A short advisory monologue by Bill Gallagher (Scaling Coach) encouraging leaders to be brutally honest with their teams about crises. Using his own post-2001 business near-collapse as an example, he describes how transparent disclosure to his team led to collaborative problem-solving, a turnaround, and growth; he closes by directing listeners to scalingcoach.com and his podcast for more resources.
Are you waking up at three in the morning or some other time in the middle of the night right now? Are there things that are eating at your gut, things that you're suffering with alone? Do you have deep fears about things? Do you have shame over some of the things that you've done and the way things are in your life right now and in your business? I'm Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach, host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. And@scalingcoach.com and on the podcast for Scaling up, we've got hundreds of tools and ideas and stories to help you get scaling up more efficiently and more effectively with more profit, more cash to make the whole thing a whole lot better. In addition to all the free tools, we've got low cost options for coaching to help you learn and get started coaching you and your team in the best practices for scaling up effectively. So I don't know about you and what kinds of crises you've been in, but in the aftermath of 2001, when I pushed things out and I'd kept the company afloat with a fair amount of debt, I found myself suddenly facing the music. The bank called me up and wanted to shut me down. And since there wasn't enough in the business, they wanted to take my house. And that freaked me out and had me thinking about not only losing the house and, and the failure of the business, but then ultimately like the failure of my marriage and that I'd become a weekend dad. And if you ask me, that's really what kept me up at night. Except I wasn't telling any of those things to my team at the time. And although my wife was well aware of it, I wasn't talking with her about how I was feeling, what I was thinking. Mostly it was trying to navigate this impending collapse and then figure out how to get to the other side with as little pain as possible. But I shifted it all and realized that what inspired me to do was to really fight and produce some kind of breakthrough. But I just couldn't think of it on my own. So I went to the team and I said, listen, guys, here's what's going on. I was brutally honest with them. I told them the brutal truth. Here's what I'm dealing with. Here's what I'm afraid of. I don't have any answers. I don't have a plan. Now that sounds like terrible leadership. Except I left them with this thing. I'm not going to quit. And if you'd like to help me solve this, I really welcome your help. I don't know how to do this on my own. I. Maybe together we can figure it out. Here are some of the things that we've got well, I laid stuff all out with them and together we actually found a way to have the breakthroughs that we needed. And a year later, not only had we solved the problem with the bank and redesigned our business, but we had more than doubled the company in that time and put ourselves back on a healthy place. Right. I thanked the team appropriately. But the key is this, telling the brutal truth, dealing with what's really there, and not coddling your people or hiding things from your people or suffering alone in whatever it is. So whatever the emotional thing is and the fear and all that that you've got going on, it's great to find the courage and the strength to get out there and to actually confront it all together. You and your team together can think of things that you can't do on your own. And the brutal truth, the really being honest with things, is the beginning of that. Hope this is helpful. Like I said, hundreds of stories and ideas like this at scalingcoach. Com. Go find them there or wherever you find your videos and podcasts, iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, etc. We'll talk to you again real soon.
