Ep. 54: Change Only Sticks If It Starts At The Top: Resetting Your Executive Team
About this episode:
Original Air Date: August 10 2026Hard truth time: your executive team sets the ceiling on how fast everything below it can move and most of them aren't built for that job. Decisions pile up on the CEO's desk because nobody's clear who owns them. Board prep swallows whole weeks. One person quietly absorbs all the coordination nobody designed for. Then a real change arrives, and the team soft-pedals it out through their functions until eight executives are telling eight different stories and nothing’s getting done.
In this episode, Rodney Evans and guest co-host Sam Rothkopf explore the merits of running an ELT Reset to get a leadership team clear on what it owns and how it runs. They unpack the problems that show up on nearly every executive team, the value of leaving your functional hat at the door, and the non-negotiables of any successful C-suite.
Mentioned in this episode:
“the first team”: Patrick Lencioni’s “Team #1” concept
“Sky work: The Ready’s Depthfinding framework
Legends, Netflix TV show
“dual transformation”: AWWTR Ep. 43
“strategy stack”: AWWTR Ep. 2
“operating rhythm”: BNW Ep. 118
“action meeting”: BNW Ep. 80 with Sam Spurlin
In this episode:
Rodney Evans
Samantha Rothkopf
Listen now:
Episode transcript:
Rodney Evans:
It's like half the time. They're either prepping for the board meeting, doing the board meeting, or doing the follow-up from the board meeting. And I'm like, "Is the board doing something helpful for you guys that you're spending this much time on the board? I hope so."
Hey everybody. This is At Work with The Ready, a podcast about work design and how organizations can be built to benefit from change. I'm Rodney Evans and I'm here with my buddy, my co-steward, my very good friend, Sam Rothkopf.
Sam Rothkopf:
Companies are facing more change than they were built for and the problem is organizations are still running on management ideas from a completely different era. Rodney and I work with leaders and teams who are redesigning how work actually gets done, so change becomes fuel in the tank instead of sand in the gears.
Rodney Evans:
So today, rather than going back to the old pattern format, Sam and I are going to continue to explore real moves, like what it really means to be built to benefit from change. And the thing we're going to talk about today is an idea that Sam came up with actually before even joining The Ready that really was how we talk about the work that we do with the leadership team and how we get really clear on it. And so we call it the ELT Reset. That stands for Executive Leadership Team.
But before we get into that, we are going to do a check-in round because we always do. Sam, do you have a question for us today?
Sam Rothkopf:
What was the first time you remember where you felt like you were leading something? Like you cognitively thought in your little baby brain, maybe you were older than that, but like, "I'm in charge now."
Rodney Evans:
The first time I really felt like I was leading something, I was a counselor at a day camp for several summers when I was really young, one summer before I could even drive, and then two summers before I went to college. And so there was really no structure at all. They just gave me a group of 12 six-year-olds? I was 15 years old. They gave me a group of 12 six-year-olds. It started at 7:45 in the morning and I just had them until 3:30 in the afternoon to amuse. And there was some programming...like there was arts and crafts time, but there were a lot of hours where it was just me and these kids.
I definitely had the feeling the first week of that camp when they sort of all gathered around and kind of just all looked up at me like, "Now what?" I was like, uh-oh, your parents are gone and I am fully in charge of you. Is this a great idea? But then it also, I think, was such a ultimately really formative experience for me because I ended up really investing a lot in the ways of working of that job to make it fun for me and fun for those kids. And realizing that if I didn't make it awesome, no one else was going to make it awesome. And yeah, it was a real moment of sort of looking over my shoulder and being like, "Oh, I'm the adult. Oh, okay. Got it. Let's figure this out." Yeah. What about you?
Sam Rothkopf:
Kind of a similar one. It's interesting because I was trying to think of examples from even earlier on than late teens, but I actually don't know if I ever felt in charge before I was 17 years old of anything. And even then it was kind of a lie. Is anyone ever really in charge of anything? But I think the first time I remember feeling like, oh, I'm the captain now is when I was the captain of my field hockey team in high school.
Rodney Evans:
Right. Sam's a jock, you guys.
Sam Rothkopf:
Sam's the jock. No big deal. And I think the reason I felt like a leader in that is that I was elected to it by the team and that felt like a big deal. So I was kind of like, these people have chosen me to shepherd them through to get to state finals and win, obviously.
Rodney Evans:
Obviously.
Sam Rothkopf:
But I think what was so funny is that I feel like my leadership style then, I was definitely more bad cop than good cop. And I was the kind of player that was ejected from a lot of games and played a little dirty and had very high expectations of folks and I wasn't very coddling. And maybe some people who've worked with me feel like that's right on, but I feel like others would think that's pretty wild. But yeah, the first leadership traits that came out for me were definitely more on the lead by example spectrum.
Rodney Evans:
Someday we should do an episode of this show about the good cop, bad cop stuff that you and I have been talking about because I think it's so interesting and I think it's particularly interesting for people with very adaptable skillsets, how we can ebb and flow in and out of that.
Why executive leadership teams need a reset
And that does sort of relate to what we're going to be talking about today, which is how a leadership team kind of sets itself up to be built to benefit from change so that the organization can also be windmill-like. So the first question I want to ask you is why is it a reset and why is it important?
Sam Rothkopf:
Yeah. I mean, I think one of the big "ah-ha"s as I was doing the research to kind of get to our positioning and product portfolio was looking at where we've had the biggest impact in organizations because we've worked in so many different parts of an organization. Sometimes we'll start with the ELT, sometimes we'll start in HR, sometimes we start with product. But the places where it's actually been able to stick and make the biggest impact and change has been when there is some kind of an engagement with the ELT. And there is just this epiphany, and maybe in hindsight it's always 20/20, but this epiphany that if you don't have buy-in from the executive group and the steering body of the organization to work differently, it's not going to stick. The grassroots concepts, and you and Sam talked about this a bit in the ways of working consulting episode, but if you don't have the top dogs on board, it's just almost impossible to make change last and stick. So that was why we decided to kind of codify it as a concept and try to start there with as many people as we can because we know that it's the most potent place to start and the place where the longevity of the change is possible.
So that's the kind of need. But I also think the concept of first team and bringing groups of leaders together that each are in charge of a different line of business, but looking at each other as an actual team and not just as a representative of their own faction has been something and is I guess for a very long time, but it's just more important than ever. And I think there are also so many critical transition points right now as the ELT gets turned over faster, I think than it ever has before, where there are moments to have a real reset as a group and that that is going to really pay dividends to being able to execute on your strategy and move quickly and benefit from the change all around us.
First team: your functional hat vs. your ELT hat
Rodney Evans:
Yes. My mind was also going to the first team place. And I think to relate it very specifically to being built to benefit, most executive leadership teams, and there are a lot of people who listen to this podcast that aren't on one and have never been on one. So maybe you guys don't totally know this. I didn't know all of this until I was on one. This idea of really being the person who represents your function takes care of the agenda of your function. So in a lot of executive teams, I am showing up there to negotiate for my organization so that I can win. And so the ELT in that case has a posture kind of like coordination, sort of balancing the scales between the folks. And it's like, "Okay, we have to have a RIF. So it's two from HR and it's 100 from product and it's 500 from growth and this is how it's going to go." It can be very like how we slice up the pie is the ELT's job. That is not a great way of working in times of rapid change.
So what we want the ELT to be able to do is as a group, steer the whole organization. And I've stewarded a few of these ELT resets. I still have a couple of them going on right now. And one of the things that I always say is in terms of this first team posture, when you're in this room, you have two roles. You have your functional hat and you have your ELT hat. And actually I mostly invite you to play from your ELT role. And what that means, one is we play as a collective and we do what's right for the business, not for our function. That's sort of like duh.
But the more important one actually is I expect you to have an opinion on this business regardless of your function. So a lot of times in the ELT, the Chief Legal Officer will be like, "Well, they set the strategy and then I make sure that the transactions happen correctly or the acquisition goes through or the diligence is right or the risk points are closed." And I'm like, "You know as much about this business as anybody else in this room. You should have an ELT hat where you are opinionated about the strategy of this company." And that's really important both from the perspective of skin in the game, but also because with the rapidity and the frank difficulty of the world moving, we just need a bunch of smart people investigating these problems together. We just sort of can't be like, it's just the product person and the CEO and the revenue person and they talk about it and beat it up. That's actually kind of insufficient now. You kind of need all of the heads around the table, in my opinion, to be able to make and then iterate great strategy and execution.
The leadership team charter everyone skips
Sam Rothkopf:
So is that when you're getting into it starting with an ELT, is that an explicit conversation that you have? Is like there are two hats and I'm going to ask you sometimes to be putting one on and sometimes the other?
Rodney Evans:
Yes. And a lot of times where it shows up is a lot of ELTs don't have a charter. And it sounds so simple, but the conversation of that group saying, what is this team accountable for? And what are the decisions that this team makes as a team is usually skipped. And so if an ELT charter has some accountabilities in it, that's really the first team role. That says that like "These are the things that this team delivers and we are all responsible for these things." So it is a very explicit conversation. And frankly, with most ELTs that I've been around, I haven't found it to be particularly difficult. It's just a little bit of a mindset shift.
Sam Rothkopf:
Yeah. Because most people who get there are smart and experienced and capable of systems thinking and thinking beyond their direct skillset.
Rodney Evans:
Yes. I don't really have any dumb clients. No, I don't have any dumb clients, definitely at that level. They're all really, really, really smart. And I also think, and you've said this to me in various ways, if they've invited me to be in the room, they are already a little bit primed to be thinking with the first team concept. They just haven't figured out how to operationalize it yet. So if I'm there having this conversation to begin with, they're probably not going to fight me on this idea because I wouldn't be there if they were that kind of ELT.
Sam Rothkopf:
Right. And what are the main issues that you're seeing when you first get into an ELT? What are the couple of things that are happening every time that need to get rectified or that are common, I guess, in a dysfunctional ELT?
3 problems on almost every executive team
Rodney Evans:
There are three things I always see. One is a failure to prioritize. Every ELT that I work with knows that they should be prioritizing. I have not met an ELT yet that goes like, "No, no, no, we are trying to bite off just the right amount of work." They're very aware that the organization is overloaded and that the cognitive cost of switching is very high and that it's getting in the way of fast execution and loops, but they don't have good ways to prioritize. And if they do have a reasonable prioritization process, it's usually too infrequent to be helpful. So it's like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we prioritized in January. And then in between three strategic partnerships, two acquisition possibilities, and an IPO came across the desk as possibilities." And it's like, "Okay, well, you're not just going to say, well, we're going to wait till July to talk about those things, so where do they go in the stack?" That's number one.
Number two is, I don't know if they would all complain about this, but I think it's bad, so I'm going to say it out loud. Way too much time spent around the board. Way too much stop, drop, and roll when it's board time. And board meetings happen a lot. So I feel like the ELTs I work with, it's like half the time they're either prepping for the board meeting, doing the board meeting, or doing the follow-up from the board meeting. And I'm like, is the board doing something helpful for you guys that you're spending this much time on the board? I hope so. I hope so. And I'm not saying boards aren't important or they're not a good accountability mechanism, but it always feels a little chaotic and a little heavy, the prep. And then I think the third one is -
Sam Rothkopf:
And so it's like, "We're doing this for the first time ever. We've never done this." It's like this happens literally every quarter. How are we not...anyway, I'm with you.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. I'll be really curious to hear, because you've been part of that process more than I have. And then the third one, which we've talked about a million times, but I do think that role clarity and attendant decision rights is really important. I think especially there are some triads within most executive teams where it's very unclear. So it's like, I see a lot of murkiness between sales and marketing, see a lot of murkiness between product and growth in terms of who's deciding the roadmap and who's deciding what we build. Stuff like that where it's not just about what the job is, it's about who makes the final call on stuff. And then a lot of it just ends up being the CEO making the final call and they don't really want to and they probably shouldn't, but it's just unclear. So everything gets popped up.I think those are the three. And the symptom of that is decisions take too long and it takes too much negotiation and talking to make one. Do those sound familiar to you as someone who's sat on these teams?
Role clarity: name the hat you’re wearing
Sam Rothkopf:
Yeah, absolutely. Especially the "what is this team's charter?" What are we doing together versus what are we doing within our own spheres of influence and the role clarity. Because I think without role clarity, there's just so much room for finger pointing and stepping on toes and people trying to take credit. It just opens such a can of worms. And I mean, in order to have not clear roles, which I think is possible, I feel like you have to have so much trust and be working as such a first team if you're not going to have super, super defined roles.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Rothkopf:
And what's nice I think about your point on we need to make sure the two hats are visible is that what you were saying when you say "sometimes we need to have the ELT hat on" is sometimes you are allowed to have commentary on other people's spheres of influence.
Rodney Evans:
100%.
Sam Rothkopf:
And we're actively asking you in this moment. And then sometimes we're not. Sometimes I'm calling upon you as an expert in finance. Sometimes I'm calling upon you as an expert in engineering. And sometimes I actually do want you to be thinking more broadly because I think being really explicit about when those hats are on or off also lets people's guards down in different ways. Because having been someone in the marketing role at that ELT level, a lot of times I'd sit there thinking like, "Look Charles, you've never written a piece of copy in your life or you have no idea what I'm talking about. Why are you telling me that this should cost one-sixteenth of what it actually costs?" And sometimes I wish that it wouldn't just be crickets all the time when I had a really gnarly thing I was trying to get after. But no one was making it explicit what hat are you wearing today and what do I need from you in this moment?
So I think even something as simple as let's talk about what hat we're wearing every time we're in a meeting together or if we want to change hats even in the meeting would get rid of a lot of the tension that's just latent in these teams.
Rodney Evans:
I literally once did an exercise with an HR leadership team. Some of them are probably listening to this, where I did a hats exercise. There were actually more than the two. And one was "expert" and one was "feedback giver" and one was "advice" cause it does all sort of get munged together. And then it creates these dynamics where you sort of fluctuate between "Just trust me bro" and "Could somebody give me some help and advice here? I'm struggling."
And it's like in a small team with high trust, it goes better. But still, I think then the lack of clarity and sort of running on vibes still creates more overhead and more sludge than if you just say, "You don't need to worry about marketing spend within my budget. Within my budget that you give me, I'm not interested in feedback. So I will not be taking questions at this time."
I think that actually is quite freeing because otherwise it can feel like, okay, well, if I'm the CFO, maybe I feel like, well, I should be looking at what various marketing metrics are costing and what the CAC is. And you know what I mean? And that's fair, but if we make it super clear that we do resource allocation, we do it once a quarter within that resource allocation, we leave Sam alone, then everybody can relax. Everybody can relax.
So I think those are the three that mainly come up to me. I'm curious if there are any other symptoms you've seen that you want to talk about.
When one person holds all the decision rights
Sam Rothkopf:
The other one that you didn't mention that feels really clear to me is when there's really only one person who actually has authority to make decisions. And every decision actually has to go up through. I've only really seen it be either the CEO or the CFO. Sometimes the CEO is not in charge, but I think that when it's clear that there's a jockeying happening all the time because the only person who actually has authority is the one person. It just leads to tons of dysfunction and leads to this other symptom, which I think is who's talked to that person last? And you're always last to be -
Rodney Evans:
Last voice in a room. Such a thing.
Sam Rothkopf:
You're always trying to be the person who's talked to that person last. It leads to a lot of strife.
Rodney Evans:
Ugh, it's the worst. The worst.
Sam Rothkopf:
Yeah.
The backstop and the blame game
Rodney Evans:
That's a really good one. I think that leads me to a couple of others that are very related, which is just anytime in an executive team, anytime there's too much focus on one individual or the individual as the problem or as the solution, my antenna goes up. So what I mean by that is I definitely have worked with executive teams where there's one sort of backstop on the team that's the maker sure that everything happens. And it's kind of like an octopus and it's kind in everybody's stuff just enough to coordinate and save the CEO from pain and frustration and tension. And a lot of things go through that person. That person is often not the CEO. It's often someone like a COO or a chief of staff or a CFO. It is often a woman. It is the person who mops up behind the chaos.
And I think that a lot of times what will happen is that person is very effective in being the sort of operating layer that's missing. And so then people go, "Well, let's resource that person. Let's get her a helper. Let's just get more hers." And it's like, "No, no, no, she shouldn't exist. That's not a job. You guys need routines so that that person doesn't have to do that all day and she can go do important stuff." So that is one symptom. If you have a backstop in your executive team where they're making sure that the team is functioning instead of doing their functional role, or they're making sure the team is functioning by triaging all of the things rather than building systems, that's a problem that I do not love.
And then very relatedly, anytime I'm talking to an ELT member who's basically just like, "Oh yeah, our people suck.The people on the team just are not good and we just need to replace them all." I'm like, "It might help, but what you're telling me is you just need heroes that can overcome a broken system and you don't have enough heroes on this team to rise above the dysfunction that they are swimming in." And I mean, that's a way to do it. It's just a really expensive way to do it and it's a fragile way to do it because heroes get tired of operating a broken system so then they leave.
Founder-led vs professional CEO resets
Sam Rothkopf:
Yeah. So that kind of brings us to a little bit of what are the elements of an ELT reset and the things that need to be put in place first and what it actually even looks like to. You talked about chartering a little bit already, but what are the most important things for a leadership team to have in place in order to be more successful?
Rodney Evans:
This is one of those things where if you had asked me this a year ago, I would've very confidently been like, "It's always these." And my opinion has changed a little bit. And the reason is I think it depends on whether you have a professional CEO in the room. I think it's different if you are in a founder-led company. In a founder-led company, I think the ELT reset often looks more like parsing out what all the jobs the founder is doing actually are. Understanding what authority they hold and reallocating it among the team in very clear ways. And then honestly, a lot of very foundational work for everybody to understand the business. Because what I find with founders is they just understand like, "Oh, this is a desk and I know what kinds of screws are in there, and I know how many drawers it has, and I know where you order the handles from." And it takes time to get a leadership team to sort of shift from everything being held within this one source to we all understand the metrics that drive this business and the levers we have to pull and the work to be done.
And so that looks very different to me than the ELT resets I've done with a professional CEO. And with the founder-led thing, I think it starts really with strategy that's written down that's not shooting from the hip. I got an idea this morning. This is our strategy now. I think it really starts there. And with the professional CEOs, I think it can still really start with a clarified strategy, but I feel like a lot of them have one of those. And with them, a lot of times it's chartering. It's like, let's get clear.
The three ingredients that I think are always necessary in an ELT reset are a strategy rhythm, quarterly strategy stack, an operating rhythm. I want to talk more about op rhythm for an ELT because it looks different. And chartering. I think that now my preference is to start with the strategy work because AI is so good at taking the content of strategy and recommending what operating rhythm you need and recommending a first draft of a charter based on what you're trying to do that now I really like to start there.
I used to not necessarily, because if a team was really mega dysfunctional, they often weren't capable of creating strategy, but also now you can bring a straw man of strategy...it's just like it's easier. So those are my big three. And generally I want to start with strategy, but it feels different when it's founder versus pro-CEO.
Sam Rothkopf:
Yeah, that checks out. And also just it feels like, and I know we've talked about strategy a lot, but strategy is such a season in organizations and it's oftentimes a four-month season. It's the longest of the seasons. I've been in companies where it takes four, sometimes up to six months to land the strategic plan for the year.
Rodney Evans:
No. Stop!
Sam Rothkopf:
And then one quarter into that, half your OKRs are already read, and it's just demoralizing and debilitating and no one's ever even looking at it. And you've cascaded the OKR system down, and it almost becomes this exercise where you're in OKR season for the whole year.
So I think that reframing what we mean by strategy, it almost makes me feel like sometimes we need a different word for what we're talking about because it's so different actually from the strategy of old. It's at a much higher interval and far more tactical in a lot of ways and real and connects to people's jobs and actually their day-to-day and is put into a rhythm, which strategy never is. The strategy rhythm at an organization is normally a season and then put on the shelf until you have to talk to the board about how you're doing against the strategy.
Rodney Evans:
And then it's like, "....what did we say???"
Sam Rothkopf:
Yeah. It's like, wow, that was a lofty idea. Interesting. So I do think that that all makes sense. And I really like the idea of doing strategy first because it is easier to get to the kinds of strategy that we're talking about now than it used to be. And it really should set, depending on your strategy, you probably do need a different op rhythm.
Building an adaptive op rhythm for your ELT
Sam Rothkopf:
So talk to us a little bit about ELT op rhythm and what you've seen work in the last year or so.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. I mean, to that point very specifically, I think that it depends a lot on what the focus of the business is at that time functionally. Businesses go through seasons where it's like all eyes on product, all eyes on go-to-market, on workforce or talent. Because whatever the crisis du jour is, now it's kindergarten soccer everywhere. We're like, "Okay, we got to do AI stuff!" And that's not wrong. I actually think that it is adaptive to not say every function is equal in every strategy in every season because it shouldn't be because it should be in response to what's going on both externally and internally.
So like I have a client right now that's very focused on basically rebuilding their go-to-market organization, not from the ground up, but not not from the ground up. And so there are beats in their ELT op rhythm that are just go-to-market focused that are for the chief revenue officer, the CEO, and the CFO only. And they're meant to dig a lot further into the numbers and into the pipeline and into the metrics of go-to-market than the overall weekly executive team meeting. This is a very smart team. They're going to sort this out. I would imagine six months from now, all eyes will not be on go-to-market. It will probably be on product instead. But right now, the strategy is very heavily weighted to the rebuilding of the go-to-market engine. And so the op rhythm reflects that. And it's an intentional choice because I think the easy answer or the instinct can be, well, if go-to-market is so important, why not have the whole executive team look at it? And the way I look at that is every member of the executive team does not need to be waist deep in the details of the pipeline. And so it's like, let's not make everybody sit through that. Executive team time is very precious. Let's keep them at a slightly different altitude, and then let's carve out this space specifically.
So that's one example of how it shifts and changes. Whereas I've had ELTs that, for example, there was a subset that had a roadmap meeting because prioritization of the product roadmap was creating a ton, a ton of tension. And that was much more like CEO, CRO, Chief Product Officer, Chief Technology Officer, really looking month on month in a deep dive at what the market was doing and how they should reprioritize engineering resources and sequencing of build against.
So that's what I mean when I say it shifts. And the thing to keep in mind that I don't think people think about enough is maybe you need a roadmap meeting where you're reprioritizing things once a month because you're in a period of volatility and your product is falling short of your competitors. But once you are sort of back on top, don't just keep doing that. Once you're out of the woods on sales forecast, don't keep having that pipeline meeting. The strategy should shift and then the op rhythm should shift so that the attention is on execution.
Who belongs on an executive leadership team?
Sam Rothkopf:
That's interesting because it leads me to another question, which is, because I think this is a huge source of tension across executive groups, is who should be in the ELT? And it's part of the chartering, I guess, is what is the purpose and who needs to be here for that purpose? But I know you've seen a ton of different configurations. You've worked with companies that are 50 people to 500,000 people.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Sam Rothkopf:
Yeah. What do you think the configuration of that group should look like?
Rodney Evans:
I'm equally curious for your answer to this because I don't think I have the right answer, but I have a hypothesis based on what I've seen, which is that most ELTs are two teams smushed together. I think there's one team that's like the market facing team and there's one team that's like the internal facing team. And there are lots of ways that people talk about this in publicly held companies, but it's like I think product–tech–growth tends to sort of be like one triangle and like legal–HR–finance sort of tends to be another triangle. And within those triangles, there's a lot more decisions to be made than across them. But mostly ELTs have all of those people in them.
I would love to see an ELT op rhythm where even if that is technically the composition of the team, the meeting rhythm breaks those out really consistently because it's like the legal person probably doesn't need to be in the roadmap meeting. And the product person probably doesn't need to be in the due diligence meeting about the acquisition. Maybe? <aybe at various points, but probably not in every one. And I think as a result, these teams are too big and they're too slow because they're trying to cover too much surface area with too many people. I think that's my take, but that's a real hand wave at an answer. What do you think?
Sam Rothkopf:
I mean, I think that you're spot on in the sense that there's definitely different executives who are more naturally grouped together because their things are more connected. And internal versus external is an easy way to do that, even though of course there's connectivity across those things. And I think that there are reasons to get that whole group together sometimes. In fact, I feel like sometimes when you're leaving a people leader or an ops leader out of a product development strategy discussion, you are only going to be thinking of possible strategies to solve your problems that are within your sphere of influence.
Rodney Evans:
Of course. Right.
Sam Rothkopf:
And oftentimes there are other kinds of solves that you're not thinking about. So I think that when it comes to the development of high level business strategy and sort of getting to what are our bets or whatever the heck you call them, having representation from the different parts of the organization can push you into places that you never though about because, "Oh yeah, maybe if we actually did do an employee hackathon that got all of our rising stars together to talk about that thing, that would kill three birds with one stone because you're hitting so many different..." And that's something that head of marketing might never think about because they're not in charge of culture or rising stars in the organization. That's just one small example, but there are places where it's really interesting to have people wearing that functional hat within a larger strategy discussion. But once you know what you gotta do, I feel like it's much less useful to have everybody together to talk about it.
Rodney Evans:
Maybe the sort of design principle that we're circling around is going back to the first team conversation of that ELT hat and divergent thinking and multiple perspectives to make creative decisions is whole group for quarterly strategy rhythm. Maybe whole group for the weekly shorter action meeting because I do think you want the whole group looking at the metrics of the business together. And there's no reason to do that in multiple places. Whatever your high level sort of state of the business dashboard is, I think you want all of those people once a week going like, "Yo, what happened to margin this week?" And sort of having that and then probably the usual action meeting, what are the couple of big things that we want to keep an eye on? A little reminder of what our quarterly strategy is and some triage. And then maybe the rest of it, whatever the rest of it is, are really more execution oriented meetings that depend on what you're trying to do that quarter and that assume different configurations of the group and not total participation across.
Why employees don’t trust the leadership team
Sam Rothkopf:
Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. I've talked to a lot of clients about their employee engagement scores and that "trust in leadership is down," especially in the ELT or like they don't understand the decision making process or that's where all of the decisions get made. Or there's two sides of it. Either the ELT is together too much of the time and running too much of the business, or the ELT obviously hates each other and it's just like a fiefdom out there and they only care about their group and it's so hard to get something in the center. Do you have any thoughts or builds on like...Because people immediately are like, "Well, it's a comms problem or we're not talking about it in the right way or we have this one person who's the issue." But I do see that as when it comes to the broader system as the two very different complaints that they'll have about the group.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. The polarity is too connected, too insular, too much concentrated authority, or too independent, dysfunctional, don't like each other, fiefdoms.
I have ideas about how to do it right. I've seen it done really well. But I think in businesses, in America in particular, we are a very individualistic society. And we like celebrities and we like heroes and we like one throat to choke, one chest to poke, one neck to hug, whatever your favorite thing is. And we love individual rewards. Capitalism, it is not a team sport. It is a solo game. And as a result of that, I think when you're working in an organization, and this was certainly true for me when I worked for big companies, not as a consultant, I felt like real allegiance to my executive. And I was not aware of who was on the executive team. I did not care who was on the executive team. I was like, "This is my person and this is who decides my bonus and decides my fate and who I want to get face time with and impress and whatever." And so I only say that because I think it's very difficult for most of the workforce to orient to a leadership team as a group.
I think we have a real natural tendency in organizations and in this country to be like, who is the person? And especially with leadership teams, to be like, "Well, the CFO is great, but the CEO is a moron and the Chief Revenue Officer is the one who's really calling the shots and the HR person's NPC." And everybody loves Game of Thrones and we love to apply it to leadership teams. And so I don't totally know what the right answer is in terms of how to shift the feedback loop from executive leader through organization to workforce to executive team. But I think that's the shift that we would like to see.
Sam’s lessons from her first ELT experience
Sam Rothkopf:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I remember in the first time I got onto an ELT, I was so jazzed about it and I happened to be actually 20 years younger than anybody else on the team. And I had gotten to that place in the very capitalistic way that you're talking about by tooth and nail, grinding it out-
Rodney Evans:
Throwing elbows!
Sam Rothkopf:
—throwing ‘bows. Was nobody's favorite person in the organization except for the people who worked for me. And I came in with a huge amount of bravado. And one of the first things that I had to do is a circle 360 comprehensive review where there's a big survey that a lot of people take about you that you take about yourself. And I was working with my first executive coach at the time and she interviewed, I think, 25 different people in the organization and then came to me with my circle. And it was so clear that I had an allegiance of people who would follow me out of the building, who came up with me, who I built, who were a small faction of the organization that was driving a huge amount of growth and that my peers hated me.
Rodney Evans:
Same. Wait, have we ever talked about this? That literally the exact same thing happened to me. And it was a leadership circle profile and my reviews from my peers were garbage. They were like, "She is maybe Satan incarnate." And the people who worked for me, it was like, "She's the greatest thing that ever happened." And the CEO also liked me because my team got so much done.
Sam Rothkopf:
Yeah, exact same. And I think-
Rodney Evans:
I also was a lot younger. Weird. We have a lot of parallels that we've never talked about. That's so interesting. Carry on.
Sam Rothkopf:
—so interesting. But I think so much of it was related to the fact that I hadn't been thinking about the different hats that you need to be wearing and the different roles that you play in different teams. And I personally didn't see my peers as competitors and I wanted to impress them and I wanted to help them by pushing on the things that they were saying and thinking. And that was perceived as Sam comes in and pokes holes in everything that I'm saying and doesn't understand how the ecosystem works. And I think that in some ways they were right. I don't think I was having a real enterprise lens as a member of an ELT. I was still playing a consultant role being like, "Well, this is how I help my clients. And so this is how I'm going to show up here for you all." And I was just like, 25, so what are you going to do? But there's a lot to learn about different group dynamics, but it was really interesting and I think helped me in some ways.
When to reset your executive leadership team
Sam Rothkopf:
But I do feel like when you're bringing new leaders into an ELT too, when is it time to do one of these things? We've seen the symptoms, but are there certain moments where it's particularly potent to set some time aside to reset and charter?
Rodney Evans:
I mean, look, anytime's the right time if any of these symptoms sound familiar to you. But definitely when there is a new person, what a great time to clarify the rules of the road so that you don't have little Sam and Rodneys just showing up and making dysfunction happen all over the place that then somebody has to probably clean up behind them. Founder led to CEO led is a great time. I think significant new strategy. Anybody going through a dual transformation needs an ELT reset for sure. And I would say no one listening to this should be thinking about this from an individual lens. You don't need an ELT reset because people don't like each other or because people don't trust each other...like that might be true. That is a symptom of this missing sort of operational layer for this team. And so I would just encourage people to look beyond like, "We just need to do some teaming and improve the vibes" and to think about whether the routines and habits that a leadership team needs in order to set strategy and monitor execution is in place. And if it's not, you should do this work.
Sam Rothkopf:
Yeah. If there's a big moment of transition, whether it's personnel or business model or something that is going to markedly change the direction the company needs to go in, this team needs to get reset first. And oftentimes it's the last place that people go to.
Rodney Evans:
I think that's exactly right. And one thing I wanted to make sure to say about this, I had a conversation recently with the CEO that I thought was very, I think he's just really smart. They're making really big changes right now. And we were talking about attrition. We were talking very philosophically about attrition and is attrition bad? And I think too often when a big change is underway of any kind, the ELT will kind of soft pedal it through their functions so that it's not polarizing or alienating. And I actually think the ELT's job is to get really clear and really crisp on what the thing is that's new that they're trying to do and then let the chips fall. And I'm not saying push a punch people out or create an adverse reaction, but I am saying give people the information for real about where you're headed and then let them decide if they want to be part of the future rather than letting every executive team member tell whatever story they think is going to keep people in their chairs because people are so worried about retention.
And so I think to your point, everything we're talking about in an ELT reset is about this group being so clear and so sharp and so convicted and so no daylight in between them. And if they don't have that, it's very hard to telegraph to the rest of the organization in a way that is clear and stabilizing.
Investigate, decide and move: the ELT’s real job
Sam Rothkopf:
Absolutely. All right. I know we're winding down here. We've had a lot to talk about on the ELT reset. Is there any final things you want to make sure our listeners hear? Any final nuggets of wisdom on this concept?
Rodney Evans:
Final nuggets. I mean, I think the thing that I'll say, and I'll throw it back to you as well, is I'm hoping that people feel like the connection between being built to benefit from change and this conversation, but to put a really fine point on it, what we are talking about in terms of ELT work and behavior and routines are the things required to investigate and decide. And then largely monitor movement. Not so much do all of the moving themselves, but say we've done the sky work to know what's up. We've made the decisions around our strategy and our direction so that we can be really clear. And now we have the operating rhythm to see how the move goes and to steer it between now and the next quarterly strategy refresh.
And if those rhythms and habits aren't in place, first of all, execution will overtake strategy in a conversation or meeting every single time. Everybody loves to just be like, "Did we sign the offer letter for that?" It's like, "Bro, we cannot." Like when you go out to dinner with your husband, it takes a second of effort to make interesting conversation and have an interesting topic to discuss. And it's so much easier to just be like, "So have you watched any good TV lately?" That's what meetings are like. That's what executive team meetings are like. They're just like, "Are you watching Legends on Netflix? It's good." Also, it is good. You should watch it." So what we're talking about is what the sort of always on routines are that keep an ELT knees bent, ready for the next change coming so that they can be the beneficiary of it.
Sam Rothkopf:
An ELT reset is not a three-day offsite where everybody starts getting along again. That's not how you get built to benefit from change. It's important to have trust and respect and deep understanding of who people are as humans for sure. But it's more important actually that you're putting a strategy rhythm together and that you're coming back to it quarterly and that you're putting yourself in a position to investigate, decide, and move. And if that doesn't start at the top, it most likely won't be happening elsewhere. And if it is, it will only be happening for a sprint and not in the long term.
Rodney Evans:
I think that's exactly right. All right, Sam, have we done it?
Sam Rothkopf:
We've done it.
Rodney Evans:
Nice. Thank you for coming and joining me again. This was so fun. This show is edited and mixed by Taylor Marvin at Coupe Studios and produced by our buddy, Jack Van Amburg. At Work with The Ready is created by The Ready, where we help organizations around the world change the way they work. Thank you for listening.