The Leadership Trade-Offs That Make or Break Teams

The ability to make trade-offs confidently separates average leaders from truly great ones. And there are no hard and fast rules. In this QA episode, M and I are going to break down six of the most common and the most consequential trade-offs that leaders face. What makes this conversation different is that it's not just about finding the perfect answer. It's about developing the leadership instincts to make better calls faster and to not waste time second guessing them after the fact.

Because in most cases, a good decision made quickly will outperform a perfect decision made too late. And with external pressures like economic uncertainty and rising costs adding yet another layer of complexity, the ability to think clearly through competing priorities has never been more important.

First question, how do you continue to lift the performance benchmark in your team without just leaning harder on your best people? Because what I see a lot is that the stronger performers they end up getting all the work and then over time they just get sick and tired of doing the heavy lifting and resulting in burnout a lot of the time.

So how should leaders be thinking about that balance between raising standards, protecting their top talent, and still delivering for the business? Because that's obviously the ultimate goal is to deliver value for the organization.

That's that's enormous, right? And we think about sometimes there might be a you know twenty or thirty percent difference, but eight times more is absolutely phenomenal.

The do's are that you have to show the whole team that you're serious about performance. You don't just lean on those stars and let them do all the heavy lifting, as you said. There's got to be this minimum acceptable stand. And once you've got that standard set, you've got to hold everyone to account for their performance. You can't let anyone slip below that low watermark. You can't make exceptions, particularly for people who are making individual choices.

And you know, you might find a situation where someone is new and they're still getting their feet and they're not quite performing up to the standard you want yet. But that's got to happen over time and they've got to be in a position where they can operate independently without your constant intervention and without having them supported by the people around them who do the heavy lifting on their behalf.

And when you're trying to manage the difference between these really talented people and people who aren't cutting it, you've got to develop pathways for your talent that they can progress and they've got to know about that. And you've got to be ruthless about removing the passengers, because otherwise the whole standard slips.

Uh, some of the don'ts, of course. Well, you don't step in and do the work yourself. Like, you don't overcompensate or over function for the people who aren't doing their job. You don't overload the producers. You've got to stretch them, but you don't overload. And you don't treat everyone the same. It it's not a a socialist collective. You've got to differentiate between your people. I'm gonna talk a little bit more about that later on.

So at what point do you actually prioritize outcomes over development and then how do you handle that without disengaging the rest of the team? This is a really tricky one.

This is one of the most important principles in performance. It's differentiation. And the only thing you should differentiate on is performance. Nothing else. So we're told we have to treat everyone equally, right? Which is fine in principle, but it's easy to get confused as to what that actually means. As a leader, you've got to give your people equality of opportunity. But that's very different from trying to equalize the outcome.

So I know a lot of leaders who try to be fair to their people, they try to give everyone the same opportunities to get the same results. But the world doesn't work that way. And when people aren't putting the effort or they're not lifting to meet the standard, then you can't keep giving them the opportunities that should go to the people who are willing to do.

So everyone has to be given the chance to excel in their role. And that means they have to be given the guidance, the support and the resources they need to do their job successfully. But not everyone deserves equal FaceTime with you. If you're leading well, your attention is a performance accelerator. So you have to focus where you generate the biggest bang for buff. It's not about being fair, it's about optimising your outcomes. So you need to spend 80% of your time with your best people.

Don't just let the squeaky wheel get the oil. The most challenging critical assignments have to be entrusted to your top performer. So you know it may seem to everyone else that your best people are being favoured with the prime task. And yes, that's exactly what you need to do. If you're fortunate enough to have someone on your team with rare talent, love them, nurture them, pay them, give them the best assignments, but don't let them rest on their laurels.

You've got to stretch them too, and demand more from them and help them to reach their ultimate potential, which is stellar.

All right, question three. How do you deal with senior leaders who just don't buy in? Especially when they're influential. So they might have a quite a strong voice in the organization and they're essentially resisting a shift towards um, I don't know, let's say a value driven way of working. So this has come from someone who's trying to implement

module one deliver value in leadership beyond the theory. How do you navigate that without it turning into politics or just becoming something that stalls the whole organization?

If your boss doesn't buy into what you're doing, the only way you can get that to change is by creating credibility and earning the right to have the conversation. And you only do that by posting the results. So until you've posted the results, you've got nothing to talk about. Now that sounds a bit harsh, but that's the way the world works and uh if you try doing it any other way, you may step on a landmine. So it's important to to not step on a landmine when you're trying to get some change.

And that's really about how you deal with the old and bold who've been in the company for a really long time, and you're trying to get some change. So uh why do people resist change so much when you're trying to do something new in the team or in the company? And there's a few reasons, right? The first is They've normally managed to accumulate a bunch of power and status over time. They become opinion leaders and other people follow what they say.

Change often threatens this person or position they've built up for themselves. And the only way they know how to handle that is to indulge in this passive aggressive behaviour that means that, you know, they're gonna nod and smile to you, but they're gonna go away and undermine everything you've asked them to do. So this is the white anting thing that happens so frequently.

We even used to have an expression for that's a little bit vulgar, but we used to say that's grinfuck which means they smile to your face and then the minute you turn around they flip you the bird. You don't want to be you don't want to be tolerating grin fashion.

Be really clear on what they need to do differently in terms of their standards and the things they focus on and the results they achieve. And watch them closely. You've got to judge them on their merits, not just listening to what they say, but watching what they do. What you don't want to do, you don't want to cut them too much slack. You don't want to confuse their clear behavioural choices with innocent mistakes,'cause you can give them too much of the benefit of a doubt.

Don't be afraid to let someone go if they won't get on board, because that's their choice, not yours. You just have to watch the scoreboard and act accordingly. And don't wait too long to make that decision. Like you you'll hesitate because you'll be afraid of losing organizational knowledge. And they'll play on that fear mercilessly. They'll hoard their knowledge and they'll try and make you afraid of the fact that if you lose them, things will fall apart. Almost never happened.

They'll try to make you think they're indispensable, but no one is. And in most cases, the risk of losing their knowledge is massively outweighed by the risk of them derailing the positive change you're trying to make. So why would you hold back a whole team just because one or two opinion leaders don't want to get on board? I have never regretted letting someone go who was resisting a necessary change. And I've never worked with another leader who regretted making a similar decision.

It's that simple.

Alright, let's go on to question four. How do you know when it's time to stay the course versus course correct? Let's say that you've put a strategy in place, you've done the work, but you're starting to see weaknesses or things not playing out as expected.

At what point do you push through um instead of stepping back and changing direction? And how do you avoid organizations getting stuck in analysis without actually taking action? This is such a meaty one. This is well, you know, when we're talking about trade offs that make or break teams. Like this is it, right?

You never really know until you look back in retrospect and see what's happened as a result of your decision. But if you tick these eight boxes on the way through, you can be pretty certain that the decision you make is going to be sound. And one of those eight attributes is speed, and speed is so underrated. But you've got to get in your head the fact that your decisions don't need to be perfect, they need to be roughly right.

How and when you adjust depends on the gravity and the potential impact of the decision you're making. So if it's a high-level strategic decision that influences the performance of the whole business, make the call but monitor it really closely. You've got to scan the horizon constantly and adjust as you go. You're looking to either prove or disprove your assumptions until you're confident that the decision's been a good one.

And even when you're pretty confident, you need to revisit the decision occasionally to make sure that it's still doing what you need it to do. For less critical decisions, you know, it's not as important. Make them quickly. Have a look at the outcomes, but just adjust as you go. Some decisions are reversible and some decisions aren't. So just make sure you know which is which and give them the appropriate level of governance and oversight and pressure testing that the situation demands.

valueless activity does not make it onto the agenda. You've got to understand profoundly which things you do that contribute most to the success of the company. And you've got to focus on those things almost exclusively. Now the trouble is, um, budgets build empires, and so people are very, very interested in making sure their budget doesn't slide.

So you don't want to cut resources and you don't want to cut budgets, but you do want to apply them to the places where they're most effective. Now our value ranking process is probably the thing that gives you the best opportunity to understand all the potential options for how you apply your resources and where the best outcomes are from that. But it's a real discipline.

And you've got to go through it and be really clear on this is number one, this is number two, this is number three, so that when all of this crap flows down from up top, You can make a really good judicious assessment of where it might fit in the pecking order of value creation. And still some bosses aren't going to be interested in hearing that.

So you'll have weak bosses who just simply can't say no to their boss above them and they'll just say yes to anything that comes down and expect you to find a way to do it without giving you the appropriate resources. Then you'll have Nike bosses who just want to command and control and tell you to just do it, no matter what it is. Just do it. I don't want to hear about it. Just do it.

And you've got to learn how to say no without actually saying no. And the way to do that is by making sure you've got a very, very clear plan that says, Here are all the things that we're doing that create value. Here's the order we're doing them in, here's how we're using our resources, and if something else comes onto the pile, fantastic, we'll reevaluate.

Do you want us to either give up or put at risk one of these high value opportunities because it's someone's, you know, thought bubble of the day? Uh and I think without the discipline of having value ranking, it's really hard to do that. With a value ranked list that has your work programme prioritised and ranked properly, the conversation becomes much easier because it's a conversation about facts, not about feelings.

uh you know, what I what I need to get after and what the work program needs to look like for my team underneath me. So that is such an important process to actually get right before you can um push back. Otherwise, yeah, you are gonna burn people out. And what is it that you say about um people burning out?

When external pressures hit like rising fuel prices, uh like we're dealing with at the moment.

Uh a couple of the CEOs we're working with at the moment have shared some of their strategies. So I just want to give you a quick outline of those because I think they're two approaches that are that are really, really good. So one of them is a manufacturing client that I have, and I was talking to him the other day and he said, you know, customers that they service, it's a B2B business, they have visibility of input.

So the pricing model they've signed up to gives them real clarity around where the costs are. And so because they understand the cost structures, when price rises come through, they can notify the customers of what those input costs are. Now, in this case, that CEO's been able to negotiate a temporary pass-through of some of the inputs that they've had to suck up a forty, fifty, sixty, seventy percent increase. So that's been really good.

But they've been able to do it in a way where they've said to their customers, we're going to absorb some of these costs. We don't expect you to wear the total hit on this margin. We're going to take some of the pain ourselves. And so we're going to do that. We'll do it open book so that you can see what's happening. And we're going to pass some of it through to you. So they had sufficient margin already to help them through the problem, but they were very clear on the

sharing the pain between them and their customers, which I thought was a really, really good approach. And they lost no skin from having a conversation with their customers. And it's protected their business to the extent that, yes, they'll take a little bit of hit on margin, but they're going to be okay. So that's a good customer relationship. Um the second CEO who's in the construction sector

came up with a great approach, which I think, you know, when we talk about mastering ambiguity, we say that in times of great uncertainty, there's a lot of opportunity. There's a lot of open ground to run in. And if you can steal a competitive march, on the other players in your business, it's these times where you're going to be able to do it.

So fuel's going through the roof, right? And this CEO dropped me an email to ask my opinion on this and I'll just read it. Um it's it's super interesting. He said All of my suppliers are putting up their prices, with some very questionable percentage increases I might add. I can only imagine lots of trade contractors are doing the same, with everyone out to make a bucket using the excuse of global oil price.

While people are panicking and everyone else is passing through cost increases, and then some, they'll be looking for a safe port in the storm. Someone who's not trying to gouge them. So I figure this is the perfect time to hold the line as long as possible with our prices and to make a play for new clients who are looking for a better partner to work with.

He sent an email out to all his company's clients to confirm that they would be honouring all their contracts and quotes and that for now they'd hold their published rate. And I thought that was just such a good way to drive loyalty and to open up the door for new customer acquisition because they were going to be very explicit about the fact that everyone else is going to have a crack at you. We're not. We're here for the long term.

So so those two CEOs, fantastic work. You know who you are, fellas. Uh fantastic work and uh really good to see these people doing that type of work and leading their company so well in this time of such uncertainty.

Should I offer my staff some sort of relief? Because, you know, they're going out to sites, they're driving around, uh, they're using their own petrol. What should we do? And most of them have sort of said that with the um desire To help ease the burden on their people, but also being very mindful of the fact they don't want to set a precedent and they don't want to set it as an expectation and an entitlement.

So using some sort of time bounded subsidy, I think is is basically where I settled with a lot of them to say, look, we understand that things are tough at the moment. uh fuel prices are really high, they won't return for quite some time. So in the meantime, we're gonna give you some relief with this allowance each week to help you out with your petrol.

And I think that's just a really nice thing that doesn't cost the company a lot, but it makes a huge difference to the employee and it really boosts loyalty.

I'm really looking forward to next week's episode, Champions Do More. Until then, I know you'll take every opportunity you can to be a no bullshit leader.