Show Notes
In this episode, we discuss how to reset expectations with stakeholders when things change. Rick shares a challenge he is facing at one of his companies. While we worked through a specific situation, the general concept applies often. Here’s the general framework that emerged:
- Clarify what needs to change and why
- Frame the problem(s) thoughtfully
- Identify the stakeholders and where do they stand
- Identify who has decision-making authority and who can be an ally
- Decide who to talk to first and iterate from there as a team
- Get everyone aligned and move forward together
- Be aware of fundamental differences; these may require you or someone else to leave
Takeaways include:
- Change happens all the time and resetting expectations is critical when it happens
- Some companies die because they never change their expectations
- When you're going through change, the minimum time investment isn't enough. You have to talk a lot more
- Start with the problems, but be thoughtful about how you frame them so that they're generalized problems that don't cause defensiveness
- As a leader, people don't see the world like you do. Your job is to get them to see it like you do, and that takes communication and it takes patience
- It is critical to get everyone to see the problems and talk about the problems
- When you can talk about the problems because they're emotional, you can't talk about the solutions and get on the same page
- When there is a fundamental disagreement you can’t get over, someone has to go (and it may be you). Get aligned on fundamental values and expectations before forming new partnerships
The problem
Rick: In life, change happens all the time. That's especially true in the workplace. Once you've been in business for more than a couple of years... even in the first year... lots of things that you thought were true are no longer true, and you have to change your mindset around what the truth is and what's going to happen next as a result of that. When you're on your own as a solo entrepreneur or you're an early founder, you just have a couple people that are all working pretty well together. It can be pretty easy to make those changes happen because the people in charge are able to make the decisions necessary to change their expectations. When you grow and you have multiple hands in the pot at different levels and it's been a longer period of time investment, you get to this place where resetting expectations is critical when a change happens, but it gets a lot harder. It gets a lot more emotionally complex. It gets a lot more complex just from sheer volume.
Tyler: Different stakeholders who all want different things and they think they know what you're doing and things change.
Rick: Multidimensional complexity increases over time. This applies to employees, partners, board members, investors. Even at home, when I was thinking about how to frame this problem I was thinking, "Well, this a Sable and Rick..." Sable is my wife. We deal with this constantly, especially in our first year of marriage where we're trying to talk about when do we have kids, what's our budget for certain things? I got fired a week before our marriage from my CEO job. It's one of those things that's like that had to go through a lot of expectation changes. Mostly, what I want to talk to you about is dealing with this at work with the stakeholders that you deal with, specifically at a nonprofit. At
GroupCurrent, we focus on helping member-based groups reach sustainability. Most of these groups are nonprofits. By design, most of our customers or nonprofit customers come to us because they've not been successful sustaining themselves. I don't want to say it's a shit show, but it's not a good situation.
Tyler: To clarify sustaining themselves, you're saying they start out where they're getting donations from various places but it's a one-time donation. They can operate for a while, but what they want is an actual business model that they can count on, and that's where they come to you to help with.
Rick: Yeah, and donations can be sustainable if you have a way of predicting them and continuing to receive them. When we starting GroupCurrent and deciding whether or not we wanted to be in this business, the thing that got me really excited is I discovered this problem that nonprofits often face, and it's not too different from a lot of founders... serial entrepreneurs, in my opinion. The situation is called the organizational starvation cycle. Some people call it the nonprofit starvation cycle, but I like organizational because I think it applies to more than just nonprofits. It starts with some unrealistic expectations from founders. In the nonprofit world, founders are called funders because generally the founders just provide the money and some guidance at the board level. They don't do the work. A lot of times, what they do is they hire a managing director or bring on some fellow board members to help run it, and they have super high expectations, unrealistic expectations. Those people that they hired feel a significant amount of pressure to conform to those expectations, which leads to either overworking, which leads to burnout, or it leads to fudging certain accuracy of things, whether it's maybe omitting when it should be said or rounding up when it should be rounded down. I speak to this stuff sensitively, because it is sensitive, but it leads to bad behavior to meet those expectations, which in turn leads to more unrealistic expectations because you're not dealing with the problem, which is unrealistic expectations. This cycle typically continues from the early days until it reaches a breaking point, which one of two things happen. Either there's no money and management gets fired and the nonprofit gets into this zombie land of, "What do we do next?" Maybe they shut down. Most of them just kind of live without doing much. Or the management goes, "Screw you guys. I can't do this anymore. I quit." There's some actual good things going on, but no one there to do the things anymore. To be successful at GroupCurrent, our clients are going to come to us because they've been in this situation, which is extremely complex emotionally. You've got founders who put a lot of money into it. You've got former people who have worked at the company who probably didn't feel like they were treated the right way. It's extremely complex. In order for us to be successful, we've got to be really good at coming in and resetting those expectations and getting all the stakeholders... the founders, the board members, and the employees that are currently working there, any current donors or community partners, any customers... on the same page with what to expect going forward. Those expectations could be mission, vision, values. It could be business model. It could be, "Hey, board members, you've got to start doing work now. You can't just sit." Roles are changing. We're dealing with this with one of our clients. We're very happy with our customer. This isn't a talk about how much the situation sucks, it's just there's a reality of the situation where the organization has gone through different renditions and it hasn't gotten yet to that place of sustainability. And it's not there yet, even with the work that we've done so far. I guess... go ahead.
Tyler: I was just going to say I like this topic because we're going to talk about it specifically in your case. But this applies very much to the topic of the podcast, which is Startup to Last, because this happens to so many companies. It happened to mine at
Less Annoying CRM where you get started... and every business, especially if you raise money... you're thinking, "I'm going to be the biggest company in the world five years from now, 10 years from now." Sometimes that happens, very rarely. But a lot of times you could still run a successful business but it's not going to be the next Google. But a lot of companies die because they never change their expectations. They never reset this. I've had this personally where it's like several people at the company weren't cool with our slower growth, whether it's customers or employees or founders or investors, in other cases. This happens to almost every business as well, so I think a lot of this will be applicable to anyone listening.
Rick: I agree. I would say that a lot of times when you're in this situation, it's easy to get impatient with other people, because getting on the same page is ugly. It is classic sausage making. You like the outcome, but you don't want to see it getting made. As we're talking about this, I want to be sensitive to how... if anyone listens to this that's part of the community that we're working with... let's be sensitive to those feelings. I will do my best to do that. I'd like to get your thoughts on where to start solving this problem, what to do, what not to do... especially... and when to... At some point, if you can't get everyone on the same page, maybe it's not worth it. How do you know when you should give up?
Get aligned at the beginning
Tyler: Let's start with the stuff that maybe won't apply directly to you, because you're coming in after things already need to change, but a lot of people find themselves in this situation where the easiest way to handle it is for it to never happen in the first place. I think the most classic example is two founders that don't talk about expectations between them at the beginning. So you start a company, who's the CEO, for example. That's a classic one. You wouldn't get hired by these organizations if they had done that from the beginning, maybe, but a lot of people should just go in saying, "Let's talk about everything we know will come up at the beginning and make sure we're on the same page." Do you agree with that?
Rick: I think it's one approach. I think if you have the right two people that you don't have to think through all these things. Like, ultimately I was really nervous... my wife is Mormon and I'm not. One of the scariest things about marrying someone... probably anyone, but especially for me... was what does that mean for me? What does that mean if we have kids? We were talking about getting married and getting engaged and I found myself constantly trying to ask every single question. I just realized that I trust this person so much that at the end of the day...
Tyler: I'm going to disagree with you there, man.
Rick: But at the end of the day, I knew that we could work through... We had talked about enough things... that we're on the same page about the things that were important... that I was able to close the book on further questions and just go, "We'll work it out."
Tyler: I guess if you've talked about enough things... Let's talk about first principles here. If you have the same fundamental values and you derive every other decision from that, then sure. To use the marriage analogy, a lot of people go into that not knowing... for example... is the other person in debt? What does the other person think about kids? Or maybe you know what they think about kids but you think they're going to change my mind. I know several people who have been divorced over things like this. I'm engaged right now and we're in the process of getting a prenup and everything like that. People say, "Don't you trust her," and it's like everyone trusts the person they're marrying and 40% of them get divorced.
Rick: Tyler, it's that she doesn't trust you.
Tyler: Yeah, that's true. It's really the other way around.
Rick: Sorry, Shelly.
Tyler: But the point is that every organization starts in a happy place. Everybody thinks, "Oh, I trust them and all that." You wouldn't partner with someone in the first place if you didn't trust them. But we know it often goes wrong.
Rick: You're right. When you start a relationship with someone, if you're going to go into any form of partnership, there are some core questions you've got to answer starting with, "What do we value?" Behavior values are really important to me, for example. There are other types of values, whether that's financial values or how you think about how much time you're putting into the company from a work-life balance, those sorts of things. I totally agree.
Tyler: Okay. Great. We don't need to harp on that because it'll vary from person to person and it doesn't apply to your situation exactly, but I think that's the starting point.
Rick: It does in a way. GroupCurrent is coming into a situation where there are old mission statements, there are old vision statements, there probably are some old behavior values. A lot of these probably got discussed at some point in time, but it's gone through enough iterations to where nothing is clear. At least, it's not written down; if it's clear to other people, maybe it's just not written down. It's almost like we do have to start from scratch.
What needs to change and why?
Tyler: That's great because one of my favorite tricks for this... because believe it or not, I've done this a lot over the years at Less Annoying CRM, because once again it's not that our values started out misaligned, it's that mine changed and someone else's didn't or vice-versa. One of the things I really have found useful is reference the old ones and... in a way that doesn't hurt anyone's feelings... almost make fun of them. In my case it's easy because I wrote all the old documents, so if I'm making fun of them I'm the victim of that. But we have things that are like, "If we're at a billion dollars in revenue here's what might happen," and now it's comical. We're never going to be at a billion dollars in revenue. I find it helpful to say that out loud... everyone gets a chuckle... and be like, "We know that that's wrong, right? That doesn't say anything about what the new expectations are supposed to be, but can we all agree that the state of the world... the reality... is not what this vision statement from five years says," and that's a starting point here. What do you think about that?
Rick: I don't know where the vision statement is. In that situation, I don't know that anyone could... If I went around the table and said, "What's our vision? What's our mission?" I'd probably get... I think there's five board members?
Tyler: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Rick: There would probably be five different statements.
Tyler: That's great. Maybe that's a different permutation on what I said, which is before starting to say, "Let's change expectations and all that," you can start by saying, "We don't even have expectations now." You could survey all five, anonymize it a bit, and say, "Look, can we all agree that it's a problem that I when I ask this question to five people I got five different answers?"
Rick: I think that there is agreement already on that.
Tyler: Oh, there is agreement, okay. But if someone else is going through this process, maybe that's a place to start.
Rick: Yeah. I think that's a great place to start. Getting everyone on the same page, the problem is we're not on the same page.
Tyler: Yeah.
Rick: That's actually pretty easy. Generally people are like, "Yeah." I think where it gets harder is that there are some strong opinions that have to be worked... Getting everyone on the same page that we need to work through something, I haven't found any hard problems with that, but other people do. It's how to get them on the same page once everyone agrees that we've got to get on the same page.
Tyler: I have had troubles with that. You wouldn't be brought in if they hadn't already reached that conclusion, but I do think there was a step where some people had not come to terms with it and some people had. Anyway, once again, we don't need to delve into that, but if you're in a situation where that doesn't I think you need to be delicate about first getting everyone on the same page that there's a problem.
Rick: You're right, actually. That is a good challenge. We're six months into this. We couldn't have this conversation six months ago. There's been a lot of work to get to the point where there's something new here, it's different, it's worth taking the time to get on the same page now, whereas four months ago, maybe it was... July... a hypothesis and wasn't worth trying to get on the same page.
Tyler: Yeah. So you're at this point where everybody agrees, "We're not on the same page and we need to be." There's two problems here at least. One is what should the decision be? The other one is, if we know that decision, how do we get everyone on that page. It sounds like you want to talk more about the second one here, not about how do we decide what the path should be.
Rick: In this situation, GroupCurrent has come up with a new path and we've proven that that path has the potential to be viable. That's the membership-based model. We went from no membership-based model to a membership-based model.
Tyler: So a model where people are donating random amounts of money or partnering with businesses that sponsor you, whatever, to a model where all of the members of the community pay a regular fee and that sustains things.
Rick: Yes, and then there are community partners who pay as well, but it's a recurring model. It's not a one-time campaign. There's no donations. It's all fee-for-service.
Tyler: Okay. Great. So you've got the model figured out. Now, I imagine the situation you find yourselves in... there's different stakeholders. Some of the stakeholders totally align with this new model. Some of them probably could align but it ruffles their feathers or they just need to get in the right headspace. And probably, for some people, there's not even a role for them in this new model.
Rick: That's fair. Who those people are I'm not clear on. It could be that everyone just needs clarity and they're going to all be great, or once they have clarity they might say, "This isn't for me anymore."
Tyler: I'm going to keep jumping back to my anecdotes, because that's what I know. We ran into this situation where we went from we were growing 10X per year, 5X per year, really high growth, which is easy when you're small. Then you get bigger and we went down to growing 35% this year. Two of the very early members of the company, people we referred to as partners... sort of like late-stage co-founders basically... they just weren't... It took us two years to realize this, but it turned out that neither of them were compatible with this other model. Everyone else at the company was. I don't know if you have people like that, and it would not be professional for you to say who any of them are, but any time you're doing this change management thing, some people, the healthiest thing for them to do is just leave. That's what happened in my case and it was for the best.
Rick: Fair enough. I don't disagree with you. I guess my hope is that everyone can make it through the change.
Tyler: I don't think there's anything interesting to talk about for the people who are totally aligned, so that means the interesting thing are the people who can survive this but there might be some bumps in the roads. Does that sound right to you?
Rick: Yeah. I would say I know what it looks like on the other end of this, but this isn't something I'm excited to go tackle. This is a very messy thing. I think what would be a success for me today is if I could walk out of here with here's step one, here's the order of events, and don't worry about steps three, four, and five, just focus on step one right and getting to step two. That would make me feel really good.
Tyler: Okay. Do you already have a sense of this? One thing I'm curious about is have you identified who the people are that might need a little smoothing out here?
Rick: I think the reality is that everyone does, myself included. It's a small nonprofit. The people who are involved are passionate what the organization has done in the past and what has been done, but there's a limit of time that people can put into it. Everyone being in the same room talking has happened twice in the last six months. Maybe three times.
Tyler: How often is it supposed to happen?
Rick: Once a quarter. That makes sense. But when you're going through change, the minimum isn't enough. You have to talk a lot more.
Tyler: Or you have to remove people from the decision-making process.
Rick: That's fair. In this particular situation, I don't think removing people out of the decision-making process will work, given the nature.
Tyler: Do you think there's a way to get more people involved in the decision-making process?
Rick: Yes, and I think now is the time. The question is how to do that just recognizing-
Tyler: Although you kind of said that the decision has been made, though, right? You know what the path is. It's about aligning people with that path.
Rick: GroupCurrent is a service provider here. We are not in the position of making those decisions. We have a recommendation to the client of, "Hey, this is what we believe should be the focus going forward. We have identified that one of the drags right now is that not everyone is aligned around..." One, we haven't made this clear, so problem solved there. I guess that's what I need to do. I just answered the question.
Tyler: Step one is go make it clear to everybody, yeah.
Rick: And even to ourselves. GroupCurrent hasn't written any of this down and shared it with the group. So that's the first step, is to write down...
Tyler: Let's be even more specific. Write down, "Here's the deal, everybody. We've identified what the problem is: if you asked five people for whatever, the five people would give different answers. What we need to do is get one answer to that that we all agree on. That's step one. By the way, we at GroupCurrent have a proposal for what we think that is." You want to present that in a more careful way, right?
Rick: Yeah, and I'm realizing that that should happen in a smaller group first, not to the whole group. I don't think it'll be productive.
Who are the stakeholders?
Tyler: Can I ask for a summary? Who are the stakeholders here? Maybe individuals who are most important but then groups of people.
Rick: Yeah. There's original founder, then there's a secondary founder who came on later but has put a lot of money behind it, then there's the former person who ran the organization for a long time, then there's a new chairperson, then there's someone else who I haven't spent much time with but appears to be on there more as a financial advisor-type role.
Tyler: This is the board?
Rick: That's the board.
Tyler: So five people?
Rick: Five people. I should also note that the chairperson recently changed. The new chairperson is very motivated to create clarity for herself and for the organization.
Tyler: Who hired you? Do you have an ally or something?
Rick: There's a lot of allies. I wouldn't say that anyone is not an ally. I think that the constraint we're operating with here isn't... this isn't a situation where we're going against enemies. This is a situation where we're going against limits of time. You have to use everyone's time in order to get shit done and get it approved, because everything is a board decision right now. It's not a GroupCurrent decision. It's getting people to the point when they're together that they can make a decision.
Tyler: Okay, so you've got five people on the board. Those are ultimately the decision-makers. Who are other stakeholders you're concerned with when it comes to this kind of change process?
Rick: The number one for me is our members. David and I have... especially David... has used a lot of his person brand capital to bring people on board and connect people.
Tyler: You've told people, "We're making this change to the organization. Trust us that this is going to work."
Rick: Yes. I guess the scary thing is that... and maybe this is what's causing it to be emotional for David and me... if this doesn't go like we think it can and should, what are we going to tell the people who trusted us if it doesn't go well?
Tyler: To pull this back to a more generic version, that's probably always an issue with any kind of setting expectations and aligning people. You wouldn't be having these conversations at all if nothing was changing. That's one of the joys and also terrifying things about entrepreneurship, is that you're putting yourself out there and sometimes you're going to wrong.
Rick: And you care, right? That's the part. When you don't care... One solution is just don't care as much, right?
Tyler: Which plenty of people do.
Rick: It's hard to do that. I have a really hard time doing that, so that's not a solution for me.
Tyler: So you've got the members... what, 100, 200 of those?
Rick: Yeah, about 140, 130.
Tyler: 140, okay. Any other groups of stakeholders?
Rick: Well, there's partners. Let's just call it 10 of those ranging from community partners, which are municipalities and chambers of commerce, to like a perk partner who are consumer products that want to target entrepreneurs, or service providers that want to target businesses.
Tyler: And they're paying some amount of money beyond just a normal membership.
Rick: Correct.
Tyler: Cool. That's the whole group? The board, the members, the partners?
Rick: Yeah. I guess the stakeholder group that I think we have to acknowledge exists but I don't know much about them is the legacy employees, board members, and donors of the organization and what they expect out of it. Then there's also the larger entrepreneurial community in Park City that is watching and on the edge of joining. Or maybe they aren't part of the organization but they are proponents of the organization.
Tyler: I don't know if this is necessarily what makes sense for you, but I would just say as a general framework for this normally... You've got different stakeholders... and this will be true at any business... you've got customers and employees and founders and stuff... I'd say ultimately who's going to make the decision... in your case it's easy, that's the board. And then, whose interests are you actually trying to align? One way you could view this, "What I want to do is really take care of the members, but I need to get the board to see that that's what needs to happen." A different way to do this would be to say, "I want to do whatever the board wants because they're employing me, and then I need to soften that message to the members so that they're cool with it."
Rick: I'm a customer guy, so I'd rather get terminated and fired rather than not do what's best for the customer. In this case, the customer is the member in my mind. That's the core customer.
Tyler: You say you have the plan that you want, you need to the board on board with it.
Rick: I don't think it's just the plan that I want. I think it's a plan that GroupCurrent has made progress on and that many... the board probably doesn't fully understand collectively, but if they did, they would probably be pretty excited about it.
Tyler: Absolutely. I guess when I say the plan you like, it's the one... you don't need to have reset. They're set. You need to get everyone on the same page.
Rick: Correct.
Tyler: The point of this is not, technically, how do you convince a board of directors to be on your side, it's how do you reset expectations, meaning everyone has these expectations that were bad... or not bad, but no longer correct. There's going to be a sometimes painful transition to the reality of how things are now. Basically, how do you break that to them? How do you walk them through that journey until they're living in reality?
Rick: Yep. And how do we do it with significant time constraints? And let's recognize that these are successful people, busy people, they're A-type personalities. I guess doing it without causing problems for people.
Tyler: In this case, since there's five board members and those are the people that need to have their expectations reset, it seems to me that this is a one-off thing, which may be different from, "I have this group of 10,000 customers and I need to send a marketing message to them." You're resetting each of the five people separately, potentially, right? Because you said they have five different sets of current expectations.
How far apart is everyone?
Rick: I would say everyone is looking in the right direction, but at what level they're looking at is slightly different.
Tyler: I wonder what you think. Would it work to basically say let's figure out where they all are right now, and then basically do a delta: what's the difference between that and what Rick... what you... see? And then put a plan together for each one on how do we get them from point A to point B.
Rick: Let's recap. Step one is to clarify what it is that we want the world to look like and what we want everyone to be on the same page about. I'd like to maybe go into what that should include if we have time. Second is figure out where everyone else is relative to that and who is the closest aligned and who is really far apart. Third would be work through the closest first to get an ally and work together as you add more people to close the gap with the other people.
Tyler: I think we should talk about the third, but earlier you said that what you really want from this is one takeaway. It sounds to me like the next thing you do is... not a survey... a lay of the land. Where do the five people stand right now? Do you agree that that would be a productive next step?
Rick: Not more productive than clarifying on a page what it is that David and I have. I would say that's the second step. I would do both of those pretty quickly.
Tyler: Cool. So we've got maybe 10, 15 minutes here. Would you rather dive into the clarifying step, or jump into that third one, which is once you know where everyone is and you know what your vision is, how do you reset their expectations there?
Closing the gap
Rick: While I think it would be valuable to go through details on what we need to cover in this, I think the hardest part is not going to be that; it's going to be when there's conflict and you're hitting that "We're not on the same page" moment that sometimes get emotional. How do you deal with that?
Tyler: Let's talk about that. Let's keep in mind here that because we haven't totally finished the first two steps we can only speak in vague terms here. Normally what we like to do is speak very specifically and then hopefully draw big picture concepts from it. We can only talk in the big picture here, but let's do it. My initial reaction to this is... and I'm probably not very good at this... I focus so much on pointing out the problems versus trying to push the solution. I think people get really defensive if you're like, "No, this is what we should be doing." It's harder for them to get defensive if you say, "Do you disagree with my characterization that the state of the world you're describing has problems?"
Rick: Yeah. That's the approach we've tried to take to date, but there's some defensiveness around pointing out historical problems around the table. That's the emotional complexity of this that I was talking about earlier.
Tyler: If you were trying to be really political... and I am not suggesting this at all... you could try to blame it on... like, each person you talk to, be like, "It's this other person's fault." It's no one's fault.
Rick: And please, no one out there do that. It's not right.
Tyler: But there's a trick... what I just said was a little too sleazy... where if you say something to someone like, "Most people are terrible drivers," they'll be like, "Yep." What you really mean is, "Rick, you're a terrible driver." You can get people to be less defensive by being like, "You're on my side and we're complaining about..." not any specific person... "the general population."
Rick: What I'm taking away from what you're saying is that I need to be thoughtful about framing the problem... Yes, we start with the problems, but I need to be thoughtful about how I frame them so that they're generalized problems that don't cause defensiveness. You've identified the thing that I'm running into that I'm most worried about. We can't talk about the problems because they're so emotional, and therefore because we can't talk about the problems you can't really talk about the solutions and get on the same page with solutions. That is the problem we're running into. We can't talk about the problems because everyone has an emotional reaction to them. I think this happens a lot.
Tyler: I've run into this many times, for sure.
Rick: How do you get past that emotion and get everyone to agree that this is the problem? Once you get to a problem, solutions are easy.
Tyler: Mm-hmm (affirmative). This is not a productive comment, but let me just say to everybody that one thing that I've done in my career that I've found leveled me up from when I was less experienced is... I'm not saying I'm perfect with this... I'm less defensive of my old actions than I used to be. That's not something you have control over here, Rick, but just everyone, if we can all just try to be like, "Yeah, I did something five years ago. I can admit that there were flaws with it," that would avoid a lot of these situations.
Rick: Yeah. Unfortunately, you can only control yourself. When you're trying to get people in this situation to align, you can't always control people's reaction to things, so you've got to predict them and be thoughtful of them.
Tyler: Obviously, this is going to vary case by case, but what do you do to get someone to acknowledge a problem that they themselves may have been a part of creating? It's an emotional and embarrassing thing for them to admit.
Rick: I can tell what I'd normally have done in the past... and it's not the right answer... but it's basically to be like, "The problem is more important than your feelings. I'm not going to worry about your feelings. I'm going to state the problem and if you have a reaction to that, that's your problem." I don't think it's the most productive way to go about it based on experience. I honestly do not know how to go about this a better way. That's how I deal with things. I talk about the problem very directly. I try to be as patient as possible. At some point I lose my patience and I state the problem very on point, and it doesn't go well.
Tyler: Would it be too sensitive for you to state, right now, what is the problem? And maybe there's 20 problems, but can we pick one and dissect it?
Rick: No, I don't want to. This isn't that complicated. It's really coming down to thoughtfulness about how people see the world when people don't see the world like you. This is actually one of my biggest learnings from PeopleKeep that I constantly face in life and I have to get better at dealing with it. I think most good leaders figure this out, which is that people don't see the world like you do. Your job is to get them to see it like that, and that takes communication and it takes patience. At the end of the day, we want people to see the world like we do, but we are losing our patience and skipping some important steps around framing this that would make our lives so much easier. We're trying to solve the problem without getting everyone on the same page with the problem, because getting everyone on the same page with the problem requires a lot of effort.
Handling fundamental differences
Tyler: Yeah. There's something else here that I hear a lot and I'm trying to be better about myself that might apply, which is there are situations where you literally can't give everyone what they want. That's a more generic version of what you're talking about, is just what do you do when two people want two fundamentally conflicting things and you can only do one thing? I keep hearing... and it keeps being true in my experience... people at the very least want to be heard. That might be one thing you can do to soften this a bit, is to say, "Okay, you tell me what you think. I'm listening. I'm getting your feedback. But, you've got to understand that at the end of the day we have to reconcile all this. Not everyone is going to get what they want, but I'm going to listen to every single person." Is there an opportunity to do that here?
Rick: I think so, but we're going to run into a problem here where who is responsible for what and who has the decision-making power to... I don't think whose role it is at the organization right now is clear enough. Who should be doing that is unclear. Who's the person who should be talking to everyone and saying, "We're going to have to reconcile this and I'm the reconciler." That's, I think, where it's a bit sensitive, but I would say GroupCurrent is there to be the instigator here, board being the decision-maker.
Tyler: You're there to be the instigator, board being the decision-maker. Maybe this isn't appropriate in your setting, but in a similar one it might make sense to say, "We already said we're going to figure out what the vision is. We're going to figure out where everyone stands. We're going to compare the two." You said let's start with the person with the smallest delta who's closest to being aligned. Maybe that's a good default person to say, "You're on the board. You're as important as anyone else in the organization. You need to go do this next step rather than GroupCurrent doing this next step."
Rick: That's really interesting. That's a great idea. I would say the only concern with that is that time limit thing. I think that's the right thing to do. Maybe it's not, "You're the right person," but it's, "We need to work together to get everyone on the same page. What's your role in this and what's ours?"
Tyler: Yeah. It's going to be different every time, but the more people you can get on the team the less... I think one reason people get defensive and emotional about this is it's kind of like, "Is it your place to say this?" And the more people... assuming everyone is handling it professionally and all that... the less that objection makes any sense.
Takeaways
Rick: Yeah. But I would say that I thought my biggest takeaway was taking action, but I didn't realize what was actually causing me problems. It's not getting everyone to see the problems and talk about the problems. Because there's an emotional reaction to talking about the problems that prevents us from talking about them, and we've got to focus on getting around that. If we can't there's no way we're going to solve it.
Tyler: Obviously, we have not resolved this issue. I feel like we've maybe talked about it as much as we can without the next step happening and getting more specific. Do you think maybe we can recap all the different things we're taking away from this?
Rick: My takeaways are, first, this happens all the time in situations from personal situations to business situations. Oftentimes we go through the motions on this stuff, but it's actually really hard, especially as the complexity of the change increases, and that could be based on the more people involved, it could be based on the length of time that has passed going down a pathway... the sunk cost, in other words... it could be the complexity around the size of the change and what it means personally for individuals involved with the change. Anyway, the higher the complexity, the more thought it takes. First, you've got to clarify what it is that you want to get people on the same page on, and if you can't do that in writing don't talk to people about it because it's just going to confuse them.
Tyler: It's like politicians who have absolutely no idea what they want but they go up and they're like, "Unity!" Or something like that.
Rick: Exactly. Second, gauging how far apart you are with the stakeholders that you need to get on the same page, and then probably identifying who is closest, but also it's probably like who's closest to you but also who is in the biggest, best position to help you? There's probably some combination of those two things to get... Go ahead.
Tyler: I'd even say a step before that... this may be obvious to some people but not to others... write down on a sheet of paper, "Who are the stakeholders and how can you communicate with them?" If it's a board of directors, one by one, every person is different. If it's customer base, maybe you can segment them in some way. Figure out what level of specificity you can target these people.
Rick: I totally agree. I think it's a higher level thing. One is to write down what you want to get everybody on the same page on. The second is to analyze and write down who your different stakeholders are and what their needs are and what their motivations are and how they're different, and then how far apart are they from each other and from where you want to go? Third, go start talking to people. In this particular situation, it's not get everybody in the same room and talk, it's let's start with the first person and then decide, once that first person is on the same page, how to handle it together going forward. I think I lost you again, didn't I?
Tyler: All right. I think we're back.
Rick: Did I lose you again?
Tyler: What I was hearing was, "Third, go out and start talking to people." Do you want to start there?
Rick: Yeah. Third, go out and start talking to people. In this situation, I don't think it's a get everyone in the same room type of thing, it's a focus on one persona and get on the same page with them and then decide together as a group of plus one where to go from there.
Tyler: Can I give anecdote on that working for me? There have been things at Less Annoying CRM where I had an idea and I was really nervous about how people would react to it. What I would do is I would have one-on-one meetings with people and I'd be like, "I trust this person. They're not going to be the person to flip out about this." Then I'd just have the conversation, learn from them, and then after I had a couple of these I was like, "I think I've refined this enough. Let me ask the next tier of people who aren't going to be..." It ended up that I never needed to announce anything, because these one-on-one conversations got everyone aligned.
Rick: Totally. When you have these conversations and people feel part of it, they end up taking some part of ownership of distributing the message, and it makes your job of communication so much easier because you have the buy-in. I guess the only thing that I don't have a takeaway for is when to give up. What I'm realizing is that I guess if this doesn't get solved, at some point it's not going to be worth trying to solve. I don't know when that is.
Tyler: What I would say is that the more generic version of this is not give up, it's, who needs to be removed? In your case maybe you, Rick, need to be removed. But in some cases... you're not the CEO in this case, but if you are... instead of giving up on the whole thing, maybe you're like, "Well, there's two out of five people who aren't on board. This is going to be tough, but it's time to get them out of the equation now."
Rick: Interesting. I guess the question is at what point do you move to that type of conversation?
Tyler: My experience has been that... Hopefully the people you're working with are reasonable and smart and all that, and if you talk through stuff long enough you will agree. And if you don't, there's a point where you identify, "We're not disagreeing because one of us is right and one of us is wrong. We're disagreeing because we have different first principles." That, to me, is when you say, "There's no changing that. We're both right in our own worldview. That means we need to end this."
Rick: Yep. Yep. Yep. I totally agree. I hope that that's not the situation here. I hope it's not. One other takeaway that I think is not what I expected, but I think it's probably the biggest take-away for me, is that when you can't talk about problems in the organization without getting emotional, you can't solve these problems. Making it a priority to be able to talk about the real problems without emotion, with whatever team you're working on, is critical. You can't go bigger than the number of people on the team who can do that. You can't. It's unproductive. I don't know the solution to that.
Tyler: If someone is just getting started, if they haven't run into these problems yet, you can preempt this, though. You can start a culture of talking about things unemotionally. No blame assigned. You don't want to start talking about things like that when they're tough, because that's what you're doing right now, is you're trying to form that trust with people while dealing with a hard situation, whereas it'd be much better if you already formed that trust with them.
Rick: Makes total sense, man. Would you add anything else?
Tyler: No, I think that's good.
Rick: I really appreciate it, man. I feel a weight off my shoulders. I don't feel crazy for what we're going through now. I know it's logical and I have a path forward, so I really appreciate your time today. All right everyone, thank you for listening. You can join the conversation on this topic and review past topics by visiting
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