691 — What Your Team Won't Tell You (Book Solo #7)
In this solo episode of the Scaling Up Business podcast, scaling coach and author Bill Gallagher explains how leaders are often blind to the negative signals their teams are sending. Drawing on his new book Busy Is Broken, he presents four anonymized vignettes—Rocky, Eddie, Lee, and Thomas—that illustrate common, self‑defeating leadership patterns: a chaotic “Super‑man” who interrupts the team at all hours, a perpetually busy founder whose nonstop work exhausts staff, a micromanaging manager who erodes morale, and a founder‑centric leader who hoards decision‑making and stalls team potential. Gallagher argues that these behaviors make the leader the bottleneck, preventing scaling. He invites listeners to actively solicit honest feedback by asking team members the one thing they do that makes the job harder, and to listen without defending. The episode ends with a promise to explore the “five engines” that keep people stuck in unproductive patterns in the next installment, and includes brief promotions for his book, coaching programs, and the Scaling Up Network framework.
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Hey, everybody. We're talking today about the things your team won't tell you. What do I see? What have I heard? What have I learned about your team, about our teams that we don't notice, that we're oblivious to? You might see them in other people's teams, but you don't see them for yourself. What is it that your team won't tell you? Hey everybody, I'm Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of this Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm also the author of a new book, Busy Is Broken. Busy Is Broken. You can find it at busyisbroken.com. But it's all about how you are the bottleneck and how you growing up as a busy person started your company with your busyness and try to solve every problem with busyness and it just doesn't scale. At some point the busyness isn't just a personal sacrifice that's costing you things in your life, but it's actually holding the team and the business back. Busyisbroken.com. Also scalingcoach.com, where you'll find all of our coaching programs, workshops, things like that. We do stuff every month at every level of business, right? We've got a thing to get to your first million in sales. We've got something to get to the first billion. from a million to a billion and more. I work with leaders at all sizes. There are different things that present at each stage of growth. I just love the whole thing to do with growth. I love working on it. I love getting to work with so many different companies and so many different leaders on that, helping you navigate the kinds of things that I and my clients have navigated for decades. Um, you'll find all that more— busiesbroken.com, scalingcoach.com. All right, all right. Every CEO story gets told from the leader's perspective. What the team actually experiences, I've sat in those rooms now as the coach. I've watched the light go out in people's eyes. I've seen their downcast expressions. I've heard and noticed where they bit their tongue, where you were on a rant. I've heard the things they won't say to you directly. That's what we're talking about today. This is the ongoing series in a series of episodes all about the things that we notice as leaders. I'm gonna tell you about 4 different stories today that all come from the book. The book has an interlude. We go from some tales of transformational leaders, cautionary tales, and contrasting stories of CEOs that you know in the world and some you don't know. And then in the interlude, we flip the camera. We look at what it's like for the team. 4 composite vignettes from real teams, real teams that I've coached, anonymized, but still visceral. You can see and feel. Each one of them shows what the leader's pattern looks like from the other side of the table, the other side of the room. Let's start off with Rocky. We've talked about Rocky in some past little snippets, that kind of thing. Mm-hmm. Rocky was a chaotic leader trying to be Superman. And what Rocky would do, he did a variety of things, but one of the things that he would do from the team's perspective is that the chief of staff would wake up in the morning, 5, 6:00 AM, look at her phone and find messages from the middle of the night, rearranging her whole day. She suddenly got like jolted most days from something that came from Rocky in the middle of the night. What? On a plane somewhere in a different time zone, whatever, meddling with her work, her steady, thoughtful things against the plan. She was an effective, accomplished chief of staff. And upsetting the strategic thing all the time. So not actually there, but meddling. Jumping in on a 9:00 AM meeting or that kind of thing, but all the preparation she'd done the day before and the days leading up to the meeting, now disrupted at first thing. So she's ready to go off to yoga and have her coffee and have a nice deliberate morning and be professional and put together. Boom, she's taken up, not because something dramatic happened in the world, because something occurred to Rocky, 'cause Rocky's trying to be Superman, the leader being everywhere, all over the world in all kinds of things and also nowhere at the same time. So not present, but interjecting in things. Totally chaotic for her all the time. I'll tell you about another leader, Eddie. Uh, Eddie's team was completely unsafe all the time. So Eddie trying to work 24/7 in the office, not flying around the world, but like actually sleeping in his office, uh, many nights, catching 2 hours of sleep a night for years, trying to do that anyway. Uh, 2, 3 hours of sleep a night. So working very, very late, then getting up very, very early. Washing his face in the bathroom in the office itself, reading every possible book, right? Like we're working on priorities and things like that, but then they're reading about OKRs and introducing that and like everything, a new system, a new framework, a new, oh, we're going to do this. We're going to be radically transparent now. We're going to do this and that. It's all fine. It's all good stuff. It just was all— too much and interfering with everything. People were exhausted and tapped out by this leader who was trying to work at this pace, who looked haggard, who wasn't thinking clearly, who wasn't focused, who was just too much and too much and too much energy and too many different ideas all the time. People find themselves sprinting after gusts of wind, trying to chase whatever, not knowing how to win in their world and what really they should do because everything's changing all the time. Right? So, in the office all the time, never resting, no new ideas, no focus, just pure busyness, right? Pure busyness without any rest at all. What do you think it's like for that team? Exhausted, scattered, doesn't know what to do, where to focus, how to prioritize any of that. That was Eddie's team. Lee, we talked about recently in another episode, but Lee had a fairly large team. but loved to micromanage. So everything was pretty orderly and their plans and things like that laid out, but Lee would just get in there and do a little something on this plan, a little something on that plan. And after a while, they just sort of would bite their tongue, roll their eyes, and try not to have Lee see this sort of irritated resignation, but deeply, deeply resigned, stopped hoping things would ever change, just figuring out how to endure it. If any of them got a recruiter's call, they were out of there. Like, this place sucks. My life is unpleasant. I'm never recognized for my work. It ends up being Lee's work all the time. People weren't so much— there were some cases where they're angry, but overall not anger, just like resigned, a state worse than anger, enduring. Thomas. Thomas had— Thomas' life, Thomas was very accomplished. It was a great team, a great product, great thing, but Thomas was involved in everything and everybody had gotten very used to the founder and the founder's role and the founder's— Thomas founder, designer, like architect of everything. So they just all waited and everything happened slowly and lovely people, lovely product, but all helpers. Not leaders. Potential sat on the shelf. Potential waiting to be done, uncomfortable doing it. Everybody settled into that thing. If you manage people, those people have a version of one of these stories, one of these 4 stories. They may not be telling you. They probably stopped trying. Some of them don't even think about it anymore if it's been a while like this. Your behaviors, are they— are you— failing to delegate? Are you micromanaging? Are you trying to be Superman? Are you holding things up? Are you too operationally focused? What are the behaviors that you have? What's it like to work with you for the people around you? It's a really useful thing this week to begin to think about what's it like to be with you. So, So, here's an invitation. And you wanna start this in some places that both you and the people you're talking to feel comfortable. So, it's gonna take something for you to hear the truth and to elicit, like to ask for the truth. And you're gonna wanna go to some people, maybe someone who's a little more confident, honest, willing to tell you the truth. And ask them, what is the one thing that I keep doing again and again that makes your job harder? What is the one thing I do that makes your job harder? So that's your job to go ask them that. And then your job is to listen, be curious. Not so much about what you do, but what's it like? So, I mean, you're listening for what it is that you do and then what's it like for them. I think more attention on what it's like for them. Get in their world, listen to it, don't explain it. Don't defend it. Just listen to it. Oh, I got that. Wow. I could see that. Wow. I really feel you now. Thank you for sharing that with me. Now, you'll be probably a little heartbroken, a little sad to hear some of your behaviors. And I think from experience, both personally and with the people I coach, you will probably recognize most of the things. You've probably done them for decades in some form or another. Yeah. What I want you to do is start to think about a little bit about what it's like. You'll recognize that pretty quickly. But I mean, what you do. I'm more interested in you getting what it's like to be them. See, the more we see— in our last Solo episode, we talked about the personal cost on us, the things we miss out on, like that side of it. Now, I want you to get the personal— the cost on the other people that work with you, the people that are giving you their best work, their hours, their life. What's it like for them? Where are they shut down, repressed, annoyed, invalidated, upset by your simple behaviors that you've been doing for a long time, unconsciously mostly? I want you to think about what it's like to be them in their shoes working with you. I've done this many times myself, and a lot of the things are recurring. I notice them, but every time I notice them again, I expand my capacity for them, my flexibility, my ability to move beyond those simple recurring moves that are maybe toxic, and then expand that not just of those. For sure, I may do those for the rest of my life, a little bit, but a little bit less every time, with a little more self-awareness, a little faster to catch myself. I'm not trying to make you perfect or change or eliminate the things that you do that sometimes— Are toxic. Are unproductive, I want you to become more aware of them and able to accept them, forgive yourself, but then also shut them down or move beyond them faster. So we're kind of at a midpoint now. That's your invitation for this week. Just start to notice what it's like to be the other people working with you. So ask them, "What's the one thing I do that makes your life harder?" Listen, don't defend, don't explain, just listen, just get it, start to put yourself in their shoes. Mm-hmm. Um, we build a case now. We've talked about some of the stories, some of the behaviors, the history of how we got here, comparing some examples, the cost on you, the cost on, uh, the team. That's this episode. And I want you to think about that for the next 2 weeks. In the next episode, we're going to look at the 5 engines, if you will, the things that keep us stuck as human beings in patterns we know intellectually aren't working. They're operating systems. They're things that keep us working the way we are. When you can understand the impacts of it, start to notice it, and think about the why of it, you have more and more ability to move beyond it, to expand your toolkit and to get past where you've been held back, where you've been operating the way that you've been operating. So that's coming in our next episode. As we close, a reminder for our coaching programs, scalingcoach.com. For the book, Bill Gallagher. Busyisbroken.com. You can preorder it now. Thanks to Wanda and to my friend and mentor Vern Harnish for creating the whole Scaling Up Network framework that's at the heart of our work. Until next time, thanks for watching, for listening. Keep scaling. We'll talk to you again soon.
