Just Took Over a Hot Mess? Here’s How to Lead Without Losing It

Have you ever walked into the room as the newly appointed or elected leader and inherited a hot dumpster fire of mess? Within 2 seconds, you figured out which directors are fighting amongst themselves while they text under the table. You know the finances are a shambles because nobody really knew how to balance them out. And you're the one that's got to fix it. How did you get there? How does any organization get to the point where there is infighting and fussing and real hard problems on the financial front. And then you ask, "Well, what exactly are we trying to accomplish here?" And nobody can answer that question either. You're not the only one, friend, that's walked into that scenario. The question is, how do you get out of that? Well, first of all, let's look at how we got into the mess. We have to always go to the core of the issue to solve for it. Otherwise, you're putting a Band-Aid on something that's going to get ripped off the next time you hop into the pool. And so, when you start asking questions, you start hearing back, "Well, this is the way we've always done it. We've always had that. This person's always been in charge of that." There's a whole lot of inertia, a whole lot of people who have let things slide because they didn't want to rock the boat. In fact, their general approach is, "Not my monkeys, not my circus, not my job," especially if you're dealing with volunteers. Then they don't have any financial stake, and so they're very hands-off. But the organization matters, and the end goal matters. There's still a vision, there's still a purpose. You might have to scratch and scrape to find it, but it's still there. There's a reason you said yes to this leadership role. Well, when you start figuring out that nobody wants responsibility, start asking, how did we get here? You'll find out everybody knew. Everybody knew there was a financial problem, but they didn't want to mess with it. Everybody knew that this one person should have been removed from leadership, but they didn't want to do it because they didn't want to rock the boat. So everybody knew what to fix. Nobody would say it. As a leader, I will tell you right now, it is hard to be the one who initiates hard conversations. Because hard conversations are often not solo ideas. They are not you at the tip of the spear. They are you saying something out loud that everybody else knows. And this is a human phenomenon, goes all the way back to The Emperor's New Clothes, where it finally took that kid to holler out, "The emperor had no clothes on." As the leader, you may have to be the child in the room that says, "This has to get addressed. We have an issue." And I want to give you a piece of advice here. Doing those hard conversations doesn't mean you get to be a jerk. The advice that I will give you is to have the hard conversations with a very balanced tone, a very gentle approach. Now, I've used gentle approaches myself, and I've used very aggressive approaches myself, and I can confirm it's actually the middle ground that works because the people around you have to know you're serious, but you don't have to denigrate them in the process. You've got to solve it though, and solving it means that you may have to let some of those directors move on. You may have to let some of the committees sunset. You may have to make some changes on the staff side and get a new auditing firm so that you can get the finances back to ground zero. And the truth is, none of that is about the people involved. As my dad taught me long ago, it is seldom the person that is the problem. It's usually the process. When your directors are sideways, it's because they don't understand the job description. And they're afraid of their own shadow. Well, that's not a director personality, is it? But that person could be very effective as a committee member or leading a work group. They just weren't cut out for decision-making. The person who's in charge of the finances should ideally be somebody that could balance a checkbook. But if you put somebody in charge of finance who's not a numbers person, you've set them up for failure. No wonder the books get sideways. The leader who's able to get people redirected for a common good, that's good leadership. And the most important thing I want you to remember here is that when you find the inner fortitude and the gumption to have the hard conversations and talk about your membership numbers, talk about the bottom line, talk about the vision and the purpose here, and get it really narrowed back down to what it should be. Once you've gotten all of those things moving, you know what you did? You took care of the leaders coming behind you. Now, they may come into a trash can that's still smoldering, but you had a dumpster fire, so that's better than it was. You're paving the way for them to come in and finish fixing so that the growth can occur. I will remind you here, friends, hard conversations protect the leader behind you. And if there's anything I know about leadership, it is that we must look out for the leaders coming next because none of us get to stay in a role forever. As my friend Ron Phipps has always said, when you are the leader, you're the peacock. When you are one year out, you are the feather duster. And every year beyond that, you're in the dustbin. It's a progression. And we should take that progression seriously because once you're in the dustbin, You might be the one causing the problem, but don't make the feather duster and the peacock pay that price. Move into your next season so there's room for somebody else to grow. The other thing I would absolutely be at fault if I did not share with y'all, one of the kindest men who's ever mentored me is an older gentleman. He does city management. And he and I were having a discussion about some infill lots in a town that was wracked by housing issues. And I was asking about what we could do here and what we could do here and thinking of all these different out-of-the-box ideas, which was a lot for that town council to absorb. They weren't prepared for that many ideas. And I was a little discouraged because they shot everything down. Well, when I met with this gentleman afterward, we were looking at a plat of the city. And figuring out what we could do next. And he looked at me and he said, "Leigh, you are always gonna have somebody shooting arrows at you. Make sure they hit you in the backside." It was a great reminder. When you're in the front, you're gonna catch a lot of flak. But you know what? When you catch the flak, you're also clearing the way. So my best advice to you, friends, Don't be afraid to have hard conversations. Don't be afraid to have them with a dose of kindness and a dose of firmness. And most importantly, make things better for the next generation, because that's what good leadership looks like.