully.
Care to guess what happened?
Yes, the losses actually got worse. When we removed the crutches, suddenly we became aware that things were worse than we thought, and our original benchmarks were off. Needless to say, our C-level executives were not pleased.
So, we doubled down.
Yes, we had another offsite, developed even crisper new plans, and pushed them to the operations team. You probably already know what happened (yes, the losses widened).
It was at this point that I had an opportunity to meet with the corporate organizational development executive. Needless to say, I didn’t seek out this meeting. It was actually presented to me as one of two choices…and the second one was even less desirable.
It turned out that this meeting was the best thing that could have happened. During our time together, she introduced me to my strengths and blindspots – work that has helped me serve executives since that day. In her work, she had me do what I came to know as a deep 360. What this means is that everyone in my professional circle was asked for their candid feedback, which Cheryl pulled into one, consolidated report. She then shared it with me – directly and clearly (I’m sure there was some compassion as well, but it was, as we say, very “real”).
Those action items laid the foundation for my personal growth – and more importantly – the success of that endeavor for our associates and customers.
The truth is that, as humans, we all show up with mindsets and perspectives that we view the world through. I live for carefully developing insights and learning, and look for novelty in all that I do. My best day is when I can connect two unrelated areas and create a completely new possibility. This makes me a keen observer and communicator that connects leaders and teams with new thinking.
It also gives me a huge blindspot that I have learned to respect and mitigate. My blindspot is in the implementation details. Don’t get me wrong, I will work very hard on implementing fresh new concepts, but once the learning juice has been extracted, I get drawn to the next shiny blue ball.
The end to the story? I hired an absolute ace operations leader who was tremendously talented in implementation. He made quick work of putting our plans in place and had great capacity for detail and follow up that made this business unit run really well.
Cheryl coached me to sit on my hands and let the new op’s leader work out the cadence and implementation of the needed improvements. Instead, I turned my focus outside the group, partnering with our distribution team in building client relationships and winning new accounts.
The end of this journey included a spin out and profitability. Even decades later, this group has done well.
The takeaway for growth leaders is that, while we usually begin solo, we need to establish a working partnership as soon as it is practical.
Specifically:
- It’s not about us becoming superheroes – it’s about understanding our human limitations and quickly building out a team that works.
- This work is best done with shared insight and vocabulary. I’ve been using the Complete Growth Leader profiles as a tool (more here, here and here) to unpack team members styles and roles and have found it to be efficient and fast.
- It’s about making the right shifts in leadership for the right task. In the example above I needed to set the ops team up for success. For more on leadership style and project phase, see the posts on STRIDE here, here and here.
Finally, there is another human tendency that does not serve us well. It goes something like this: we did the planning and made the investment, but it didn’t stick (so we must have done it wrong). It’s at this point that we usually do the same thing, in a bigger and more expensive way, with the same results.
If you find yourself doubling down on something that’s not quite working, it might be good to talk. If you’d like to discuss this more in depth, feel free to contact me at 847-651-1014 or use this link to set up a complimentary discussion.
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