I just published “Old-Timers Are Right About What We Are Seeing. We’re Wrong About Why.” A friend sent me a note in response. He framed it as a CEO’s question, but I knew exactly what he was doing. He was testing me.
His note read: “Dave, this is brilliant. You have summarized the change and the challenge. Let’s say I am a CEO of a company that fully sees what you have said play out in my company and I want to DO something today to change it. What specifically do I do—hold meetings, change metrics, hire change experts? What are the literal next 10 actions that I myself must take? No theory, but seeable specific actions.”
The question is brilliant. It is what any hard-charging CEO would want. “I see the problem, I want to fix it, give me the 10-point action plan to get it done.” On the surface, it plays into what we all want; solve the problem so we can move on.
My friend is Mitch Little. He published a brilliant short book titled CUSP: Leading by Serving When Outcomes Matter Most. It’s free to everyone. The question is brilliant both because it is what any high-level executive would want to know, and because answering it with 10 actions violates the very principles Mitch outlines in CUSP.
In CUSP, we learn leadership is more about a way of leading than a set of actions. What leaders do when no one else is watching shapes their behaviors when everyone is. The principles Mitch outlines are Care, Understand, Serve, Purpose. Caring keeps leaders connected to their people, even when pressure drives the opposite. Understanding prevents leaders from acting on partial information, the kind that comes from scorecards and dashboards. Serving means absorbing pressure rather than passing it down. Purpose serves as a North Star when things seem to be going off track. CUSP is what leaders return to when the going gets tough.
Mitch knew what he was doing when he asked me the question. He wanted to see whether I would take the bait.
My knee-jerk reaction might have been to respond to it. When asked for a 10-point action plan, we tend to give a 10-point action plan. That is how too many of us are trained to respond, particularly when the request comes from someone of Mitch’s stature.
If I had taken the bait, it might have looked something like this: “Great question, Mitch, here are 10 things.
- Hold a town hall in week one to acknowledge what is broken.
- Kill three activity metrics within a few days. Pick the ones that focus on cadence rather than judgment: number of dials, number of emails, number of LinkedIn engagements.
- Restore the training and development budgets to the levels of two years ago.
- Mandate one hour of recurring coaching that every leader must schedule with each of their people.
- Participate in three customer calls in the next 30 days with no agenda and no notes.
- Audit the “we are a team” language in all company materials. Eliminate it or earn it.
- Kill one initiative that looks good but produces no meaningful outcomes.
- Change one compensation element to focus on long-term customer outcomes rather than quarterly objectives.
- Publish a written commitment to the team. Put your name on it.
- Hold yourself publicly accountable for these changes for 90 days.”
On the surface, each of these makes sense. Each is defensible.
But the entire thing is wrong! And the reason it is wrong is the heart of why the original article needed to be written.
There are three fundamental reasons the, “give me a list of 10…” is wrong.
The first reason is that the list prescribes more of the disease as the cure. The CEO’s organization got into this mess by treating human work as something to be optimized through programs, projects, and initiatives.
Sales cadences are initiatives. Engagement and culture surveys are initiatives. Activity metrics are initiatives. All of them get dashboarded, reported on, and optimized. And every one of them, as I discussed in the earlier article, is part of what stripped the meaning out of the work in the first place.
Now the CEO sees the damage and wants to fix it. With ten more initiatives. Even if the items themselves are good, but the method contradicts the message. The organization will receive this list the way it has received every previous list. It’s another stack of initiatives to manage and report on. It’s layered on top of all the previous initiatives.
People become more overwhelmed, not less. They have less clarity about what matters, not more. You cannot solve a problem caused by treating people as inputs to be optimized by adding ten new optimization initiatives. You are just piling more on, without understanding the core issues.
The second reason is that the list will be delegated. That is what CEOs do with action items. The CEO who delegates the fix is the same CEO who delegated the cause. The accountability is assigned to other people, the CEO tracks progress on a dashboard, calling for corrective action when the dashboard shows reds and yellows. Asking for specific actions that can be monitored, tracked, and dashboarded, ultimately converted into a slide for board presentations
Reducing things to a list of trackable actions is something that CEOs do every day. But it is this very approach to managing human work that created the detachment in the first place. Doing more of the things in the same way we have always done, won’t produce a different result.
The third reason is that the list doesn’t address the core problem. The CEO is asking what to do today because he feels the pressure of today. But the pressure of today is the same pressure that produced the initiative du-jour environment in the first place. It is the pressure that strips the meaning, scripts the seller, optimizes the metric, and then wonders why no one cares anymore.
The honest answer requires the CEO to do something almost impossible for a CEO. Tolerate the discomfort of not having a list. Sit with the question for longer than feels productive. Let the answer form before he acts.
The CEO who acts on Monday will be solving the wrong problem, fast. That is worse than not acting at all, because now there is a new wrong thing on top of the existing wrong things, and the organization knows that this is just another initiative wave to wait out. As Mitch puts it in CUSP, before we act, we must understand.
So that is what taking the bait would have looked like, and that is why I did not take it. But Mitch did not write me to watch me refuse. He wrote me to see what I would do instead. So let me try to do the thing he was actually asking for, which is harder than the list and which is the real answer to his question.
The real answer begins before any action. It begins with the CEO sitting with two questions, privately, before anyone else is involved.
· What is actually happening in my company? Not what the reports and engagement scores say. What is happening with the people doing the work, the people I do not see and engage with every day?
· And harder than that; what did I do, what did I tolerate being done, what did I fail to do, that helped produce what now needs to be fixed?
These are not action items. They require honest reflection and deep understanding before any action can be taken.
The next step is something too many CEOs never do, she goes and looks. She doesn’t conduct a series of roundtables asking people’s views. She know they will probably say what they think they should be saying.
The CEO actually sits in on the work. She watches what people actually do all day. She practices what Peters and Waterman called Management By Walking Around–MBWA. The CEO looks at the activity metrics his front-line managers are using, asking herself whether those metrics are producing the expected behaviors or being gamed. Daily outreaches, phone calls, scheduled meetings; all of these drive compliance behaviors. None of them drive the outcomes the metric was supposed to produce: stronger pipelines, better deal strategies, higher win rates.
The CEO begins to understand what the work has actually become. She slows down enough to see the reality people face. She resists the urge to act before understanding what action is actually required. And sometimes the most important action is just paying attention.
This is very difficult for most leaders, particularly those who pride themselves on being action-oriented. But unless leaders take this time, little will actually change.
Only after the CEO has taken the time, after understanding the reality her people face, can action begin. And most of the time, the best action is subtraction. Stopping things. Stopping the things that get in the way of people doing their jobs. Stopping the things that are meaningless and do not contribute to real outcomes. Stopping the things that destroy trust. Rather than launching new initiatives, the first move is reducing and eliminating the existing ones. By doing this, leaders identify what actually matters and reestablish focus on it.
In announcing those reductions, leaders also do something else that is rare. They demonstrate accountability. By stopping initiatives they previously championed, they admit they were wrong and are correcting course. That single act communicates more than anything else. People see a senior leader change her mind in public, admitting the organization has to do something different. Most executives never do this.
The next action is the hardest of all. It is giving the initiatives the time to work. There is an impatience for immediate results, and when leaders do not see them, they feel compelled to introduce more changes and new initiatives. The problem is that changes of this kind take time. If we do not take the time to understand and adjust, we will never address the core issues. Sometimes we have to slow down to move fast.
The leader who does these things; who understands, takes ownership, and takes the time, is demonstrating exactly what Mitch focuses on in CUSP. Caring, Understanding, Serving, Purpose are not what you practice when things are easy. They are how leaders conduct themselves when things are tough.
There is also something different in Mitch’s question. He took the time to ask it himself, and to take ownership of the answer. He did not ask, “What does my team have to do?” He asked, “What are the things I should do when I see this happening in the organization?”
Most executives never ask that question. The fact that Mitch did is what makes real change possible. He is engaging with the problem in a way few others ever do. And it is precisely that engagement that makes all the rest of the change possible.
Mitch knew what he was doing when he asked me. The question was the test. The answer he wanted was not a list. What he wanted to see was whether the response would focus on the core issues that underlie all human performance. The principles he outlines in CUSP. They have been tested by Mitch and by others. They take time, focus, and courage. And they drive the highest levels of performance and engagement.
That is the answer to Mitch’s question.
Afterword: Another fascinating AI based discussion of this post! Enjoy!
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