Debra Chantry-Taylor: What Has to Change in the Leadership Team Before the Business Can Scale Again

SUMMARY KEYWORDS 

Leadership team, scaling, decision rights, role clarity, accountability, visionary, integrator, growth problems, productive tension, family influence, business ownership, decision bottlenecks, leadership evolution, business strategy, execution. 

SPEAKERS 

Debra Chantry-Taylor 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:00 

If everything still needs one person to function, the business doesn't scale. It depends, and dependency is not growth. So scaling requires leadership teams who can make good decisions without waiting for permission. And that only happens when decision rights are clear and leaders are willing to let go the biggest role clarity problem I see is that the visionary is not letting go to the integrator and the leadership team. You've got to let go. You've got to be clear about accountability. You've got to let people work in their zone of genius and just get on with it. 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:36 

Hello and welcome to another episode of Better Business, Better Life. I'm your host, Debra Chantry-Taylor, and I'm passionate about helping entrepreneurs lead a better life by creating a better business. If you listened into my last solo podcast, I was raving on about the book by Dr Benjamin Hardy called The Science of scaling, and in this episode today, I'm going to be continuing that conversation and taking it to the next level. So this episode is all about what has to change in the leadership team before the business can scale again. So let's start by saying scaling doesn't stall because of strategy. Let me say the quiet part out loud, when a business can't scale or growth feels harder than it should be. The problem is almost never the strategy, and it's very ready the market. Let's be honest, it's the leadership team, and not because they're bad people, and not because they're not trying, but because the way the leadership team operates has not evolved to match the next stage of the business. And that's the bit that most leaders don't want to hear. The leadership team that built the business is not automatically the leadership team that can scale it, and pretending otherwise is one of the fastest ways to store growth. So why has this episode coming after the science of scaling? Because if the last episode was about what scaling actually requires, impossible goals, time as a tool, higher standards, elimination, then this episode is about the human reality, because none of that works unless the leadership team changes how it behaves. You can have clarity on paper. You can have your priorities listed. You can even have good data. But if the leadership team hasn't upgraded how it works together, the business will hit a ceiling and it will sit there, frustrated, overwhelmed, tired, and wondering why. So here is the first hard truth, growth exposes leadership, and here's something that I see constantly. Growth doesn't create leadership problems, it reveals them when the business is smaller, unclear, roles are manageable, avoided, conversations are survivable, and decision bottlenecks feel efficient, but as the business grows, those same behaviours become painful. Meetings get longer. The decisions get slowed down. People get frustrated. Execution gets messy and chaotic, and it's not because the team got worse, but because the business outgrew how leadership was working, and that's a maturity gap, not a failure. So how do you go from nice team to real team? So most leadership teams are really proud of being a good team. They respect each other, they get along, and there's very little open conflict, which sounds great in theory, until you realise that growth requires productive tension, not harmony. Nice teams avoid the hard conversations. Real teams have them and often enjoy them. And here's the trap. Leaders often confuse trust with comfort. If leadership team meetings feel calm, but nothing actually changes afterwards. That's not alignment, that's politeness, and politeness, like it or not, does not scale. So role clarity is the silent growth killer. This is where scaling often quietly breaks leadership roles are mostly clear. Everyone kind of knows who owns what, until something goes wrong, and then all of a sudden, decisions bounce. Accountability blurs. People step in where they shouldn't, or they step back when they shouldn't. Growth demands crystal clarity, not goodwill. This is especially tricky in long standing businesses and family influence ones, where roles have evolved over time instead of being intentionally designed. This is especially tricky and long standing businesses and family influence ones where the roles have evolved over time instead of be instead of being intentionally designed, when that's the Harvard three circle dynamic at play, business ownership and family bleeding into each other, and if the roles aren't clear, everything becomes personal, and once leadership becomes personal, then scaling becomes exhausting, so decision making must move down. Here's another uncomfortable truth, your decisions don't move down as a business grows, pressure will always move up. Founders, CEOs, senior leaders still involved in everything, still the same. 50 net and still the final say, it feels responsible, it feels caring, but it's also a bottleneck. And if everything still needs one person to function, the business doesn't scale. It depends. And dependency is not growth. So scaling requires leadership teams who can make good decisions without waiting for permission. And that only happens when decision rights are clear, and leaders are willing to get let go, particularly with founders. I'm going to be really honest here the amount of times that I see founders put in place a really good, solid leadership team, and then they still want to micromanage, and they still want to be involved in every single decision, particularly when they put an integrator into the business. And the whole point of having an integrator is to completely let go and to pass that accountability down. The whole point of having a good leadership team is they are the experts. They know what they're doing. Please give them some boundaries and let them get on with it. So accountability from effort to outcomes. Let's be honest again, most leadership teams will definitely talk about accountability, but very few practice it really well. They praise effort, they track activity, but they avoid calling out missed outcomes, especially when people are busy. But growth doesn't care how busy you are. It cares what gets done. When priorities roll quarter after quarter without consequence, the organisation learns something very quickly. Commitments are optional. Once that belief sets in, execution falls apart. It's a little bit like children. I always say that, you know, the reason we have to set boundaries with children and follow through on it is if they get told, please don't do that. That's really naughty. If we don't actually follow through with a consequence, the child learns that, in actual fact, they can get away with it, and I see this all the time with leadership teams, if you continue to not focus on your rocks and your priorities and get them done, if you continue to let your scorecard slip week after week and there is no consequence for it, then we start to learn that is absolutely fine and we don't really care anymore. In fact, to be honest, rocks has become an optional thing altogether. And they start to become projects that aren't distinct, that aren't finished in 90 days. They just roll and roll and roll and roll over every quarter I've seen rocks that have gone on for four quarters in a business, and it gets the point where I go, what are we doing here? Why are we bothering? This isn't a rock. We're just kidding ourselves. So closing, scaling is a leadership upgrade. Here is the absolute bottom line. Scaling is not a strategy problem. It's not a market problem. It's a leadership evolution problem. Before the business can scale again, the leadership team must change. It must change how it argues, how it decides, how it holds each other accountable and how willing it is to let go of old identities. And that's not failure, that's growth. That's what will help you create better business, and a consequence of that is a better life, but only when leadership evolves first. Now, before I came on to record this podcast, I asked my chat GPT, d2 to give me 10 questions, I could ad lib. I haven't even read these. I'm going completely off the cuff, but let's have a go and see how we go. Number one, what's the earliest sign that a leadership team has outgrown how it currently works? The earliest sign, I think, is when the meetings that we're holding, they either start to become really, really short and really, really congenial and really fun, but not necessarily challenging the status quo, not having the difficult conversations, or the meeting structure has changed completely, which means that, Yes, you've still got your level 10 meetings, or your version of a level 10 meeting, but you've also got all these other meetings, a quick check in, a quick one on one, a quick team thing, a quick work in progress. You know, some of the teams that I've worked with, I look at their meetings and they've just added and added and added, and really, that's not helping. We should just have one meeting a week, and that's how things work. Number two, how do you tell when a growth problem is really a leadership behaviour issue? How do you tell I mean, I think it's when we are when we start to see these things slipping, and the leadership team doesn't call each other out. They just go, oh yeah, we're off track. Oh well, don't worry. Or it's like, oh yeah. But we're so busy we're overwhelmed, we don't have time. And if you haven't got a leadership team that's prepared to call each other out and really have the hard conversations, it's a leadership behaviour issue 

Debra Chantry-Taylor  09:31 

number three, what role clarity problem do you see most often when businesses hit a ceiling? Okay, if you're listening in as a visual, you're going to hate this, but the biggest role clarity problem I see is that the visionary is not letting go to the integrator and the leadership team, or the integrator is not letting go to the leadership team as well. So it really is, you know, you've got to let go. You've got to be clear about accountabilities. You've got to let people work in their zone of genius and just get on with it. And so if we're not really. Really clear. We often have an accountability chart that says that the integral is responsible for profit and loss, responsible for the business plan, but the owner still comes in and oversteps the mark all the time. Or we have accountability charts where we say that, you know, the sales and marketing is responsible for the sales and marketing budget and the sales and marketing plan, but they're not really. They still have to run every single thing past the owner. So that's probably the biggest thing that I see in the business that I work with. Number four, how does founder or long tenure behaviour unintentionally block scale? I think I've covered this in the last couple of questions, but really it is about the founder is says they want to let go, but still requires everything coming back through them, and they become the bottleneck. And yeah, as soon as you remove that bottleneck, you will start to actually get scale. Since you allow your leadership team to actually step up and become a leadership team, then you will do it. The other thing that I see just thinking about this now is also that they hold on to people who no longer serve the role. And I hate to say it, but I see this so often. Where are you? But this person's been around for a long time, and they're really great, and it's like, are they? I mean, yes, they're lovely people, and yes, nobody wants to let somebody go, but I just don't see them as being leaders. And leaders are people who are not yes people. As soon as you've got somebody who's always saying to yes to you, you've got to actually question that whether or not they have the capability to actually be a leader, which is interesting. The next question here is, what does healthy tension actually look like in a leadership meeting? Healthy tension is where we do hold each other accountable, where we're actually questioning it and saying, Well, how come we haven't achieved that? Why are we off track with our rocks and also challenging some of the things that are being said to to ensure that we're getting to the real root cause of the issues. Because I often see in the issue solving part of the of the leadership meeting is that we jump straight to a quick conclusion, rather than really diving deep and going, what is the real issue here? And I think it's because we don't like to call other people out, but we as a leadership team, we must be there for the greater good, and if we're there for the greater good, it is our role to actually have those difficult conversation. Number six, why do leadership teams confuse being busy with being effective? I don't know why this is to be honest, but I think it's just a natural human tendency. We just see being busy as being we're moving forward, but often we have to ask ourselves the question, no, why are we continuing to do the same things and expect different results? Because usually when you've got an element of busyness, it's just because you're doing the same stuff and expecting something different. So being effective is about, you know, not the how, but who am I being and what do I need to do, and questioning everything, getting rid of the zombie work that Dr Hardy talks about in his book, making sure that we're doing the right things, making sure we're measuring the right things. The amount of scorecards that I see where it is rewarding busyness, but it isn't record rewarding outcomes. Scorecards must drive outcomes. Number seven, what accountability behaviour must change first for growth to resume. What accountability behaviour? I think, just true accountability. So I think if we think about this. It's not just about coming in and reporting on a few numbers and telling people they're on track or off track, but actually true accountability is where the leader has allowed the leadership team to take full accountability for the departments, full accountability for running it, and that person absolutely obsesses with the rocks that need to be done, and obsesses with the profitability and the revenue of the business, because that is what a true leadership team is. Again, in my sessions, I see people come in on the leadership team when I ask them about the previous quarter and how things have gone, and I asked them for the numbers, they all look to the accountant, and the accountants want has to do with the numbers. And I say to them, This is ridiculous. We're a leadership team. It is your role to obsess about profitability and revenue. Everybody should know those numbers. I'm not asking for absolutes. I'm asking for back of the envelope maths. How did we go against our target? And why don't we know what our target was? We should know our target. We should know how we're going against it, and it is really important that we obsess about that as well as obsess about getting our rocks done. Rocks are the stuff that changes the business fundamentally. If we're so busy doing business as usual and doing the same thing we've always done, then nothing is going to change, and you will not get that scale number eight, how do leadership dynamics shift when family ownership and management overlap. This is probably more relevant for the family businesses that I work with. You know, we've got these sort of family ownership and business management three circles, and often there's no clarity about who is in what circle and what role they play. And what you see when this happens is everything. Becomes quite emotional, because whether you like it or not, a family, the dynamics in the family are very should be very different the dynamics in your business. And then ownership, you know, putting the owner's hat on and coming in and trying to overrule things because you're an owner does not help the business either. So I think if you get really, really clear about those three circles, what is it the family? What's the role of the family circle, and what role do I play in that family circle? What is the role of ownership? What decisions they get to make, what meetings are they part of? And what role do I have to play in that? And then finally, the business, or the management circle, which is, you know, what does the business actually need to achieve? What roles and accountability does it need to achieve that? And again, what role do I play in that, and what decisions do I get to make? Once you get clarity around all of those three circles, life just becomes easier. Suddenly it's no longer emotional. It's about doing the right thing for the greater good of the business. Number nine, what conversation is leadership usually avoiding? When growth stalls, I had to be actually, very careful around this, because I, myself, am a visionary in my business, but I've also been an integrator, and I'm one of the few people who can actually do both, but not in the same business. And I really think conversation that's not had is the one about what's two. There's two main ones. I actually think the first one is about the owner or the visionary, not letting go. And the second one, I hate to say it, but it's about the leadership team. Is your leadership team really a leadership team? Because if they're in there talking about business as usual, in the weeds, talking about operational stuff, they're not a leadership team. A leadership team should be obsessed with the future focus of the business, obsessed with the revenue, obsessed with the profitability, obsessed with the stuff that moves the needle towards the long term vision of the organisation. And they should be obsessed about the greater good. If your leadership team just wants to talk about everything getting in the weeds and the day to day business as usual. I'm going to be really frank. They're not a leadership team, and that could be that they just need some some training, some upskilling, some support. Maybe they need somebody like me to kind of poke the bear and really push them to think differently. But true leaders do not get involved in day to day, and true visionaries let go and let the team step up. Okay, if a business could change just one leadership behaviour to unlock scale, what should it be? I think this has to come down to my favourite thing, the elephant in the room. If your leadership behaviour can just be about calling stuff out and having the open and honest and frank conversations, you're going to scale so much faster. So there you go. That was interesting, having those written and not knowing what they were. Hopefully that's been helpful for you. If there is anything I can do to help you on your journey, please get in contact. You can email me on Debra at business action.com.au, or Debra at business action.co.nz. My tagline is here to help. I am the lady with the elephant. I'm all about the elephant in the room. And like I said, I'm passionate about just helping leadership teams get what they want from their business so they can actually lead a better life. Thank you for listening. Hope that was helpful. Look forward to seeing you again soon. You.