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What do I do when my team can't agree?
137 Plays5 months ago
This week’s scale-up confession comes from Emma, an entrepreneur running a growing eco-conscious marketing consultancy. Responding to the letter, Rob explores how misalignments within Emma’s leadership team seem to be paralysing decision-making, impacting morale and which components of the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) are most likely to offer a solution.
Connect with Us:
Have your own business question or leadership challenge? Please email Rob at rob@mission-group.co.uk (and let us know whether you would prefer a private answer or are happy to feature in a future episode).
You can also reach Rob on LinkedIn via https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertliddiard/ or to book some free time https://www.eosworldwide.com/rob-liddiard).
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Transcript
Introduction to Scale Up Confessions
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, welcome to this first episode of Scale Up Confessions, a show where we talk about the sometimes brutal realities of leading an owner managed organization, where we share tips, tricks and tools to get the most out of a team in an entrepreneurial business.
00:00:18
Speaker
to survive the highs and lows of operating at the small and medium sized business end of the economy where life can be uncertain and the setbacks can come daily. But of course, there's also extreme upside and opportunity to create life changing outcomes for owners, employees and other stakeholders in this very exciting part of the market.
Rob Lydiard's Background
00:00:41
Speaker
I'm Rob Lydiard. I was the founding CEO of a software business called Yapster that was acquired in 2022.
00:00:46
Speaker
I'm now a professional implementer of the Entrepreneurial Operating System, or EOS, which means I have the great privilege every week of working with amazing entrepreneurial operators and leadership teams ah to help them align around a vision and overcome their problems, their issues. So I get to hear confessions all the time. And this podcast is is an attempt to share with the ah outside world some of the fascinating stories that we hear in the session room and the the incredibly innovative and inspiring solutions that teams come up with in order to move their businesses forward.
Emma's Team Dysfunction Challenge
00:01:24
Speaker
Today we're hearing from an entrepreneur called Emma that that that checked in with me, sent me a note, um raising some challenges around team dysfunction.
00:01:34
Speaker
And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to read out Emma's letter and then we'll get into talking about what the root of her problems might be and see if we can signpost some suggested solutions to get her business unstuck. So let's get into it.
00:01:53
Speaker
Okay. Emma writes, dear Rob, I'm reaching out because I'm at my wit's end with some challenges in my business. I run a marketing consultancy specializing in digital campaigns for eco-conscious brands. And over the past couple of years, we've been on a steady upwards trajectory, but lately things feel like they're grinding to a halt. And the main issue is the growing tension within our leadership team, I think. I co-founded the business with a head of strategy and a creative director. Both are brilliant at what they do, but lately it seems like every discussion turns into an argument. A head of strategy is very data-driven, always looking at the numbers and long-term ROI,
00:02:30
Speaker
while our creative director is more instinctual and passionate, focusing on creative vision and the brand's emotional impact. When we try to make decisions, whether it's taking on new clients or even choosing campaigns to prioritize, their disagreements stall us for hours, sometimes days. This has slowed down our workflow and ultimately our ability to serve clients. Things came to a head last month when we were deciding whether to take on and a major new client in the fashion industry.
00:02:57
Speaker
The head of strategy pointed out the potentially high revenue, but highlighted concerns over the brand's environmental ethics saying it could clash with our values. The creative director, on the other hand, was excited by the creative possibilities and saw the chance to guide the brand towards a more sustainable future. They argued for days and we missed the window to submit our proposal, which has impacted team morale and caused frustration amongst our junior staff. I feel caught in the middle and I don't know how to help us reach common ground.
00:03:25
Speaker
How can I mediate these differences in a way that moves us forward rather than stalling us out? Thanks for any advice you can give, Emma. Thanks for the letter. I'm loving this new format.
Leadership Advice for Emma
00:03:40
Speaker
Look, Emma, I'm not a guru. I always say this to teams when we're working. I um have some hopefully useful experiences and have spent a decent amount of time trying to master one business operating toolkit. EOS, there are others.
00:03:56
Speaker
But seeing as you've written in and people are listening to this podcast, I am going to indulge and share with you what I think what the tools from EOS would instruct and do with that what you will. But like I always say to all business owners, this shit is always hard. Virtually no one has, quote, the answer.
00:04:14
Speaker
and Even if you do have the answer, life can just be uncertain and you might get a different outcome to what you expected or what any of us would have expected had we done the same thing in your position. So ultimately, the most important thing you can do is follow your own kind of brain, instincts, gut, heart, because you've got to live with the with the consequences. okay So ah nothing that I'm saying now is intended to indicate that I absolutely know the right answer.
00:04:40
Speaker
The reason I'm doing this and the reason people are listening is because it can be lonely in the big C and anything we can do to come together to make it a bit less lonely clearly helps, but ultimately the buck stops with you, it's your call. So I guess that's the first piece of advice. It sounds like you've got co-founders and yes, you're a leadership team, but if you're the CEO, you're the leader. I don't know if you didn't say in your letter, if you own more shares than your ah head of strategy or your creative director,
00:05:06
Speaker
If you do, great. Even if you don't, if they've agreed that you're the CEO, organizations need leadership. They need both a leadership team and a leader of the leadership team.
Vision and Values Alignment
00:05:16
Speaker
So the first issue I'd like you to write down is, am I being a leader? Am I leading my leadership team? And then secondly, is is my leadership team leading the organization? Because at the core of any successful business, or most successful businesses, unless you're very, very lucky to have incredible product market fit,
00:05:36
Speaker
that makes you successful even if the business is not very well run operationally. The heart of most normal businesses success comes from team health. And what that means is it means trusting each other enough to be able to engage in true constructive conflict to get to the heart of issues and then come up with the right answer. And if you're the leader of the leadership team, you've got to encourage a healthy conflict and then sometimes you need to make the decision.
00:06:03
Speaker
so So let's get into what that means in practice. um The first point is it sounds like you do have healthy dialogue in the leadership team or have dialogue in the healthy in the leadership team and it it has conflict at its core. What I'd like you to ask yourself first is, um are you pushing your colleagues and yourself engaging in true conflict rather than superficial conflict. So are you really, really, really saying what needs to be said about the underlying issues rather than just kind of disagreeing with each other on superficial issues that don't um don't don't correct the underlying? If you're not, that's an indicator of team health, poor team health.
00:06:49
Speaker
So what you have to ask yourself then is, are we not having the discussions that really need to be had because we don't know what needs to be had? And we'll talk about that in a second. I'll give you some tools. Or is it because we fundamentally like lack the courage at the moment to say what needs to be said? We know what the issue is, but we're just not tackling it. If it's the latter, then you as the leader need to summon the courage to say what needs to be said and encourage your team to say what needs to be said.
00:07:15
Speaker
Right, so I'm going to assume that you don't know or they don't know, and it's not a case of just dodging the hard conversation. So if you don't know, then the next thing you need to ask yourself is, are we really aligned around a common vision? So what I mean by that is, are we clear on where we're going and how we're going to get there? Do we know what our organization is, like, at its core, and where we're trying to get to? Like, are we trying to grow revenue? Are we trying to grow impact?
00:07:44
Speaker
Are we trying to grow impacts by growing already eco-conscious brands and helping them scale? Or as you alluded to in your letter, are we taking organizations where we find them and sort of transform influencing them and transforming them to become more eco-conscious? It sounds like you might need to introspect with your co-founders and decide what the purpose and vision, what we would call core focus in the EOS world,
00:08:12
Speaker
of your business really is because it sounds like there's a disagreement there as to whether we're transforming big businesses or we're picking already eco-conscious businesses and helping them scale. I guess it sounds like they're different target markets and they're different propositions. And you need to create the environment for your co-founders to get aligned on that, you know, and hopefully facilitate to a place where they can't become aligned.
00:08:40
Speaker
If you can't get them to be fully aligned, then if they want to be in your leadership team, they need to disagree and commit, so you decide, and then they commit to moving forward. If they can't disagree and commit to moving forward, you either are going to need to change the vision to something you can all agree on, or you're going to need to have the hard conversation about somebody possibly getting off the bus.
00:09:06
Speaker
because ultimately it all everything stems from being aligned on a vision and where we're going and how we're going to get there. So I know that's tough, but that's the first point. so So what actually is at the core of your business? What's the focus? What are the priorities? And then that vision allows you to make informed decisions day to day, week to week, month to month. If that's not clear, you need to get clear on that. You can only get clear on that if you've built team health. So hopefully that helps and makes sense from there.
00:09:31
Speaker
Then, of course, you've got to ask yourself if you've got the right people. There are two
Cultural Fit and Role Alignment
00:09:35
Speaker
aspects to having the right people, and in my opinion, and as we teach in the US. So first is getting like the right people on the bus. It's the sort of the Jim Collins good to great thing. um This is about making sure that we've got people who are aligned culturally. So have you defined the values of your organization?
00:09:56
Speaker
And then are you rigorously and regularly checking, we use a tool called the People Analyzer, that the people you've got on the bus do in fact share that common set of values. If you've got people that have got fundamentally different, diversity of perspective is good, but if you've got people that are different at the core, it's going to be very difficult difficult to reconcile them within a common organization. And again,
00:10:25
Speaker
If between your co-founders are in the wider team, you've got like this cultural disunity, then for you as the leader, you're going to have to encourage them to to face into that fact and then have some of the team potentially modify their behaviors and um to get aligned. Or potentially if they can't, then you're going to need to coach them up or out of the organization.
00:10:47
Speaker
The second part of having a great people organization is what we call like right seats. So right people in the right seats. the Right seats is just about whether people are are good at their jobs. So the the tool that we use there is something called the accountability chart. It's really just ah just a visual illustration. It's literally a chart starting with perhaps you in that top seat. We might call that visionary or integrator. You might use a job title like CEO.
00:11:12
Speaker
I'm flowing all the way through the organization. What are the key functions, the seats, and then what are the roles, the things that each seat's responsible for as that flows through? And are you clear, and are the people in your leadership team clear on each of the unique accountabilities for all of the people that work in your organization? And in particular, what are the discrete accountabilities between your two warring co-founders? So between your head of strategy and your creative director, who's responsible for what?
00:11:43
Speaker
Is it one of them or someone else in the organization that's responsible for making sure that we don't miss bid submission dates? Because in your letter you said, because we couldn't agree, we missed the bid deadline and that really demotivated the wider organization. So you've got a few things to unpick there. Do we actually know who's responsible for getting our bids in on time? And then do we have a um clear accountability as between all of the people that need to collaborate to be able to make sure that people do their constituent bits. And then pulling that all together, we've got this concept of of core processes, so how we do what we do. And that might include our sales process or our bid management process. But also something in the EOS that we call the meeting pulse, which is like when and how we do our meetings.
00:12:35
Speaker
We have like a weekly leadership team meeting we call a level 10 meeting, but you'll have all sorts of other recurring meetings that happen rolling through your your week, months, quarters, and even years. And so for example, is there a meeting where people come together to solve issues, right? And it may be that an issue like this where we've got a problem with misalignment around the vision or perhaps a people issue would bubble up in time and it might be brought by the person responsible for getting bids in,
00:13:05
Speaker
that it would be brought up in time for this to get to your desk to enable you to bang heads together, inspire people, whatever you need to do, carrot or stick, to get this answer out there so you can get a solution in place before the bid deadline falls. So that's another thing you should write down and consider. Do we have a regular operating rhythm that allows issues to be seen early and then solved in a calm, predictable way so that we can we can make sure we remove blockages before they cause us pain. So
Summary and Audience Engagement
00:13:38
Speaker
effectively, there were four parts to my long rambling answer to your letter, Emma. Firstly, are you taking responsibility as CEO? Are you building health throughout your organization, but particularly at leadership team level so that you can have open, constructive conflict to really get to the heart of what's going on?
00:13:55
Speaker
Are you actually clear on what the vision for the organisation is so that people can step into that opening that you've created and make correct decisions, directionally correct decisions on where the organisation should be going, how they should be prioritising when challenging issues come up? Have you got the right people on the bus culturally? Are people culturally aligned? And are they clear what they're accountable for so that folks can know that it's on them to either make a decision or to escalate an issue for it to, the traction piece, for it to come into one of our regular meetings in enough time for us to identify, discuss, and solve the issue before something bad happens, like missing a bid deadline. So I hope that's been helpful. Those are just four areas. There's a bunch of other tools and concepts across EOS that might've been relevant to this, but I'm conscious that I've done 10 minutes of this soliloquy now and will be losing listeners if I keep going. If you've got any more questions, as ever my contact details are in the show notes, please reach out to me.
00:14:54
Speaker
love to get more letters from those of you listening that are facing operating dilemmas that you're comfortable sharing with this audience. um And otherwise, even if you don't have a question that you want to share, I love hearing from people that are listening to this. So please don't be a stranger. Just reach out. Have a great week.