Seth Dobbs (he/him): How well do you recognize problems in the making? Have you struggled deciding when small things are actually worth addressing? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs and this is the Principle Driven Leadership Podcast where I share principles of leadership, along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be.

These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building organizations and in coaching others has become leaders themselves. And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential for helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact.

And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results. And leadership is a journey. The step we’re taking today involves thinking about how being vigilant about the slow and subtle erosion of principles and values can actually help you prevent things from getting bad enough that you need to make major changes.

So Caleb worked at a social media marketing consulting firm. His firm was a pretty big name, especially in certain industries, and they were really well known for the quality of their assets, their designs, their storylines, the attitude and personality, the production quality and so forth. And in fact, that last bit, the quality was really central to how they try to differentiate themselves.

They believe that high quality media assets and social led to key outcomes for their clients, high engagement, strong return. In fact, this was so important to them that a key principle of this organization was quality over all else. Now this approach led to lots of word of mouth and reputation based business and leads, and many of them being non-competitive opportunities, which was great.

They weren’t the cheapest firm, but that was not a part of their vision. They wanted to be seen as one of the best, a premium firm, best quality, best engagement, best return on investment, and they felt that this approach would, in a turn, in turn, lead to the growth of their company. And they were right.

They focused on that vision and the company was doing very well. It grew quite a bit. And at some point though, in their heyday, Caleb was actually on a team working hard on a deadline. Pretty typical state in this business. The team leader was very anxious to get it done so they could move on to the next thing.

And because of that, actually pressed hard on the team to get it all done quickly. Now typically with marketing, there’s often inflexible deadlines due to ad commitments or other spend. But what was happening, the team lead was actually pushing for a tighter timeframe than the norm. Caleb believed. Their thinking was that because they were paid by peace.

They could generate more revenue, more money by tightening timeframes and moving on to other pieces of work for other clients sooner. That’s not wrong. That certainly works. Many mechanics, other body shops, stuff like that, do piece work and try to optimize within the process to make it profitable.

But in Caleb’s case, the team actually had to cut corners in post-production to make the new timeline work. And they delivered and while a couple of the team members raised a hand to call out, the problem of cutting corners didn’t seem like there was any real impact in that. So, in fact, by applying this pressure, the team leader continued doing that and was actually able to increase the number of pieces that team delivered in that month and increased revenue.

And so continued with that kind of pressure with trying to tighten those timeframes. And there was some ongoing concern that there was a decline in adhering to their values. In general, this was received as great news, right? The team was only making little changes who would really notice and more money was coming in.

And in fact, at some point, Caleb’s team leader was hailed as a hero because of those numbers. Which then led to other teams embracing this new approach. And because of that, Caleb’s leader wanted to continue to stand out. So the leader looked for new ways of squeezing more out of the process, and sure enough, with enough pressure, the team found other ways to shorten the process, all at the expense of almost negligible changes to quality.

Almost now for the next couple months, they were able to cycle through more clients, more work than ever without increasing costs, without increasing team size. And the team Caleb was on was heralded as new champions in the organization, even though there were growing misgivings amongst the team. And Caleb even confessed to me that while it was kind of great to be celebrated like that, at least inside, he felt it was at the expense of doing great work, that he was proud of.

It was right about one thing. The work wasn’t the same great work they used to do. So even as they were able to get more done at the same time, they were starting to see a little bit of reduction in engagement in their media and social placements. They also started seeing a decrease in word of mouth sales.

Fewer customers were just coming to them because of their reputation, and so they had to spend more time and money in seeking and landing work. And then at some point, they even lost a couple bids because of perceptions of quality, and that’s when the overall company leadership started really taking notice.

At that point, the fix seemed kind of obvious and a new leader was brought in who was gonna enact sweeping changes to improve quality, but there was a lot of reputational damage already done to the firm. They also lost a few of their best people, including Caleb. So the principle of this team needed to embrace course correct early.

This can be hard because the changes in an organization and in your processes and so forth can be subtle. I think a little bit about throwing a ball up in the air, right? You throw a ball up in the air, even while it’s still moving upwards, there are greater forces pulling it down that aren’t immediately visible.

Until they are because the ball is dropping. This is the same with organizations. In Caleb’s case, the company had a clear set of outcomes and values, and yet. They decided they should make small tweaks at the cost of those values, values in in violation of their key principle. Small forces working against the growth.

They were still propelling upwards in revenue, but the pace of that was eroding as they eroded commitment to the vision and their principles. Now it’s impossible to prevent every bad thing from happening, and sometimes the desire to do that can lead you to over-engineer and overprocess to the point of also having a negative impact.

So I’m not suggesting that, but on the other hand, letting things go too far moves you from incidental, localized challenges to more systemic problems. So you need to be vigilant, ready, and willing to recognize when something is getting in the way of achieving your desires and, and your vision, and not let that ride away at your organization.

You need to create a culture where it’s not only okay, but actually expect it that you and your team talk about problems and shape your collective perception of them together. This is what your principles are for, to give you and your team the guidance on what you need to be vigilant for so that you can course correct early and recognize problems sooner.

Again, this can be challenging ’cause in many places in particular, like with Caleb, money can override vision and principles. The opportunity for revenue can sort of override what we’re trying to achieve. So you need to think about it this way. A violation of your principles should require a check. On the one hand, is there something wrong with your principle?

Is quality really the most important thing for us? Or on the other hand, are you taking a step in the wrong direction? Should we really be reducing what we consider key to the success of our organization? Ultimately, this principle is a balancing act. It’s not about being nitpicky towards everything, but recognizing when it’s time to course correct as early as you can.

You can see the results of this principle when there are fewer big corrections needed by your team, and even ideally, you’ll start seeing fewer deliberate attempts to cross the line on your principles, on your vision. Mistakes will happen and they’re impossible to fully prevent. And in fact, we often learn more from making mistakes, so we can’t prevent all of them from happening.

But when you start seeing a pattern of not upholding your values, your culture, your principles, your vision, you should call it out and analyze what’s going on. In Caleb’s case, I definitely support the notion of the organization of the leader looking to rebalance their values in order to figure out the best way to operate a business.

But there were some sound reasons for why they had the principles they had and for where they were. And so when Caleb and some of his team members started raising the flag, there should at least have been a conversation and analysis of what was happening. Again, the reality is that opportunistic revenue is often the biggest catalyst.

It’s letting small problems grow. So the notion of course, correct early is as much about taking the long view as anything. Looking at the trend lines of decisions of what’s happening, thinking through where are these gonna take you, what outcomes are inevitably gonna result from today’s decisions, not just tomorrow, but down the road.

This is important because it is far less costly to fix problems earlier than later. Think about a small leak in your roof. It’s much easier and cheaper to fix than when you let it grow to a gaping hole, and your house suffers less internal damage by fixing earlier. The social media company could certainly correct everything at this point, but is that gonna make up for what they lost?

And does the cost of the larger correction actually exceed the benefits that were accrued along the way? This isn’t easy, but if you don’t stay vi vigilant, if you don’t ask the right questions, you’re gonna incur a lot of risk and often damage course correct early helps you face reality, which is essential to a good spirit of problem resolution in the story I described.

Few in the organization wanted to really face the reality of what was happening because there was an immediate benefit. And so a problem that was easily fixed early on was allowed to blossom or fester. And an additional impact to consider is further erosion, not just of their value around quality as their primary driver, but think about the message to the team.

They raised concerns early that they were not following the organization’s key principles and values, and they were ignored. How likely are they to wanna raise a hand again in the future, and what further damage is that gonna do? It’s one of the quickest ways to destroy the spirit of problem resolution and become an unhealthy organization.

It’s possible that early on management could have said, well, it’s okay in this one case because there are certain extenuating, some circumstances we can’t let it happen again. Or there might be other middle grounds or absolute responses, but some response by essentially ignoring the concerns. They had two destructive impacts, one organizational growth and two team spirit.

Ignoring growing problems is not a good strategy. Refusing for whatever reason, to recognize what is happening will have a decaying effect on your team, on your organization. Now sometimes rescue can seem heroic, right? I’m sure whoever came in to lead after Caleb left, if they were able to fix things, would be seen as a champion and celebrated.

I. Vigilance course correcting early on the other hand typically isn’t celebrated. It’s really the daily nudging of the organization to keep people focused and on track to keep people aligned on the values, principles, and desired outcomes of the organization. There’s no big heroic moment in that that gets recognized, which arguably is perhaps true heroism in its way.

Now, you’ll see in shows and movies and big dramas. Leaders making big, make or break decisions for their business, all to a dramatic effect. And it’s great for that, great for a storyline, but it’s not great for leading an actual healthy organization. So much of leadership is about the little things about not getting to a stage where you have to make those big decisions about course correcting early.

So what problems are you letting slide now for expediency or any other reason? Is it a one-time occurrence that makes sense as an exception? Or is it the start of a downward slide? Or does it mean that you don’t have the right principles and values in place and you need to reconsider them? What changes can you make today to improve that?

Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe and share with a friend if you liked it, and join me next time when I’ll talk about how resolving conflict sometimes requires taking a step back.