Leveraging Leadership

When to Involve Additional Team Members in Critical Business Decisions

• Emily Sander • Season 1 • Episode 158

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Emily Sander, Chief of Staff to an executive leadership coach, discusses how to handle underperforming team members by involving others in the team. She shares a case where a founder had difficulty getting metrics from a team member named Sharon. To solve this, Emily suggests including Daniel, an individual contributor close to the data, in meetings. This helps uncover Sharon's hidden talent and ensures essential work is completed, while also providing contingency plans if Sharon exits.


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Who Am I?

If we haven’t yet before - Hi👋 I’m Emily, Chief of Staff turned Executive Leadership Coach. After a thrilling ride up the corporate ladder, I’m focusing on what I love - working with people to realize their professional and personal goals. Through my videos here on this channel, books, podcast guest spots, and newsletter, I share new ideas and practical and tactical tools to help you be more productive and build the career and life you want. 

 

Time Stamps:

00:29 Client's Situation: Founder and Sharon
04:05 Discovering Hidden Talent
05:42 Back Channel Conversation with Daniel

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What do you do when someone on your team isn't delivering? This is a situation one of my clients was in. She's a founder and one of her team members, we'll call her Sharon, was not delivering the metrics she needed. This was like her core department, her core program. Sharon's in charge of this and she wasn't able to provide key metrics and key information to this founder. And the founder needed this to deliver to the board so the board could make some very important, critical decisions. And this thing had gone on for like weeks and weeks and pushing months now. And Sharon just wasn't able to provide. Seemingly basic information. So, and, and we had gone through the, you know, set expectations, be clear about timelines. Here's the format I need it in. what information would help you? Can I make this request more clear? All of that stuff had gone on and Sharon still couldn't do it. And so it was. You know what? We might need to bring someone else in the tent. We might need to bring a skip level team member into these conversations. And there was this one individual in particular, let's call him Daniel. And Daniel was on Sharon's team. And Daniel was, uh, one of the ICs, so Individual Contributors, who was, Closer to the data itself. And I said, start having Daniel in these meetings. When you talk about the overall program, you have multiple team members checking in about the program status. Bring Daniel in those. Invite him to those. along with a few other team members. But Daniel's kind of the key player here. And at first, Daniel will just listen and just kind of take in, Oh, okay. Like, uh, these are the questions being asked and these are the answers being given by Sharon. And this is the context being provided. This is why the board needs this. This is how the board is going to use this information. Okay. Okay. And this is like the format. It seems like the format's already been asked for and hasn't quite been delivered. Okay. And he's just taken all this in and getting acclimated to it. And in, you know, meetings and meetings and subsequent meetings, it might be, The founder asked Sharon a question. Uh, Sharon doesn't answer. Um, by the way, Sharon's kind of one of these people who is a little bit squirrelly, a little bit slippery, and is a good talker and can kind of talk their way out of situations and talk about things that are related to the answer, but not quite answer the question and then get off the call. And then you do weeks and weeks and weeks of that, and you still don't have the metrics. So we've all known people like that. Sharon's one of these people. So when she gives one of her squirrelly, slippery answers, it might be the founder going, Okay, I hear that answer. Daniel, um, do you have any, do you have any idea about these metrics? Are you able to provide some of these, uh, some of these metrics here? Oh, yeah, no, I pull this part of the metric. Do you want this part of the metrics that I pulled? Yeah, yes, please, please. Like, this is what I need. Okay, yeah, here you go. I have that export right here. Okay. And Daniel might be able to chime in and put these things together, right? Like two plus two equals four. Oh, you need my part and you need that other part, right? Okay, so I can pull that as well. And have it to you, tomorrow. Is that, would you like that? Yes, that would be fantastic. Thank you, Daniel. The other thing that happen in these subsequent meetings, is if the founder's asking Sharon for, recommendations, ideas, what are your thoughts on this? And, Sharing gives fluffy non answer answers. It might be okay. thank you. I heard that answer from the other team members. I'd love to get your perspectives. Can we just do a round Robin and just give me kind of your quick take, your thin slice on what you're seeing from your end, or, you know, you've listened to what we're talking about here for quite A couple meetings, like what's, you know, what are some of your ideas or what are some of your thoughts and people can chime in and give other perspectives. and this can be advantageous in a number of ways, right? So, so like number one. Um, Daniel could end up being a superstar and in, in the course of these subsequent meetings, it became apparent that Sharon had been hiding Daniel. So Daniel was very competent and good at what he did. And, Sharon was a little bit intimidated by that and didn't want to give him credit for things. And so it became apparent she had kept him off to the side. So Daniel might be a superstar on your team. He might be untapped hidden talent that you're like, Oh, I found a diamond in the rough. Here we go. So that could happen in the interim. Daniel can help provide some of this information where you're not getting it from Sharon. And you know, you got to patch this thing together and Daniel might be like the source of information. You can do it. It might be rough around the edges. It might be, I'm trying to get up to speed and get caught up on all the context, but I can get you like, I can export this information to you. And then I can learn the format that you wanted it and type of thing. The other thing is if Sharon ends up not making it, then you have someone who's just closer to everything, just closer to the information, closer to the context, someone who can step in more easily. So bringing someone into the tent or bringing other team members into the tent at this juncture might be a good thing. and another thing that was happening in this mix was that the founder had grown increasingly frustrated with not being able to. Getting this information. And so the tone on these calls was getting a little more direct, a little more pointed, a little more sharp. And the level of her involvement was getting like closer and closer and closer in. So she was, she was micromanaging because she had to, not because she wanted to. And this, in the last conversation I had with this founder, it was like, okay, Okay. At this point, at this juncture, because we know Sharon might not make it and we have contingency plans for if she exits, take Daniel aside and have a back channel conversation with him right now about the fact that you don't normally operate like this. You don't want to be operating like this. This level of oversight, is it normal? If teams are able to provide this information, like she is happy to be hands off. She is happy to let teams run and do things on their own. It's to this point because there have been rounds and rounds and rounds of conversations previously, and she's just not able to get the information and metrics she needs. And it's putting, it's putting the company in a really tough spot with the board and to just have that conversation with Daniel. So he understands that, that dynamic. all to say, there are places where bringing people into the tent is really important. Now I can imagine someone listening, going, hold on a second, Emily, are you saying undercut your management? No, no, no, absolutely not on the whole. I would absolutely support and be aligned with your leadership team, especially in public, especially with groups. Are there set select instances where bringing people into the fold and leaning on them for information that's not being provided is an option? Absolutely. Yes, and I've done this and I've coached people on it. And this is a thing that is done sometimes. Should you use it all the time? No. Should you be like flippant and disrespectful and just be nasty to people on the call, even when you're doing this? No, there's respectful, professional ways to do it, but they're like, sometimes these things have to be done and it might not feel nice, but it has to be done because you've done everything else to try to avoid this. So this is the exception. It's not the rule, but there are exceptions to every rule. And so you have to know what options you have. if you have critical work that isn't being done and the business impact is too high to wait and not do anything, and you have a go to person or a potential go to person in a skip level situation, then that is an option that you have. Okay. So deploy that and use that where you will make sure you do it in the right way. And you're always respectful to people, but that is absolutely an option. And it's sometimes a really good one in some situations. So take that and use it where you need to, and I will catch you next week on leveraging leadership.