Between slowing down and speeding up

Why does a company with the right strategy and the right people still get stuck?

Usually because the company is still running on a set-up that was built for an earlier version of itself.

The strategy describes where the company wants to go. The roles, the decision lines and the habits in the weekly meetings still describe where it came from. Good people keep working hard inside that old set-up, and the harder they push, the more friction they feel. From the outside it looks like a lack of energy or commitment. Up close it's mostly confusion about who decides what now.

You rarely see it on a dashboard. You see it in decisions that come back to the table three times, and in people waiting for a sign-off that nobody is sure is still needed.

So when a company is stuck in that way, I don't start by questioning the strategy. I start by looking at what still holds the old way of working in place.

Where do you look first when a company is stuck?

In the one-to-ones.

In my first weeks I book an hour with as many people as I can and mostly listen. The useful information is rarely in a report. It's in what people tell you when they feel safe enough, and in what they leave out. A release that's been ready for months. A risk someone is carrying alone because they assume the boss knows.

A lot of what blocks a company sits just below the surface: old loyalties, beliefs about what's allowed, worries nobody says out loud in the meeting. I look at that with curiosity, without looking for someone to blame.

At the same time I make a few small decisions quickly, so people see what I do with what they tell me. That's what makes the next round of conversations more honest.

How do you make roles clear while everything is changing?

I start from the value each role adds to the rest of the company, and work back to the tasks from there.

Job descriptions are usually written for the company as it was a year ago, so in a transition they don't help much. What helps is a role canvas: one page per role, filled in together with the person who holds it. On it we write the value the role creates and the core tasks that deliver it. We also write down who this role leans on, who uses what it delivers, and which tensions or open questions sit around it.

When people put their canvases next to each other, gaps and overlaps show up quickly. Two people turn out to own the same decision, or nobody owns it at all.

That conversation is often more useful than the canvas itself. People leave it knowing what they stand for and where they need each other.

How does lasting change actually start?

With small shifts in how people behave, in places where everyone can see them.

A team agrees to make one kind of decision without escalating it. A leader picks up a responsibility that had been lying on the floor for months. The Monday meeting gets one new habit, like ending with who owns what by Friday.

Each of these looks minor on its own. The Leader Lab calls them micro-behaviours, and they shape culture far more than a programme or a new set of values on the wall. People watch what actually happens after a meeting, and adjust to that.

So I look for a few of those moments early on and make sure they stick. When enough of them add up, people start to feel that the rules have changed, and they begin to act on it without being asked.

How do you make sure change lasts after you leave?

By asking, from the first weeks, what has to keep working once I'm gone, and building towards that.

In practice that means the new way of working has to show up in three places. In how the leaders behave on an ordinary Tuesday, when nobody is watching. In the systems people rely on, like how decisions get made and how work is planned. And in the story people tell each other about why things changed, because that's what new colleagues will hear first.

If it only lives in my head or in a slide deck, it fades within months of the handover.

That's also how I know an assignment is done. The leadership team runs it without me, and the company keeps moving after I've left.

What if there's no clear path?

Then I don't pretend there is one. Most transitions don't have a clear path, at least not at the start.

Mustafa Suleyman writes in The Coming Wave that transitions come in waves and jolts, and often only make sense afterwards. That matches what I see. What I can bring is enough clarity to see the real choice in front of us, and the steadiness to make it and carry it out together with the CEO or founder.

You might recognise the situation. The company is in a transition, but the old structures are still running the show. You're needed in several directions at once, and you feel unease in the team without being able to say where it comes from.

That's a normal consequence of growth and ambition, and it's exactly where I'm most useful.

If this sounds familiar, tell me what's going on. The messy version is fine.