A while ago, Garry made a great point in one of his post on how a surprising amount of leadership is simply holding the line on reality.

And, more importantly, a surprising amount of leadership is the acceptance and confrontation of uncomfortable reality. You see, in most organizations, leaders believe it’s their job to be optimistic and keep the team happy and comfortable. They tell the team “we’re almost there … the project’s almost done” even when it’s a dumpster fire. “The pipeline is strong” when all the pipeline consists of is a list of companies who indicated they might be interested in a solution that falls in the category of solutions the company offers and they have not been vetted beyond a third party discovery call. “It’s just timing” when the RFP only gets 3 responses from 7 suppliers after extending the deadline by two weeks. “Once we hire X, it’ll be fine” when the reality is that things will get worse since “X” won’t know how to fix anything until trained (and someone will have to stop fire-fighting to train X, which will allow the fires to consume even more).

A good leader addresses the discomfort.

“Okay, things went to sh!t with this project but we succeeded in the root cause analysis, we can get back on track in two months, and, more important, we also identified three other oversights in the project plan, corrected those, and forced the vendor to upgrade capabilities that will allow us to be more productive than planned when we go live. We’ll just have to work harder to ensure the revised plan doesn’t hiccup“.

“Losing MegaCo to our biggest competitor, whom we know can’t serve MegaCo, was a big hit. We had to cut our simultaneous sales efforts in half and what’s left in RFP stages doesn’t even equal MegaCo’s potential when combined, and we know we’re only batting 50% when we get to that stage. We need to refill the pipeline with active targets fast, and we know that the leads given to us by DealSourcingCo are not well qualified based on our few conversations. Since we also didn’t have time to review many leads the past quarter, those wankers really slacked. We have to shape up, do our own pre-sales and qualification, work overtime, and re-jig the entire pipeline over the next two weeks. However, even if only a third of the “pre-qualified” leads pan out, which is the current success ratio, the good news is that we’ll have more than enough to keep us busy and get back on track for next quarter.”

“It’s not timing. If 4 / 7 potential suppliers didn’t answer the RFQ, then we really f*cked something up. We need to contact each of them, and find out why. We’re we not specific enough on our requirements? Was our guaranteed commitment too low? Was the timeframe too short for them to respond? Were we asking too much in the RFQ for no guarantee? Did we misjudge the supply/demand and they just don’t need us? However, I just licensed us a category management system where we can encode all the knowledge we gain from every sourcing exercise to make sure this situation doesn’t (unnecessarily) happen again as we will know what we need to get it right“.

“Bob quitting and taking all his knowledge was a big loss. We’re totally underwater as we don’t have his category knowledge, know which of the 10,000 spreadsheets he was using for the last events, or who really managed the relationship at the supplier. The fact my predecessor never made Bob properly track anything left me with a hole I’ve ben struggling to figure out how to fill, especially since every time I pushed for better data organization he kept being more insistent he just didn’t have the time with his workload.
However, I did license an AI tool that will scan all his files, attempt a categorization by category, and extract the likely supplier, contact, products, and prices. I did license a category management tool that all of this data, once reviewed by an independent expert, will be pushed into.
And I did go out and find a few independent consultants who are real veterans with 20 years of category experience and engage them for the next quarter to sit down and help us get everything organized. (Independent, not fresh-faced known-nothing MBAs from a big consulting co.) The next three months will be hell, but then things will be better than they ever will before because we’ll all know where all the key category knowledge is at all times and we’ll be able to bring Bob’s replacement on and have that person be effective day one. For now it sucks, but if we can hit our targets, I’m going to expand your bonus pool by giving you some of mine“.

That’s leadership. Telling the team as it is, making sure they understand it’s not going to be comfortable for a while, but that they will get through, you’ll be there with them, and you’re doing whatever you can to make it possible.