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Every time you step into a bigger role, or even when you've been in the seat for a while, the same traps show up. Slipping back into old habits, avoiding the hard conversations that actually lift performance, and overcompensating for poor performers instead of leading at level. Now, if any of that sounds familiar, our brand new live workshop is for you. It's called the first 90 days at any New how to Win Trust, Build Credibility and Deliver Results. Marty and I are running it on September 17th live on Zoom and if you show up live, you'll get the Blind Spot Identify Tool, a resource that exposes the hidden gaps holding leaders back. Save your free spot now at bit ly NBL90. That's bit ly NBL90. I can't wait to see you there.
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When we started this podcast, we we had to figure out a lot of it on our own, which was pretty daunting at times. When you're starting off with something new, it seems like your to do list just keeps growing and it can begin to consume every waking moment. Finding the right tool that helps you out and simplifies everything can be a game changer for millions of businesses. That tool is Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names to brands that are just getting started. Shopify is also packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. Get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into With Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com leadership. Go to shopify.com leadership leadership.
- [01:52]
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Welcome to the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. In a world where knowledge has become a commodity, this podcast is designed to give you something more access to the experience of a successful CEO who has already walked the path. So join your host, Martin Moore, who will unlock and bring to life your own leadership experiences and accelerate your journey to leadership excellence.
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Hey there and welcome to episode 323 of the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. This week's how to Stop Missing Finding the Hidden Bottlenecks. Last week we launched our no Bullshit Leadership Hub and the community's already firing on all cylinders. For those of you who've already joined, you may have answered the initial survey questions, some of which highlighted the common problems that every leader faces. One comment in particular, which was articulated beautifully by Sarah, really hit home for me. Sarah said, I think a big leadership challenge right now is capturing and communicating the nuances of what's slowing down progress, as well as utilising data to set realistic goals. This is a great observation and one that I see many leaders struggling with right now. So today I'm going to pull this apart a little. What are the root causes of unexpected inertia? How do we work out what's really happening based on the symptoms that we can observe? And how do we communicate and seek adjustments from our stakeholders? This episode is super practical and I know it's one that you're going to want to keep coming back to again and again, so you might want to bookmark it. I start by digging into the 10 common root causes of slow progress, unexpected delays and missed targets. Then I'm going to give you six ideas for how to uncover some of the hidden bottlenecks. And finally, I'm going to give you my foolproof four step process for communicating any delays and resetting expectations with your stakeholders without losing their confidence in your leadership ability. So let's get into it. To work out what's slowing progress down and causing targets to be missed, you've got to go way back to where the work is initiated and step through to where you are now. I've distilled 10 root causes of unexpectedly slow progress and almost every situation can be attributed to one or more of these. The first root cause is many problems start way back at the definition stage of the deliverable. Now, when work's first approved, whether it's a project or a business as usual initiative, the problem starts with poor definition of the job itself. Cost and time estimates are frequently underdone, risks are generally downplayed and the potential benefits case is overblown. You can pretty much expect this every single time because in the approval phase the person petitioning for the allocation of resources wants a positive answer. So they want to look at everything through rose colored glasses and give you the same set of glasses to look through. Your very first hurdle is the psychology of selling the investment. This is where expectations are forged and if the expectations run realistic, which is often the case, even acceptable progress and speed will seem slow in comparison. The second root cause is missing critical touch points. People or teams who are in fact key to final delivery are often not consulted. So for example, a project might require input from risk management or it might need legal sign off, or there may be new things that need procuring and you need to develop a new relationship with suppliers. When planning is done in isolation by each business unit or team, as it mostly is, they often Adopt a myopic view, disregarding the need for input from third party sources. This builds in bottlenecks right from the start because at some point these external resources have to be incorporated to get the job done. The third root cause is weak accountability assignment. Single point accountability is fundamental to efficient execution. You have to have one head to pat and one ass to kick for everything. Now, without clear ownership, people adopt an all care, no responsibility approach. This is like a cancer slowly growing but unseen in your culture. No one really feels the pressure of delivering the overall outcome because the ownership is inherently weak. When problems arise, instead of the strong sense of urgency that comes with single point accountability, people just sit back expecting someone else to solve the problem and you won't even be able to see this happening. The fourth root cause is poor decision making discipline. And this is I guess, essentially a byproduct of weak accountability. When it's not clear who's making a decision, the only alternative is to reach consensus. Now many leaders kid themselves that this is a good thing. It's not. Consensus decisions are the worst type of decisions. When you seek consensus, the focus shifts from solving the problem to appeasing the people. And you end up with a Frankenstein's monster of a solution. An answer that everyone can live with, but no one's really happy with. It also opens the door for power of veto. Key people can use their power to withhold approval with no consequence for them personally because they have no real stake in the accountability. Consensus, decision making and power of veto are both major progress killers. The fifth root cause is lack of scope discipline. In project based work in particular, protecting the scope is critical. Now. Very often scope is expanded because people are full of good ideas and with all the best intentions. They add stuff to try to improve the outcomes. But this rarely creates a tangible benefit. Instead, it does nothing more than to increase time, cost and complexity. Having poor scope discipline will slowly and invisibly push the timing out and you'll wake up one day to a project that is unrecoverably late. The sixth root cause of hidden delays is is poor understanding of resource dependencies. We tend to do our planning using averages. So for example, we might say that we need 8fte in our business analysis team. But in certain specialist areas of expertise there may be bottlenecks. Resource leveling is a project management technique that lets you look at the work program through the lens of your resource allocation. You'll notice if you do this that on some weeks analyst A has only 10 hours of work assigned, while analyst B has 110 hours assigned. If you're not aware of this, you'll find out eventually and things will slow down while people twiddle their thumbs waiting for a certain point of the critical path to be reached. As a general rule, it's important to recognise that a lot of critical information gets lost in the averages. The seventh root cause of delays is poor milestone discipline. If you don't have clearly defined milestones to interrogate as the project progresses, it's so easy to get blindsided by accumulated slippages. And this is why frequent milestones assessed diligently is essential in any project based work. So if you're not assessing earned value at every milestone, it's easy to get it wrong. Let me just explain this. Most projects keep pace with their cost estimates. That's the nature of resource allocation. Some even keep pace with their defined time milestones. But very few keep pace with their earned value expectations. Earned value is the measure that tells us, given the burn rate of time and money, have we reached the level of functional completion that we expected to up to that point? The eighth root cause of slippages and delays is poor anticipation of the unforeseen risks. There are so many examples of unforeseen risks blowing up project estimates. One great example that's in the news at the moment, in fact it has been for a number of years, is the ambitious Snowy 2.0 pumped hydroelectricity project in Australia. What started off as a $2 billion project is now looking like it's going to cost $30 billion, once you include $12 billion of new transmission infrastructure and the federal government's $6 billion buyout of the state's shares in the company. Of course, the project ran into serious issues with its civil earthworks. Who would have thought that tunneling through 27 kilometres of unknown geology in a pristine national park would run into problems? One of the tunnel boring machines, which was named Florence after my granddaughter, ran into soggy ground and it remained bogged there for almost a year. As it stands today, the project is going to be delivered at least six years late and at least six times more expensive than was originally projected. And it's not all over yet. So think about this, right? That's $30 billion of taxpayers money that's unlikely to get anywhere near an acceptable commercial return, which demonstrates an important principle of major projects. If I owe you $100, I've got a problem, but if I owe you a million dollars, you've got a problem. The ninth root cause is lack of air cover. Many senior Managers are weak, and I don't say that in a disparaging way. I just mean they don't have the strength to stand their ground when the people above them keep throwing work on the pile. They just say yes and dutifully pass it down the line, asking their teams to take on more and more with no additional resources. Something has to give, and normally the outcome is that everything slips. It's the silent bloating of a work program that's almost unavoidable because no one pushes back on their boss. The 10th and final root cause of delays is the inability to face the truth. Many leaders simply won't report accurately because they don't want to deliver bad news. They cover up slow progress and slippages with irrational optimism. They say things like, well, we may be a little behind, but we're going to make this up later. This is where you need to be brutally honest and direct as a leader. You never make it up late. It doesn't happen. So tell me exactly what you intend to do to recover that slippage. If this doesn't involve either a reduction in scope or an addition of resources, then your time delays are only going in one direction and it's not a good direction. Those 10 root causes will cover just about everything that can go wrong that caused your initiative to slip. I want to give you a few practical actions now that you can take that are going to enable you to get to these root causes and expose the bottlenecks sooner rather than later. The first thing is don't let questionable stuff through the gate. Your first best bet to combat delays is to ensure you create a well defined work program that recognises the reality of the environment in which it's being delivered. So don't do dumb shit like building in more work than you have the resources to complete, like ignoring or downplaying key risks, and like including initiatives that are low value in relative terms. The second way to get to the bottom of these delays is to inspect outputs diligently. So create regular milestones and KPIs. If there's a lot of elapsed time between milestones, find other ways to satisfy yourself that progress is actually on target. Accurate reporting of the things that truly measure progress is critical. Use the earned value measurement of anything that even faintly resembles a project, and be strong with your one on one interrogation of the individuals who are accountable for delivery. Be supportive, but also be insistent. Don't tell me, show me. Technique number three is to create clarity of accountabilities for every single deliverable you need one head to pat and one ass to kick. This is the key to execution excellence, because without single point accountability, you'll always find your results are underdone. And once you're convinced that you've put single point accountability in place, make sure you fully enforce the structure. That means you not dipping down into your accountable people's work. And it means ensuring that their decision rights aren't trampled on from either above or beside. The fourth technique to find these slippages is to be aware of decision making inertia. People are typically just too slow in their decision making. Why? Because they're afraid of getting it wrong. So they spend too much time in consultation. They wait for data that often does nothing to improve the quality and accuracy of the decision they're trying to make. And they push their decisions up the line to try and get agreement from people above. It's their security blanket. The fifth technique is to look at reporting for inconsistencies. Now, if you pay attention to the detail, you're going to pick up on inconsistencies in reporting. For example, a milestone may have slipped and it's been reported with a yellow status on this week's status report, but no change has been made to subsequent deliverables. Something has to change. The deadline, the budget, the scope, the level of quality, the risk profile. Something's got to change. This is not technically difficult to see, but holding people to account is emotionally difficult. Your job is to not let anyone get away with telling you something that's implausible. And finally, the sixth technique for making sure that you can uncover these hidden stoppages and delays is to promote a culture of robust challenge. One of the biggest cultural barriers to keeping things on track is the unwillingness of people to speak up. Your objective should be to create a culture of robust challenge for people to speak their minds and contribute their ideas and engage in conversations that provide constructive tension. Now, if you think that a high performing team is one where there is little conflict, you would be wrong. High performing teams have a significant level of tension as the individuals wrestle with key issues to get the best outcome. These teams rarely leave problems hidden. So let's say you run into one of these inevitable problems that causes slow progress delays and missed targets. Your best protection is early detection, which is why it's so important to do the things that will expose those delays as soon as possible. The vast majority of these problems stem from the simple fact that humans are involved, so they are inevitable, no matter how great a leader you are. I'm going to Finish by giving you my foolproof process for communicating delays and recalibrating your stakeholders expectations. The first step is get all the dead cats on the table. Make sure you know the full extent of the problem. Now this can be really hard work. As we know people will often hide bad news. You've got to find the root cause and you've got to stem the bleeding. And then make sure you don't take anything on face value. Challenge every statement with questions about what and why. Your main objective here is to expose the irrational optimism in your team's recovery plans. So you've got to force people to face the reality of their situation. Don't let them off the hook with the standard approach that they're going to default to, which is, well boss, the delay was bad, but now everything's good. The second step of the process is recast the value case and make sure it makes sense to continue. Now very few leaders do this. Once you have a good sense of the impacts, go right back and re evaluate why you started the work in the first place. Instead of assuming that your organization is going to suck up the additional cost and time of a delay, use it as a review point. Now that the value we're going to deliver is clearly less than originally anticipated, does it still make sense to continue? There's no point in putting good money after bad, so always be prepared to walk away from a sunk cost. The third step in the process is to make real change to recalibrate. If you want a different outcome going forward, then you have to make changes. What are you going to do differently to improve the outcomes? Now some of this might simply be recasting of cost and time parameters, but on other occasions you going to need to replace one or more people who haven't been able to deliver. Just be careful here. I'm not suggesting witch hunts and scapegoating, but if you have, let's say, a project manager who has repeatedly covered up issues, that person is really unlikely to change going forward. If you haven't got someone you trust, get someone you can trust. So you've taken these three important steps. You've got all the dead cats on the table, you've recast the value case and you've made real changes to recalibrate the initiative. Now the final step of the process, you're in a position to communicate to your stakeholders. Here are some important rules of thumb for your disclosure. The first thing is don't sugarcoat it. Whatever you do, you don't want to erode your stakeholders trust in you or the process that you're undertaking. Also, you should think of this as though you have one shot in the locker. If you have to reset expectations, do it once and only do it once and do it right. Get everything you need in place to make a recommendation about the go forward position. If you go back to that well more than once, your stakeholders will understandably get the impression that you don't know what you're doing. Also, provide certainty, but give options. As I said, don't just assume that the best outcome is to suck up the delay and keep going regardless. Give your stakeholders the information they need and provide them with options and a recommended decision. This is going to help you to rip the band aid off quickly. You get everything on the table. You give your stakeholders the confidence that you know what you're doing. You map a path forward and and in the very acceptance of the plan, you have recalibrated expectations around your new delivery parameters. So to wrap all this up, let's face it, even in the best run teams, delays are going to occur. As a leader, your job is to anticipate these delays, investigate them, and navigate the new reality that you're faced with. Nothing will erode your stakeholders confidence in you faster than your inability to handle slippages in your work program decisively. But if you can get this right, your leadership stock is going to rise rapidly. All right, so that brings us to the end of episode 323. Thanks so much for joining us. And remember, at your CEO mentor, our purpose is to improve the quality of leaders globally. So please share this episode with all of your colleagues. They could all use it. I look forward to next week's episode where we're going to give you backstage access to our live event in Australia with the Fireside chat I have with M. Until then, I know you'll take every opportunity you can to be a no bullshit.