The Frozen Middle Didn’t Freeze Itself

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The all-hands meeting ends and the slides go dark. Dozens of mid-level managers shuffle into the hallway, and before the elevator doors close, the verdict is already in. Not spoken loudly, not written anywhere, just present in the slightly-too-long pause before someone says “interesting presentation” and the eye contact that doesn’t quite happen.

Up on the executive floor, the CEO is telling his senior team the rollout went well.

That gap between what leadership believes happened and what actually happened thirty seconds after the applause is where strategies go to die. They don’t die in the market or because of competition. They die in the hallway.

You Don’t Find the Frozen Middle. You Build It.

Every senior team that has ever complained about middle manager resistance has a version of the same story: vision was clear, strategy was sound, and communication was thorough. Yet somewhere between the boardroom and the front line, the whole thing lost its pulse.

So the diagnosis comes back: the frozen middle. Risk-averse, poorly motivated, chronic blockers of innovation and execution. The managers who were supposed to cascade the change and instead quietly suffocated it.

It’s a convenient diagnosis, and it’s also almost always wrong.

Middle managers don’t freeze because they lack ambition or capability. They freeze because they’ve learned, through years of accumulated evidence, that full commitment to a new direction is a bad personal bet. They’ve watched too many initiatives dissolve the moment they became inconvenient. They’ve seen too many leaders who claimed to want honest feedback and then subtly punished the people who provided it. Too many all-hands meetings promised transformation and delivered only a new set of talking points.

The frozen middle is not a talent problem. It’s a trust deficit wearing a talent problem’s clothes.

They’ve Already Seen This Movie

Overt resistance is actually manageable. The manager who pushes back openly, who asks hard questions in the room, who tells you directly that the plan won’t work, that person is doing you a favor. They’re giving you something true and something you can act on.

The manager you cannot afford is the one who nods.

They use the new vocabulary with fluency and show up to the right meetings saying the right things with enough conviction that nobody flags them as a problem. Then they walk back to their teams and run the exact same playbook they’ve always run, because nobody gave them a genuine reason to do anything different.

That version of non-commitment is almost impossible to detect until it’s already cost you six months and a market window. Your new product arrives late because the people responsible for execution were executing a different agenda. The cost initiative delivers incremental savings against a structural disadvantage that’s been quietly widening. Your quality program shows up just after the customer defections it was supposed to prevent.

You can’t fight what you can’t see, and a nodding manager is invisible until the damage is done.

The Bet They’ve Already Made

Middle managers sit at the most consequential real estate in any organization. Senior executives rotate through roles every few years, while middle managers often stay. They know where the bodies are buried and what actually makes things move inside the organization. They’ve also made a private calculation about whether this initiative is different from the last one, and that calculation is running constantly beneath every meeting, every presentation, and every cascade session you’ve carefully designed.

When they’re genuinely enrolled in a direction, they are your most powerful asset. They break silos and translate strategy into operational reality while absorbing the friction that would otherwise grind execution to a halt. An organization that looks politically dysfunctional on paper starts behaving like one coherent unit, not because the structure changed but because the people in the middle decided to make it work.

When they’re not enrolled, that same network becomes a passive immune system rejecting the change. Not aggressively, not visibly, just consistently.

The question leaders almost never ask is why, not in the abstract, but specifically, in this organization, with these people. The answer almost always comes back to the same four things, and none of them show up in a strategy deck.

Four Things They Need to See, Not Hear

Middle managers won’t commit to any strategy, however elegant, unless they’ve witnessed four specific things from the people asking them to execute it. Not been told, witnessed.

Sincerity. Not the polished narrative about why the new direction is exciting, but the real account of what’s broken and why this direction is genuinely necessary, including the parts that are uncomfortable to say out loud. Leaders who communicate only the comfortable version of the truth train their organizations to distrust every version of it. The moment a manager detects the gap between the story they’re being told and the reality they’re living, the calculation tips. They file the initiative under “things leadership says” and move on.

Courage. Visible willingness to hear hard things and make the hard calls those things require. A leader who signals, even subtly, that they prefer good news will receive only good news, right up until the moment they can no longer afford to. Middle managers watch this closely. They test it, sometimes consciously and sometimes not, by observing what happens to the people who tell the truth. If those people get quietly sidelined, the lesson lands fast and spreads faster.

Competence. Not a perfect plan, nobody has one, but demonstrated ability to manage a strategy through the inevitable messiness of real change. To stay the course when things get harder before they get better and follow through when following through is inconvenient. Middle managers have watched too many initiatives quietly shelved the moment difficulty arrived to keep investing in ones that show no signs of holding. What they’re looking for isn’t certainty. It’s evidence that leadership will still be running this play in eighteen months.

Concern. Genuine, visible regard for the human cost of the plan. Every new strategy creates disruption, and the managers absorbing that disruption on behalf of their teams are watching closely to see whether the people driving the change actually care what it costs. When they conclude it doesn’t, their commitment becomes performance. Polished and consistent, it will sustain itself indefinitely because hollow performance is indistinguishable from real commitment right up until the moment you need the organization to do something genuinely hard.

These four things cannot be communicated in a meeting. They accumulate through behavior over time, or they don’t accumulate at all.

What Actually Travels Downward

The most common mistake in large-scale transformation is the belief that alignment, once achieved at the top, naturally flows downward through the organization. Enroll the senior team and extend to the next tier, and the momentum carries itself from there.

It doesn’t.

Alignment has to be built deliberately at every level with every group of people being asked to execute it. Not because people are resistant by nature, but because commitment requires context and context requires real conversation, not a cascade deck and a follow-up survey. Most leaders don’t build that time into their transformation plans, and the gap shows up exactly where you’d expect: in the hallway, thirty seconds after the applause.

What actually travels downward without that deliberate investment is language. People learn the new vocabulary without internalizing the new direction. The words move through the organization and the belief stays behind. Leaders hear the right things being said and conclude the work is done, which is precisely the moment the hallway starts filling up with “un” words again.

The problem was never the frozen middle. It was leaders who treated enrollment as an event rather than a relationship, who measured success by what people said in the room rather than what happened in the hallway thirty seconds later, and who confused the cascade of language with the building of genuine commitment.

Middle managers are not blockers; they are mirrors. What looks like resistance is usually a precise and accurate reflection of what leadership has actually demonstrated, not what it has announced. The frozen middle thaws when it has genuine reasons to, when it has seen sincerity and courage and competence and concern accumulated through consistent behavior over time, not delivered in a single compelling presentation.

The CEO who wants to know why transformation stalled doesn’t need a better strategy or a more sophisticated cascade plan. He needs to go stand in the hallway and listen to what happens after the applause.

That’s where the real audit begins.

The moment a room changes

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Most leaders have never seen it happen in real time. They’ve read about alignment, sat through presentations about it, nodded at the frameworks. But they’ve never been in a room when a leadership team, mid-conversation, becomes something else entirely.

I have. And once you’ve witnessed it, you understand why nothing else in organizational life comes close.

The Room Before

I worked with a $700 million national technology business that had spent seven years tripling itself. Not through luck or through favorable market conditions. But through a leadership team willing to commit to things that looked unreasonable from the outside and then find a way to deliver them.

I was facilitating their strategy alignment session when the CFO stood up and made the case for committing to surpassing one billion dollars in revenue.

A handful of his peers nodded immediately. Others started squirming.

You could see it physically. Leaders shifting in their seats, arms crossing, expressions moving between genuine inspiration and the cold honest weight of the markets they were operating in.

This is the moment most alignment conversations collapse. The bold voice gets quietly outvoted by cautious ones, and everyone settles for a number that feels responsible and produces nothing remarkable.

What Happened Instead

The EVP of Services stood up. Bold, entrepreneurial, thinking in possibilities rather than constraints. His argument was direct: if teams worked in genuine alignment and brought integrated offers to market together, they could attract larger, more strategic clients. The growth wasn’t theoretical. It was sitting right in front of them, unclaimed, because they’d been operating as separate functions instead of one unified organization.

The Director of Services reinforced it immediately. The math worked if they were willing to move together. Then several other leaders made their cases, building on each other instead of defending against each other. The momentum was real and moving in one direction.

The CEO had been listening the entire time without interjecting. After everyone said their piece, I asked for his perspective.

What followed wasn’t a presentation. It was a reminder.

He took his leaders back seven years, to when the company was a $200 million organization with a declared ambition to become the dominant player in their domain. Then he reminded them that this wasn’t the first time they’d sat in a room like this. Every three years, this same conversation had happened. Every three years, they had looked at a goal that seemed too large, too bold, too disconnected from current reality, and committed to it anyway. And every single time, they had not just reached it. They had surpassed it.

He wasn’t asking them to believe in a spreadsheet. He was inviting them to trust what they had already proven about themselves, individually and collectively, repeatedly, over seven years of doing exactly this.

As he spoke, I watched the room change.

Leaders who had been squirming started leaning forward. Shoulders dropped, heads began nodding, not the polite nodding of people managing their reactions, but the involuntary nodding of people whose thinking is actually moving.

When the CEO sat down, the room went silent. Not the silence of confusion or reluctance. The silence of 100 people processing something they had just decided, together, without being told to.

I asked every leader aligned with the bold promise of exceeding a billion dollars to raise their hand.

Every hand in the room went up.

What That Moment Actually Was

It would be easy to call this inspiration. The CEO gave a powerful speech, the room got energized, hands went up. That’s not what happened.

The CEO’s reminder landed the way it did because the room had already been doing the work. He didn’t create the alignment. He completed it. Not with a vision of a future they had never seen, but with the evidence of a pattern they had already lived.

Within minutes, the energy in that room was categorically different. Decisions that had been stuck started moving. Leaders who had been operating in silos started having conversations about integration and shared clients. The squirming stopped not because the market got easier or the target got smaller, but because 100 people had made a genuine commitment to the same future and could feel that everyone around them had made the same one.

A unified leadership team that trusts its own proven ability to deliver finds a way. A fractured team with a safer number finds excuses.

The Question Your Room Is Asking

The billion-dollar commitment didn’t come from a strategy deck or an accounting exercise. It came from leaders who trusted each other enough to be honest, built on each other’s thinking, and were reminded by their CEO that bold commitments were exactly what they were capable of keeping.

Your leadership team has that same capacity. The question worth sitting with is whether you’ve created the conditions for it to surface, or whether your team is still having the real conversation in the parking lot after the meeting ends.

One of those produces raised hands. The other produces seven more years of leaving what’s possible on the table.

Most leaders don’t know how to communicate a message – and it shows

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It still amazes me how many senior leaders, intelligent, experienced, highly educated professionals, simply don’t know how to communicate a message clearly and effectively. There are so many examples. You can see this so clearly when watching leaders deliver presentations.

They spend hours building PowerPoint decks, obsessing over font size and color schemes, but when they stand up to speak, they lose the plot. Their slides are packed, their timing is rushed, and their audience walks away confused, disengaged, or worse, unmoved. Indifferent.

PowerPoint has been the universal business language for decades. But the real problem isn’t the tool. It’s that too many leaders use it as a crutch instead of a medium for impact.

The epidemic of over-talking and under-communicating

I’ve watched countless executives try to cram ninety minutes of content into a thirty-minute meeting. They talk faster, flip slides faster, and seem to believe that if they can “get through it,” they’ve done their job.

They don’t pause to read the room. They don’t notice when people escape to their phones or check out completely. They miss the cues, glazed eyes, crossed arms, restless body language, all signaling one thing: “You lost me.”

Instead of adjusting, they double down. More words. More slides. More noise.

And when time runs out, they rush the ending or skip it altogether. Everyone leaves without clarity or conviction. That’s not communication. That’s self-indulgence.

The real problem: everything feels important

Most leaders fall into the same trap. They’re hypnotized by their own content. They think everything they want to say is equally important.

They confuse information with impact. They confuse talking with influencing.

They forget that communication is not about everything you know. It’s about what will make the biggest difference to your audience in this moment.

If you can’t tell the difference between what’s essential and what’s merely interesting, you will drown your message, and your credibility, in words.

The organizational consequences

Poor communication isn’t just a personal weakness; it’s an organizational liability.

When leaders don’t communicate clearly, the entire company suffers.

  • Alignment breaks down.Teams leave meetings with different interpretations of what was said, and act on conflicting assumptions.
  • Decisions slow down.Too much talk, too little clarity. Time is wasted rehashing topics that should have been settled the first time.
  • Execution falters.People can’t execute what they don’t understand. When messages are vague, accountability erodes.
  • Culture deteriorates.Employees lose faith in leadership, energy drops, and cynicism and resignation rise, because people feel trapped in endless talk with not enough real progress.
  • Results decline.Projects miss deadlines, customers feel the inconsistency, and performance suffers.

The damage compounds over time. The organization becomes a place where communication is tolerated, not mastered, where everyone talks but few are truly heard and make a difference.

By contrast, when leaders communicate with precision and power, the effect is immediate and contagious:

  • Clarity replaces confusion.People know what matters and act accordingly.
  • Momentum builds.Meetings shorten, execution accelerates, and results improve.
  • Culture strengthens.Resignation lifts, people feel connected to purpose and leadership again. And there is an organization consciousness and intent to make the greatest difference when communicating.
  • Trust deepens.When communication is honest and effective, credibility rises, and so does performance.

Communication mastery doesn’t just make you a better speaker. It makes you a more powerful leader who makes a greater difference. And it makes your organization more coherent, confident, and unstoppable.

Communication is about altitude

Every message has an altitude. At 50,000 feet, you’re talking about purpose, vision, and direction. At 10,000 feet, you’re discussing strategy. On the ground, it’s execution and details.

Great communicators know how to adjust their altitude based on time and audience. If you have five minutes, you speak at 50,000 feet. If you have thirty or more, you descend.

But too many leaders try to cover everything, all altitudes, all details, all points, regardless of time. They treat a 15-minute update like a half-day workshop.

This results in information overload, zero retention, and wasted time.

Five ways to communicate like a leader

  1. Start with impact, not information.
    Start from the end. Before you build a single slide, ask yourself: What difference do I want to make with this presentation?What do I want people to think, feel, or do differently as a result? Build your presentation from there. Everything else is noise.
  2. Cut the “interesting.”
    Most leaders overload their message with nice-to-know content. Ruthlessly remove anything that doesn’t serve your core purpose. Your audience doesn’t need to see how smart you are or how much you know. They need to see what matters.
  3. Practice highlighting the essence, no matter your time.
    Practice delivering your message in 30 minutes, 15 minutes, and 5 minutes. Learn to distinguish between essence and preference. When you master that, you’ll always hit the mark, no matter how much time you’re given.
  4. Rehearse for clarity, not performance.
    Stand in front of a mirror or a colleague with a stopwatch. Speak slowly, pause, and breathe. If you can’t deliver your message calmly and clearly in real time, your audience will feel your rush and disconnect.
  5. Read the room.
    During your presentation your audience is giving you feedback every second, with their eyes, posture, and silence. Pay attention. If you’ve lost them, stop. Re-engage. Ask questions. Great presenters don’t deliver speeches. They create conversations.

From content to connection

PowerPoint is a tool. Leadership communication is an art and learnable skill. The goal isn’t to transfer information. It’s to enroll others in purpose, commitment, and action.

The best communicators don’t need more slides. They need more awareness, more empathy, and more discipline to focus on what truly matters.

Your message doesn’t have to be long to be powerful. It has to be clear, human, and relevant. Because in the end, communication either accelerates performance, or undermines it.

Every presentation, meeting, and conversation is an opportunity to raise the standard, to speak with clarity, create alignment, and move people to act. So, communicate with intention, own your message, and make every word count.

 

What gifts have you received during the COVID era?

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Recently my wife and I were sitting on the porch drinking our morning tea. My wife was reading me a new affirmation she had received via social media about how COVID has presented the world with unique opportunities to reprioritize and focus on what is most important, yadda, yadda, yadda…

I am sure like me you have received many of these affirmations and videos. Many of them rung true, some even touched and inspired me.

In the same spirit, I asked my wife: “What gifts have WE received so far during the COVID era?”

My wife and I generally feel very blessed in our lives and we frequently count our blessings. This has especially been the case recently as we know that COVID has had devastating effects on many people in terms of lost loved ones, serious illness and loss of livelihood.

I challenged my wife to share her views on “What net new gifts have we received as a direct result of the COVID era? In other words, what good things have happened to us that would not have otherwise occurred without the pandemic?”

We came up with a list of things that were meaningful to us. Here are a few of them:

  1. We grew closer to our kids
  2. Our kids grew closer between themselves
  3. We spent more quality time and grew closer as a family
  4. My daughter had wanted to change her job for a long time, but she was too comfortable. Her employer had to shut down the business, and she was temporarily laid off, which gave her the opportunity and courage to resign and start working on a new direction
  5. We completed a few projects in our home that were on our ‘bucket’ list for a long time
  6. I significantly improved my classical guitar performance.
  7. Our garden is looking more beautiful than ever…

While traditional and social media keep pumping the notion of looking at the half-full part of the glass and finding the silver lining in the COVID era, I am not sure how many of us truly feel and own it.

Most of us probably dedicate a big part of our mindshare to coping and managing our work/home life, another part to keeping updated with information and relationships, and the rest to hoping, wishing and waiting for things to get back to ‘normal’.

How much time do we really spend on acknowledging our ‘COVID gifts’ and enjoying them?

I invite you to do the exercise of listing all your COVID gifts. You could do it alone or with your loved ones.

When you do it, keep your list specific and real. Don’t censor or judge. Don’t disqualify any gift because it is ‘too small’. If it is something that enriched your life and you feel that in reality it wouldn’t have naturally or easily happened without the COVID era, count it in.

If you come up empty-handed and you feel you didn’t receive any gifts it could be for two reasons:

  1. You are too self-critical or cynical. In this case, be more generous with yourself and find the gifts that probably exist. Alternatively, ask someone who knows you well and help you see the gifts that you received and have not acknowledged.
  2. You are not taking advantage of this era and living as fully as you can. If this is the case, it is never too late. Start now. Connect with your loved ones and friends. Use any extra time to complete something you have been wanting to achieve for a while. Read a book, learn something, be creative, watch a Netflix series, clean out a corner in your home or help someone else.

There are always gifts. You just have to be ready and willing to see and own them.

Success through Rigor, Clarity, and Responsibility

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Often when managers and employees feel frustrated about other’s lack of accountability, and they describe the reality as: “They promised to do X and didn’t deliver!” there is more to the story than that.

I have seen many times, in situations of conflict or dispute, person A insisting that person B promised to do or deliver something and simply did not do so, while person B denies ever having made the promise in the first place.

Both parties feel frustrated and resentful. Each one believes their version of the story represents the facts and truth. However, in many cases, when both parties step back, look a bit deeper, and try to view the situation more objectively, they realize that it was not bad intent caused their heartache, but rather the lack of rigor and clarity in their initial interaction.

If you want to avoid the common issues that happen when requesting or promising, there are a few things to pay attention to:

  1. Make sure what you are requesting or promising is clear, understood, and agreed to in the same way by both sides. Often, instead of explicitly spelling it out, people assume the other person knows what they are requesting or promising. It probably won’t be an exaggeration to say that, more often than not, people simply do not understand and/or are not aligned about what is being promised or requested. Needless to say, this causes mismatched expectations, that always lead to upset.
  2. Make sure the time frame of the promise or request is clear. For example, if you are asking for additional resources or budget for a strategic project, be specific about the time frame (the ‘by when’). Don’t leave it vague, or hope they’ll understand your urgency or act on it rapidly. And, if the person you are requesting this from promises to make it happen, “As soon as possible,” don’t settle for the lack of clarity… And don’t fall into the trap of assuming you will get what you need in the time you need it. Furthermore, don’t feel disappointed if your expectations were not met.
  3. Make sure the level of sincerity and commitments toward the promise is explicit. When you make a request and someone responses with “I’ll do my best” or “I don’t see any reason why not,” don’t make the mistake of taking that as an affirmation of commitment. A promise is clear, explicit, and unconditional. This doesn’t mean that a promise is a guarantee and, therefore, will always be fulfilled. However, when someone says: “I promise,” “You can count on me,” or “You have my word,” that represents a much stronger, sincerer, and more committed intention to do what they said. People often avoid this level of clarity because it is uncomfortable, and they fear it could lead to the realization that they may not get what they want.
  4. Check-in, follow up, and support the promise while it is being delivered. When someone promises you something, and they are in the process of working on it, your job is not over. You need to stay engaged and involved throughout the duration of the delivery cycle as a committed and vested partner in order to keep the promise alive. This interaction will look different depending on the nature of the promise and person you are dealing with. Sometimes it may mean checking in on a frequent basis. At other times, it may mean looking the person in the eye at the onset to get a sense of confidence that they really mean it, understood it, and will follow through. The main reason for avoiding this conversation is because it is disruptive and uncomfortable. People fear it could lead to the realization that they may not get what they want.
  5. Manage undelivered promises with integrity. No matter how sincere the promise, it is never a guarantee. Things happen, and people who promise sometimes fail to deliver or change their mind. If you understand and accept that simple fact, you will be in a much better mental place to deal with undelivered promises. For the most part, people know ahead of the deadline that they are not going to deliver what they promised. But unfortunately, while people seem to have no problem not doing what they said, they do have a problem being straight up and upfront about it.

The lack of courage to acknowledge and take responsibility for promises that won’t be delivered often goes both ways – to the one promising and the one being ‘promised to.’ Have you ever been in a situation in which someone promised you something, you had a feeling they may not come through, and still you avoided confronting them about it?

Regardless of your position and seniority – if you are not going to deliver on your promise, letting others find out at the last minute and be surprised is not acceptable. It undermines trust, credibility, confidence, and success.

If you can’t deliver what you promised, communicate in a timely and responsible manner. Then the two of you – together – can figure out alternative solutions and routes to rectify the situation or take a different course.

People want to fulfill their commitments and succeed, but they also can handle the truth, even if it is bad news. By interacting with rigor, clarity, courage, and responsibility, you are promoting respect, emphasizing other’s strengths, and enabling success.

 

Can you tolerate brutal honesty?

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There are two types of leaders – those who can only tolerate brutal honesty and those who cannot tolerate brutal honesty at all.

Leaders who are relentless about driving a culture of open, honest, and courageous communication around them are typically extremely committed to high performance. They have zero interest in, or tolerance for, internal drama or politics. They operate at a high level of personal integrity, authenticity, and ownership. And, they expect and demand the same from people around them.

They make it difficult – if not impossible – for people to get away with doing the things that undermine and weaken the organization, such as pointing fingers, adopting a victim mentality, indulging in destructive politics, and “cover-your-ass” behaviors.

These dynamics and behaviors distract everyone from the goals of the organization, and even if these behaviors are subtle, they drain energy and waste everyone’s time. Eventually, people begin to feel that they cannot make a difference, and the organization loses focus and cannot achieve the results it seeks. In today’s environment of growing competition and limited resources, no company can afford this.

In contrast, leaders who avoid brutal honesty at all costs are part of the problem. They enable and permit unclarity and vagueness in roles, decisions, and objectives.  Lack of clarity often fuels politics. Contrary to their declarations, leaders who lack courage thrive in political environments. In fact, they use the politics to hide and manipulate people to do what they want them to do without having to do the tough ‘dirty work’ of taking a stand, expressing how they feel, making clear decisions in sensitive areas, and giving direct feedback and coaching to their people.

I was working with a senior executive team of a very large global service company. At the start of our engagement, I interviewed all the senior executives and a handful of managers to gain insight into the culture and dynamic of the organization and its senior team. The interviews revealed significant issues and dysfunctionalities in the levels of trust, cohesion, collaboration, and communication between lines-of-business and functions, as well as between the senior executives themselves, including the CEO.

When I presented my findings, all the executives confirmed the issues. While people were somewhat startled by my summary, everyone seemed extremely relieved that the truth was finally out.

The executives were eager to engage in open and honest dialogue to address the issues and start driving change.

While there were no disagreements about the issues, the CEO took the dysfunctionalities personally. Despite his declarations to the contrary, he behaved in a defensive and passive-aggressive way, suppressing all courage, goodwill, and progress. Needless to say, the executives became weary and fearful of expressing their views. The dialogue became inauthentic and useless; everyone left the conversation feeling frustrated and discouraged about the lack of senior openness to change.

I could see over a short period of time, following the meeting, that the executives started to disengage and invest less of their commitment, passion, and energy in trying to change things.

Any manager or employee can be the catalyst for change, even reversing damage created by past-behaviors and establishing new high-performance team dynamics. It takes courage to be a role model and hold others to account. In fact, in an environment where people are used to only voicing what they think their leaders want to hear, managers need to stand for a higher standard of brutal honesty, refusing to settle for any less than that!

No matter which method they use, they must make their unconditional commitment to honesty known and must convince their people that they mean it. It’s not enough to declare it. Managers need to demonstrate through action that they are genuinely open to feedback, criticism, and input, including about themselves.

As we all know:

It takes ten rights to fix one wrong and one wrong to undermine ten rights.

The leadership philosophy of open, honest, authentic, and courageous communication can be messy, lonely, and painful at times. However, when leaders have the courage to behave authentically every day, a powerful platform of authentic team ownership, commitment, and accountability emerges around them.

Brutally honest leaders inspire, empower, and equip the people around them to tackle any challenge and/or opportunity they encounter, no matter how unfamiliar, complex, or difficult, in a powerful and unstoppable manner.

Nothing can beat that!

 

Do you just complain or actually do something about it?

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I am constantly blown away by my observation that people in organizations – at all levels – prefer to complain and whine about the things they are not happy about rather than doing something about it.

In fact, when things don’t work effectively, people tend to spend more time covering their behind – i.e., making sure everyone in the universe knows it is not their fault, instead of trying to figure out how to fix the problem.

That is why people rarely step up to outright declare, “You can count on me – I will fix this!” Instead, they prefer to copy the entire universe on their self-protection emails…  or as these are referred to – C.Y.A. or “cover your ass”.

This behavior is very pervasive. I see and hear it everywhere, every day.

In fact, I was in an airport taking a flight the other day. It was not a busy time, so hardly any people in the line. As I was going through security, I couldn’t help but hear the security staff whining and complaining about their supervisor. One of them went on and on about how their supervisor didn’t give them enough time to go to the bathroom. Another added her own criticism about the fact that the supervisor reprimanded her for not doing her job correctly. They were feeding off of each other in a frenzy. It went on for 5 minutes.

First of all, I felt embarrassed for them. It wasn’t appropriate for them to have that conversation in front of the customers – me. However, I guess they were so upset and resigned they didn’t even think about that.

More importantly, I wanted to interrupt and ask: “Did you speak with your supervisor about these issues?. Did you try and do something to correct these small easy-to-fix issues?” However, I didn’t. I am sure the answer would have been a resounding, “NO!”

Everywhere I go, I people-watch and can sometimes find myself inadvertently eavesdropping on conversations. Obviously, I don’t do it rudely or inappropriately, but people tend to speak loudly when they are passionate or upset about something, so I pick up on it – probably an occupational hazard.

It seems that everywhere I go people are complaining and whining about their hardships, rather than making attempts to do something productive about it.

After all, why take responsibility when you can be a victim and blame others for the issues. It is so much easier to exist this way.

However, being a victim comes with a hefty price. Primarily, you stay small, you lose your power to shape and influence your circumstance, and you feel resigned.

The good news is that anyone can change their orientation at will. If you are fed up with the powerless conversations, change the channel, and start engaging in powerful conversations.

This means start making clear and direct requests; it may require you to promise things in return. In addition, it means stop participating in the around-the-cooler bitching sessions, which don’t make any tangible difference other than promoting self-righteousness.

You always have a choice when you are unhappy about your circumstances or predicaments – you can just complain or actually do something about it!

 

Agreeing to disagree is always a cop-out

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Too often I see the following scenario: A team meets to discuss issues critical to the organization’s success. The conversation goes on and on without resolution, as different people have divergent opinions about the best course of action. When the leader tries to bring it to a conclusion, they are no closer to alignment. They leave the meeting “agreeing to disagree.”

Such meetings are worse than a waste of time, in fact, they can actually damage the organization, which is then no closer to making the decisions and assuming responsibility for them. People stay within their comfort zones at the expense of moving the organization forward in new and dynamic ways.

Take as an example a successful technology company that was trying to take its game to the next level. One of their biggest challenges – and opportunity – was to get all their business units and functions working together in a more cohesive and aligned way. Instead of interacting with customers with one voice, different sales and services groups were promoting their own agendas, often competing with other internal groups for customers’ mind-share and business. Cross-selling was suffering and a lot of potential revenues was left on the table.

The senior leadership team of this company made many attempts to get on the same page. They scheduled many long and exhausting meetings, but these perpetuated the vagueness and didn’t create clarity and alignment. Leaders left these meetings with different understandings and expectations and every time issues came up and a leader would say “But, we agreed on this!” a colleague would respond with “We never agreed on this!” Needless to say, this company was not going to the next level any time soon.

Why does this happen? It is either because leaders lack the courage to drive clarity in the face of controversy, or they lack the understanding of their role as leaders, or they lack the ability to effectively manage conversations.

True leaders know how important it is to have an open debate with honest, respectful listening because there is rarely a single right answer to any dilemma or question. They are able to elevate their people to set aside their personal egos, agendas, and preferences to align with the collective wisdom of the group. They instill in their teams a real commitment to the type of conversation that leads to making choices, aligning behind those choices, and taking responsibility together. This requires courage.

There is never a justification to leave a conversation agreeing to disagree. It is always a cop-out!

Of course, some topics are complex and may need a number of meetings to gather the necessary input and to digest it as a group. But paralysis by analysis is always an excuse to avoid taking a stand. And, the cost of lack of decisiveness, accountability, and follow-through is cynicism, resignation, and stagnation.

Achieving extraordinary results requires the ability to align on goals. Agreeing to disagree precludes that. Organizations that achieve 100 percent alignment behind a goal that is 80 percent right have a much greater chance of success than those where people are divided behind a perfect goal. Compromise too often means that some of the people are 100 percent behind one point of view and others are zero percent. How motivated are those ‘zero percent people’ to work towards the success of a goal they have not endorsed? They are the ones watching and waiting to say: “I told you so”.

Obviously, it is scary to step up to the plate and take full responsibility for a goal or direction that is uncertain, controversial, difficult to achieve, or politically incorrect. Making choices means eliminating alternatives. But when team members do find the courage to make tough choices, they are immediately more powerful. They are able to apply their energy towards proving their choices right rather than wasting energy on proving that others are wrong.

 

How to make your meetings more productive and fulfilling – part two

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In my last blog, I stated that one of the most common complaints I hear in organizations is “We have too many meetings.”

To coordinate and drive a complex team and business you do need enough points of contacts to make sure plans are clear and people are on the same page. Getting all the stakeholders in one room at one time is often the most effective way to do that.

Unfortunately, even though people have the right intent at heart because they don’t know how to run effective conversations people too often leave these meetings feeling that they didn’t produce enough value and progress, and therefore they were a waste of their time. And this, of course only adds to the overall frustration and mindset of “Too many meetings.”

In my previous blog, I outlined a few practical tips for making your meeting more productive and fulfilling. Here are a few additional tips:

Don’t compromise on the quality and integrity of the dialogue:

Yes, spend as little time as is needed to achieve the outcomes. However, do it without compromising on the quality and integrity of the dialogue.

If an important topic takes more time than allocated, do not shortcut the discussion and move on without having achieved its outcome. Manage the agenda based on achieving the outcomes, not time allocations.

Sometimes topics are large and complex and you may need more information or time to align on the decision, beyond the time you have during the current meeting. That’s fine, as long as you are sure you make a clear decision and commitment about by when you will make the decision. Don’t leave anything open or vague. Committing to commit is a powerful move.

It’s also legitimate to say “We are not going to make any decision or commitment on this topic at this point.” Committing to not commit is a clear commitment. Just make sure everyone understands and owns the consequence of that commitment.

As stated above, some topics require more debate. Don’t lose patience or react or take shortcuts to alignment. It will come back to haunt you in the future.

Don’t tolerate any cynicism or sarcasm. It undermines the debate. When people passionately debate topics they often say things like “That’s just semantics“, but then they continue to fight for their point of view with vengeance. Everything is semantics. We live in semantics. How we articulate and say things – especially decisions and commitments – is critical to our future direction and team strength.

Remember, another few minutes today could save you many hours and a lot of heartache in the future. Therefore, go all the way to reach genuine alignment.

Insist that people only talk if they are going to forward the action.

If you want your team members to speak and engage in effective conversation that achieves 100% alignment especially around complex issues or decisions, get your people to follow this rule: “Always forward the action when you speak”.

This means that you should encourage people to express their views. However, when they are done ask them to end with “Therefore I propose…” and propose something.

You want people to be focused on achieving the outcomes you set rather than opinions for the sake of opinion, which is what happens in most meetings, most of the time.  When there are uncertain, uncomfortable or tough choices and decisions to make, people tend to opt out to merely highlight the dilemma rather than take a stand, which is what powerful leaders do. Too many people get away every day by talking a lot without saying much.

Your meetings would be much more effective if the people who don’t have something to say that will forward the action – don’t say anything at all!

How to make your meetings more productive and fulfilling – part one

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One of the most common complaints I hear in organizations is “we have too many meetings.” I believe in most organizations there are too many meetings. However, I also believe that what is causing people’s frustrations about meetings is the fact that most meetings are ineffective. They don’t produce enough and they don’t leave people with the experience of ‘time well-spent’ and having produced great accomplishments.

If you make your meetings much more powerful and effective I believe people will feel differently about “too many meetings.”

Here are a few practical tips for making your meetings much more productive and fulfilling:

Focus on achieving outcomes, not discussing topics

This guideline may seem simple and common sense, however, the inverse is true for most teams, as they typically orient their meetings around filling time slots with discussion topics.

It starts at the planning stage. Typically, the head of the meeting gathers from team members topics that require dialogue or decision. He or she then attributes time to each topic on the list and slots them into the agenda, which gets distributed to the team.

I have been in so many meetings that begin with a slide that shows the agenda – the sequence of topics in their time slots.

Furthermore, so often when I ask the meeting facilitator “How did the meeting go?”, he or she says “Great, we kept to the agenda“.

Instead of falling into the trap of filling time with topics, begin each meeting by creating clarity and alignment around the intended outcomes of the meeting. You can do this before the meeting as part of the preparation or in the meeting itself. Always state the intended outcomes in terms of clear end-results, not activities.

Having clear outcomes in front of you throughout the meeting will help you to navigate the discussion and stay on topic, especially when people react to others’ statements and want to steer the dialogue down unproductive rabbit holes or in unplanned directions.

Also, make sure that when you achieve an outcome acknowledge its fulfillment and completion. Don’t just jump to the next one. This will generate a sense of progress and accomplishment, consistent with your purpose.

Spend as little time as is needed to achieve the outcomes

People will discuss any topic for as long or short as the time allocated for that topic – regardless of necessity or effectiveness. Therefore, the shorter the time you can spend on a topic to achieve the outcome you desire, without compromising the quality of the conversation the better.

Leaders often seem to feel that if they don’t have a long conversation with their team about a topic people won’t align, or their alignment won’t be genuine. That is not true. More often than not the only reason discussions are so long and tedious is because the leaders allow that or even promote that.

For example, when presenting a new direction moving forward, I see a lot of leaders present then ask questions such as: “Does anyone have anything to say?”, “Does anyone have a different view?” or “How do you feel about this?”.

These are the wrong questions to ask, and they will most likely lead to a long and ineffective discussion.  Why? Because people always have something to say, and a feeling about everything. You don’t want to hear how people feel about the new direction.

This may seem trivial, but it isn’t – if you ask people to share how they feel or if they have anything to say, guess what – they will. How people feel is not a critical condition for alignment.

Instead, you should ask two more important questions:

First – “Does anyone have any questions about our new direction?” If you feel the need, you could ask someone to share their understanding of the new direction, just to be sure.

Second – “Are you all willing to align with this direction?“If everyone says “YES” you have accomplished what you wanted. If someone says “NO” then you need to continue the dialogue to see what is missing or the way for the unaligned to align.

There is no contradiction between someone saying “I am aligned” and “I still have concerns, fears, doubts, etc.” As long as everyone has the same understanding of what Alignment means you will be in great shape. It means: Owning the decision and/or commitment as my own decision and/or commitment.

Spending as little time as needed to achieve the outcome is only half of the story. Next week I will complete this blog with the second half of my advice on how to make your meetings more productive and fulfilling.

 

How much honesty can you stomach?

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If you ask the senior leaders of any organization how things are going in their organization, they would probably give you an upbeat, positive, optimistic description. If you then ask the shop-floor employees, the same question you would probably hear a different story.

From many years of experience, I can attest that there is often a dissonance between how senior leaders view their organizational and business reality and how employees do. While senior leaders often paint a rosier picture and claim that things are going well, even if there are issues, their people often highlight all the issues and describe things as not going that well.

In addition, employees often express frustrations about their senior leaders. They often say things like:

“We can’t be honest with our managers about the burning issues because they only want to hear good news. As a result, they don’t understand the full extent of the problem and we can’t address and change things…”

If you want to fix or change things or take any aspect of your business to a higher level, you have to start with honesty. You have to make sure employees and managers at all levels feel comfortable and safe to bring up the issues and problems, no matter how ugly or uncomfortable they may be.

Leaders who can stand in front of their superiors, peers, and people and acknowledge: “This isn’t working!” without discounting or sugar-coating the issues have a much greater chance to turn things around and generate breakthroughs.

Unfortunately, so many leaders seem insecure in this area. They seem to be so concerned about how exposing issues would reflect on their personal brand, that their self-preservation concerns hinder their ability to acknowledge and address the issues heads on.

So many leaders come across as politically correct and covering their behinds when talking about the issues. They can’t seem to be able to say: “This is not working. We need to fix it!” Instead, they say things like: “Things are going well, but we have an opportunity to improve…”

Their vague and watered-down pronouncement prevents them from fully owning and addressing their issues. It also weakens their ability to generate urgency to fix what isn’t working. In addition, their lack of blunt honesty hurts their credibility with their people, who usually know exactly how severe the issues are.

Just reflect on any corporate scandal or breakdown that has been in the news in the last few years and you’ll see a similar pattern – customers experience a big issue – be it environmental, safety or quality issues.

Once the issues are publicly exposed – often in the media, the PR department goes full-throttle into damage control. The CEO makes a public apology and the clean-up begins, including things like a stop in manufacturing and/or a product recall.

However, the question that never gets addressed is – Why did the breakdown happen in the first place?

From many years of working with organizations, I can tell you with confidence that employees and supervisors on the shop floor always know about quality and safety problems long before top managers become aware of them.

In a company where leaders are unafraid to hear the truth, employees tend to follow suit and be courageous and vocal too. This environment is much more conducive for everyone at all levels making it their daily business to make sure things are working the way they need to. In those organizations, important information, no matter how sensitive, controversial or troubling, percolates up to the right places very fast.

However, in organizations where leaders are reluctant to hear the truth, people tend to hide and cover their behind. Finger-pointing blossoms, people do as they are told but they are unwilling to be the bearers of bad news. When you don’t have honesty, leaders remain oblivious and blind to the issues and as a result, they don’t own, confront and address them effectively.

You need courage to look in the mirror, face reality and own the uncomfortable and challenging situations. When you do it, you move from being smaller than your problems to being bigger than them. When this shift happens, you always feel more empowered and eager to take action and turn things around.

Honesty is the mandatory first step for taking the game to the next level in any area. And, as the saying goes, “The truth shall set you free.” Even if at first it will “piss you off.”

Are you managing your objectives or are they managing you?

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Aspiring people have personal and professional goals as do most driven teams.

However, having goals is a double-edged sword. Goals could be a blessing or a curse, depending on how you relate to them.

Why?

We create goals in order to focus, compel and motivate ourselves and others. If we are ambitious, we typically take on bold and aggressive ones. We don’t stop there; we typically create a detailed execution plan with strategies and milestones.

Then we delve into implementing our goals and it doesn’t take long before we are so immersed in the roller coaster of our day-to-day life that we forget that we are the ones who came up with our goals in the first place.

When we achieve our goals, meet our milestones and/or achieve our plan as we wanted, we feel great. More than that, we believe we are great. Our mood and spirit are uplifted, we feel empowered and invincible.

However, when we fall short or fail to achieve our goals, milestones or plan we tend to feel disappointed, upset, anxious and/or stressed. We often second-guess our ability to achieve future goals, in the same or other areas. We get nervous about how others will view us. We often even make it mean that we will never achieve our vision or that it will never work smoothly for us.

For the most part, our relationship with falling short is not simple or objective; we don’t view it as: “we have failed to achieve a goal”. We make it mean something much bigger: “we are failures”.

Actually, in both success and failure, we tend to have a reactive and undermining relationship. Both leave us smaller than our circumstances, commitments and dreams. If we fail to achieve a goal, we feel a failure. If we achieve our goal, we feel invincible.

In both scenarios, our identity and self-worth are wrapped up in external circumstances. In either scenario, we are only as worthy as our results in relation to our objectives. And, because we created our objectives and then forgot that key fact, we are now prisoners of our own creation.

The only reason for having goals in the first place is in order to empower and inspire us to reach higher grounds. Creating goals that compel us is a powerful act. However, by forgetting, or not owning that we are the creators of such a powerful dynamic, we lose all the power.

Corporations often take the objective game to a whole other level of drama.

I was supporting a regional sales team of a global product and service organization that recently became public. The company was growing steadily due to the sales team achieving their sales objectives each quarter.

Then, toward the end of one-quarter things changed. A few big regional deals that the team was betting on to achieve its goals didn’t go through according to the plan and the region was at risk of missing its sales objective.

The global sales leader called the regional president multiple times urging, even demanding him to do whatever it took to meet his objectives.

The regional account managers started giving excessive discounts, at times giving up all profitability just to move deals forward in order to achieve their objectives.

The region ended up barely achieving their objective. However, no one felt good about it. People felt they did the wrong thing for the wrong reason; they felt the price of the apparent success was too high – giving up profitable business and ravaging the next quarter’s prospects just to cross the line with the objective at hand.

I guess it is easier to give a huge discount to a client, even at the expense of doing the wrong thing for the health of the business, than to have the tough conversation with your colleagues or boss about not allowing objectives to dictate bad behavior.

I recently spoke to the CEO of a different company who took on bold objectives and missed his first milestone. He shared with me that he felt guilty about the high bar he set, because had he not done that his people would have felt happy and successful.

I see this type of unhealthy, reactionary, survival-based behavior around objectives play out all the time in so many companies.

The lesson here is:

  1. All goals, strategies, and plans are made up.
  2. Don’t be a victim of your objectives.
  3. Own the fact that you created them for the purpose of focus and empowerment.
  4. Have the courage to manage your objectives, including saying ‘no’ to them when they are no longer the right way to go.
  5. Most important, don’t let your objectives manage you.