In this podcast episode Cameron Herold explains why the most important "team" for any senior leader is the leadership team itself, not their functional department. Drawing on his coaching work with Blue Grace Logistics and his experience building 1‑800‑GOT‑JUNK, he outlines concrete rituals that break down silos and politics in growing companies. He recommends a weekly 2‑minute high‑five/shout‑out round where each leader publicly acknowledges a specific contribution from another function, establishing cross‑functional appreciation. He stresses the need for a clear rallying cry—a vivid vision, BHAG, or core purpose—that aligns every employee beyond departmental goals. He advocates a lean leadership‑team dashboard that tracks only 2‑3 key metrics per function, colour‑coded for quick status checks, keeping the whole team on the same page. Quarterly off‑site retreats in non‑office settings are suggested to strengthen culture and relationships. He also describes gamifying project progress with a large Monopoly‑style board, turning milestones into houses and hotels that generate fun rewards, further uniting teams. Finally, he proposes flipping the org chart so CEOs and COOs appear at the bottom, supporting VPs, managers, front‑line staff, and ultimately clients, and emphasizes that leaders must live core values and actively help each other remove obstacles. These practices together create a high‑trust, low‑politics environment that scales from 30 to 400 employees.
Chapters
On the Cincinnati Bengals, we've got a wide receiver and the wide receiver's got the offensive team and the special teams and the defensive teams. What's the most important team for the wide receiver of the Cincinnati Bengals? It's the entire team. No one gets this right. Everyone thinks, well, the wide receiver's on the offensive team, so of course that's his most important team. The CFO's in charge of finance, of course that's his most important team. The CMO's in charge of marketing, of course that's the most important team. No, it's effin' not. So I was coaching a company in Florida. This is going back about 10 years now, company called Blue Grace Logistics. And at the time they had 400 employees at their office in Florida. They just ranked as the number one company to work for in the state of Florida. He was president of his YPO chapter, and I'd been coaching them for 4 years. I coached them from 40 people up to about 400 people. But when we were at the 400-person mark, there was some politics starting to creep in. In fact, it wasn't just creeping in. It was like a black mold that had kind of spread over the leadership team. It was like this ooey gross kind of black mold of politics and silos and kind of turf wars and pointing fingers and bullshit that just shouldn't be there in a best company to work for, best place to work. Total open office environment, a CEO who was amazing. So I was leading one of their meetings. I did 4 years in a row. I went down and spoke at their conferences and coached a lot of their people in person. I coached their CEO and their COO for 4 years. So I was working with their team and something dawned on me. On the Cincinnati Bengals, we've got a wide receiver and the wide receiver's got the offensive team and the special teams and the defensive teams. What's the most important team for the wide receiver? The Cincinnati Bengals. It's the entire team. But no one gets this right. Everyone thinks, well, the wide receiver's on the offensive team, so of course that's his most important team, right? The CFO is in charge of finance. Of course that's his most important team. The CMO is in charge of marketing. Of course that's the most important team. No, it's effin' not. When we built 1-800-GOT-JUNK, The most important team that any of the 6 of us on the leadership team was responsible for was the leadership team. The second, our set, we always called it our second team, was our functional business areas. So the leadership team was my primary, and then it was marketing and sales and PR and the call center, right? Our head of finance was leadership team and then finance. Roman, the head of IT, was the leadership team. And then IT. And if you asked any of us the most important team, it was 1-800-GOT-JUNK, completely no questions asked. So when the wide receiver is standing off the field and he's watching the defense play and the defense are now running off the field because it's time for the offense to come on, the wide receiver is high-fiving them and cheering them and slapping them in the ass and saying, oh, by the way, I noticed a couple of things while you guys were out there. Here's what I saw. So what we put in place for Blue Grace Logistics was every week's leadership team meeting, before the meeting started, every one of the 6 to 7 people, I think it was 7 people on their senior leadership team, had to high-five and shout out one other business area for something specific that they appreciated them in the last week. And it could have been Jay going, Kathleen, I just want to say fucking A to finance. You guys crushed it by pulling those reports together for us last week. I know you were super slammed, but man, that lived two of our core values and we just love you long time. And then Kathleen's like, thank you, that's amazing. But I got to shout out Chez. Chez, you guys over in marketing, man, you guys crushed it. You guys, you know, blah, blah, blah. And that practice every single week with every single leadership team member shouting out everybody. So, everyone had to shout and it had to be something specific. It's not just, "I appreciate marketing." F off. What specifically did they do that lived a core value or that made your life easier or that made you proud to work here or that drove us towards our core value or our core purpose or our BHAG? Like, what was it specifically? And when we call that thing out, Super powerful. So I would encourage all of you to bring that system into your weekly meeting. It doesn't take more than 15 seconds per person. So it's 1 to 2 minutes total to shout out another business area to like for, for all 7 to get shouted out, all 8 to get shouted out. Like it's 2 minutes at the start of every weekly meeting. It will be game changing for the company. Couple other things that I thought about related to silos and politics. I was thinking back to the businesses that I've led or coached. Second one is, does your company have a rallying cry, like a core purpose or a BHAG or a vivid vision? Because that rally cry, whether it's win the Super Bowl or win the World Cup, or at 1-800-GOT-JUNK, it was to build a globally admired brand or to make our vivid vision come true, or to get to $100 million or to get to the top 30 metros by the end of 2003. We always had a rallying cry that aligned not just the leadership team, but everybody else in the company. And then our BHAG, building a globally admired brand, our quality focus areas, clean, shiny trucks, friendly, unified drivers, on-time service, upfront rates, aligned everybody, our core values. So you need those rallying cries, and that pulls people away from finance is my most important area. No, no, finance is way secondary. To our core purpose and our BHAG and our vivid vision and our core values. So the rallying cry is important. Wondering how AI can actually improve your business? Cadre.ai helps leadership teams identify the highest impact opportunities and implement AI strategies that increase efficiency, profitability, and revenue. Learn more at cadre.ai.com. You also wanna make sure that you help each other avoid the busy traps. As we scale, especially when you're in the 30 to 100 employees and you're in the death zone, you can often get busy being busy. You can get busy pushing paper, you can get busy managing reports, you can get busy working on ideas that aren't necessarily the critical few things, but the important many. So help each other out by going, hey Taylor, I noticed that finance is getting a little bogged down in some of this minutia. Could you help us with the marketing budgets? Because if we could nail that, we could, we could totally take over the year. Right? So, get— help each other out. Show them the blind spots. Show them where they're getting beaten out on the field while you're standing on the sideline. Make sure that you take time to get out of the office as a leadership team. Don't do your quarterly meetings in the office. Even if you rent an Airbnb or a Breather Space or some cool, you know, out-of-the-office space, go somewhere that has some culture and have some fun and sit and break bread together. I love renting like a, you know, big 8-bedroom Airbnb and everybody living there for 1 or 2 nights. But some time away from the rest of the business every quarter is really, really powerful. Make sure that you define metrics and accountability is another way you break down the politics and the silos is have 2 or 3 metrics for every business area that ends up on your leadership team dashboard. Right? If you have a dashboard that looks like my Zoom screen right now with like 60 people, I don't know who to look at. If you have a dashboard filled with rows and filled with columns and it's all these metrics, you don't know what the most important critical few metrics are. So my suggestion is that you have a leadership team dashboard that's even just in Excel. It doesn't have to be fancy. That has 2 from finance, 2 or 3 from finance, 2 or 3 from operations, 2 or 3 from sales. 2 or 3 from marketing, 2 or 3 from customer, 2 or 3 from ops, 2 or 3 from IT that roll up to a leadership team dashboard. And that's all you see. And you see whether the metrics are green, yellow, or red across not just your business area, but you see the leadership team's dashboard. Green meaning that everything's on track for that metric. Yellow means there's something off that maybe we should talk about. Red means there's a fire we should kind of dig in. And every week everyone on the leadership team sees the top 2 to 3 metrics for the entire business so that we all stay on the same page. And then we can go look at our business areas 20 or 30 metrics later. But finance doesn't want to look at 20 metrics from marketing, nor do they have time to. The CEO doesn't need to or want to, but that's what's going to keep you on the same page is that kind of Same page. Um, I also like creating some kind of a game on a quarterly basis. One of my favorite games that we ever played was somebody on our marketing team put the Monopoly board up on, on, on a whiteboard. But I mean, it was a 5-foot-long by 5-foot-wide Monopoly board, and every one of the real estate properties was a project. So there were, you know, the, the 2 purples were 2 IT projects, and the 3 light blues were 3 finance projects, and and each business area had houses and that you'd get like 2 houses on one of your properties if it was 50% completed. So let's say the project was to, you know, roll out a marketing calendar. That would be one of the colored houses. And when that marketing calendar was at version 2 and it was being signed off on, maybe I had 2 houses. When at version 3 and we were getting it, you know, beta tested, maybe there were 3 houses and then You got the hotel when the project was rolled out. And it was just really fun on a weekly basis, a daily huddle to update the Monopoly board so that you could keep everybody on the same page. And then it's kind of fun when you're cheering on finance for getting a hotel on one of their properties because they get to go up and spin the wheel and community chest or chance is like dinners for everybody in the business area or free coffees for everybody in the business area. Or you guys all have to run through the tunnel and get paddled. And like, we do silly stuff as well, but whatever it is that keeps you on the same page is how you break down the politics and silos and turf wars. You see, like the games and having fun and updates on projects, but it's together as a team is what's really critical. And then the last part is the last two parts. The first is that. The core values start at the top or really at the bottom. I think you should flip your org chart upside down and have the CEO and the COO at the bottom of the org chart supporting the, the VPs, supporting the managers, supporting the frontline staff, and everybody's supporting the clients, right? So if your job is to support everybody, it's also to be the ones who live the core values. You can't show up late for meetings and go, sorry, I'm late. What you're really saying is, F you, I'm disrespectful and I think my time's more valuable than yours. So if you wanna keep the company on the same page and really build that strong leadership team, it's everyone has to live the core values and that has to start at the top. So, you know, leading by example, um, is critical. And then the, the, the last one is just to help each other. Right? We're there to help support each other, to help remove obstacles with each other, to help, you know, if we see somebody stressed or we see they're struggling in their daily life, just to be there and support them. Because sometimes they had, you know, a tough couple of plays out on the field and they just need us to cheer them on a little bit when they're off the field.
