In a slight surprise to us, each of these three myths are directly addressed in our “Hidden Talents, Winning Teams” series on team success. We will mention these myths and how they relate to our previous newsletter posts, but first let’s briefly recount the other insights from the data.

According to McKinsey’s research, the most important performance differences among teams relate to (a) the efficiency with which they meet their deadlines, (b) the quality of their results, and (c) the level of innovation they exhibit.

We can note that these are each performance metrics, not measures of employee satisfaction—as we frequently emphasize, the common thinking that people and team investments are about “being nice to employees” is belied by the data—these are the elements that drive outsized financial performance.

According to McKinsey’s data, four health drivers come up as the most important across all three performance areas: Trust, Communication, Innovative thinking, and decision-making. Feedback and role definition are also near the top of all four lists.

This is interesting information, but it likely will surprise few to learn that trust and communication are important for effective team performance. That is why the “myths” are perhaps the most interesting part of the piece.

And what are these myths? We found it interesting to see that each of them relates to an article we published on this feed in the previous few weeks:

Myth 1: Teams should ideally be stacked with top talent in every role to achieve maximum effectiveness.

Reality: Effective teams focus on the individual and collective skills and behaviors that matter most, and every role needs fit-for-purpose talent, not necessarily “top” talent.

Given that this is the single deepest recurring idea of the “Hidden Talents, Winning Teams” series, it is great to see it borne out by the data. The first two parts of series focused on PJ Tucker and Roberto Firmino, professional athletes who played in roles generally considered to require “top talent,” but succeeded in adding tremendous consistent value to their teams despite lacking that talent, due to their particularly strong “fit for purpose.”

Myth 2: Teams already know what they need to work on.

Reality: Teams are often unaware of their most important gaps and can have shared blind spots, leading them to prioritize the wrong things.

Every team thinks they know what the most important things to work on are, but they are often wrong. Part 6 of the Hidden Talents, Winning Teams deals specifically with team building, and discusses a few of the ways in which leaders miss opportunities, particularly with regard to potential “Reverse Peter Principle” candidates.

These blind spots represent only a small fraction of the blind spots many teams have, and we will delve into others in future posts.

Myth 3: There is a best-practice playbook for team effectiveness that every team should adopt.

Reality: There is no one-size-fits-all solution.

Part 3 of our Hidden Talents series focuses on the Boston Celtics, and how they built an exceptional team very differently than most other teams: by defining a few key skills that every member of the team must have, thereby avoiding “weak links” and ensuring that everyone can operate at peak performance without having to cover for anyone else. Notably, these “must haves” are not generic and common to every organization (e.g. “behave with integrity,”), but are hard skills specific to the way this organization wants to operate (e.g. “make >40% of your three point shots”).

As noted, this is not the only way to build an effective team. Plenty of successful teams have included players who could not do all the things the Celtics players can do. There is no one-size-fits all solution.

We hope you found this data as interesting as we did, and that you will be able to apply this knowledge to your own organization.

Thanks,
The Impactful Executive Team

PS - free free to share this newsletter with anyone that would find it useful.

Whenever You’re Ready, There Are 3 Ways We Can help You:

1. Find out more about TIE’s Top Team High Performance Program. Visit ImpactfulExec.com, read our 5-slide TIE teaser or 20-slide full TIE introduction.

2. Score your organizational health. Measure across our three levers, three levels, and nine elements using our 7-min Diagnostic assessment and emailed pdf report.

3. Improve your top team’s performance. Send us an email if you have further questions and schedule a 15-min triage call to see if we can help you.

To close out our series on how we can build high-performing teams by looking for talent in unexpected places, let’s provide a summary of the series:

In Part 1, we introduced PJ Tucker and Roberto Firmino, a basketball player and soccer player who were both successful despite mediocre abilities in what are ostensibly the most important elements of their roles. We asked why their teams not only kept them around but achieved outstanding success with them, despite these obvious limitations.

In Part 2, we answered this question by introducing “threshold theory” and how it relates to team building. The main idea is that, after a certain level of ability in the core skill of a role, greater ability is often no longer as central to success as the presence of other, secondary skills. We looked at the research in IQ, the career outcomes of students from an elite high school, and an analysis from the Harvard Business Review of the performance of CEO’s to further explore this phenomenon and its implications.

In Part 3, we continued to talk about basketball but moved our attention to last year’s Boston Celtics, who won the NBA championship. We considered why most pundits picked against them in the NBA finals, despite the statistical odds pointing heavily in their favor. We also explored why they were so successful, positing that their lack of any “weak links” with regards to the most important basketball skills allowed them to play in a way other teams–all of whom had some weak links–could not. We then discussed the implications of this lesson for corporate teams, looking at McKinsey & Co. and Southwest Airlines as examples of companies that include specific skills that all employees must share, in order to avoid allowing “weak links” to reduce the performance of the whole.

In Part 4, we drilled down on one of the Boston Celtics’ players, guard Derrick White, and introduced a phenomenon we named the “Reverse Peter Principle.” As it sounds, this principle is the opposite of the commonly understood Peter Principle, in which a person “rises to the level of their incompetence.” In this case, individuals like Derrick White move to more and more difficult roles and perform better in each new environment. We question why that happens, and whether it can be predicted.

In Part 5, we introduce two other examples of the Reverse Peter Principle, in business and politics: Howard Shultz and Winston Churchill. We begin to answer the questions raised in Part 4, pointing out that we can improve as we move into ostensibly more challenging roles if our skill set and mentality is a better fit for the demands of these new roles than it was for the previous roles.

In Part 6, we conclude by looking at the implications of this phenomenon for business leaders, focusing on three important things leaders should consider as they build teams. First, look more broadly for potential leaders. Second, be humble and realize that our own assessments of who will succeed are often flawed. Third, avoid assuming that the top performer at one level is the best choice to move into a role at a higher level. Instead, look for who has best demonstrated the required skills for the new role–even if that person’s overall performance in their current role is below some of their colleagues.

In his classic work, “Good to Great,” Jim Collins emphasizes the importance of “getting the right people on the bus,” and “getting them in the right seats,” noting that this is both essential to business success and easier said than done. We hope that this series has provided some valuable insights and a fresh perspective into how you, as a leader, can do that more effectively.

Thanks,
The Impactful Executive Team

PS - free free to share this newsletter with anyone that would find it useful.

Whenever You’re Ready, There Are 3 Ways We Can help You:

1. Find out more about TIE’s Top Team High Performance Program. Visit ImpactfulExec.com, read our 5-slide TIE teaser or 20-slide full TIE introduction.

2. Score your organizational health. Measure across our three levers, three levels, and nine elements using our 7-min Diagnostic assessment and emailed pdf report.

3. Improve your top team’s performance. Send us an email if you have further questions and schedule a 15-min triage call to see if we can help you.

Last week, we discussed the “Reverse Peter Principle,” a phenomenon in which some people do not “rise to the level of their incompetence” but instead perform better as they rise into more and more challenging situations. We moved on from Derrick White to discuss Winston Churchill and Howard Shultz. Today, we will try to get more practical about what you can do differently based on the Reverse Peter Principle.

First, let’s look at a business example in a company in which both of us have experience: McKinsey.

To become a Senior Partner at McKinsey, you need to succeed as a Partner. To be elected a partner, you must be a highly effective Associate Partner. Before that, you need succeed as an Engagement Manager, an Associate, and an Analyst. If you are an average or below-average analyst, you will not under any circumstances rise to the level of Partner.

But wait. Does what makes a successful Analyst also make a successful Senior Partner? Not really. As described in the previous post, both roles require strong structured problem-solving skills and top-down communication skills. But succeeding as an Analyst mostly involves developing expertise in Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, rapidly iterating pages based on often vague feedback, and conducting and synthesizing standard research interviews. None of these skills have any relevance at the senior level. They are the consulting equivalent of scoring 1-on-1 against a set defense for Derrick White.

If you think about your company, it is highly likely that a similar thing is happening. There are people who could potentially be great in leadership roles, but who will not get the chance to do so because they fail in skills that are irrelevant to those roles, but relevant to their lower positions.

So what can we take away from this?

In our view, three important things:

1. Look more broadly for potential leaders. They may be found in unexpected places.

2. Be humble. Realize that your judgment about who will succeed may be wrong. Getting these decisions right is always an inexact science. Prepare, monitor, and adjust.

3. Do not assume that the best person at one level will be the best at the next level. Instead, be deliberate about the skills required to succeed at the higher level, and look for and develop those—even if they are not the most important skills at an employee’s current level.

Note that following these tips, while helpful in identifying and preparing leaders, may set you up for grumbling within the organization if not handled carefully and transparently. If Person A has higher performance reviews than Person B, but is passed over for a promotion, Person A could very well feel mistreated and perhaps even discriminated against, putting the company at risk.

To avoid this reaction, be very transparent about the criteria being used to make leadership decisions, the criteria being used to measure performance in the current role, the differences between the two, and the reasons for these differences. For instance, accurate and efficient completion of technical tasks may comprise, say, 70% of an individual’s performance review in their current role, but may have a minimal impact on the decision regarding whether to elect that person to a leadership position. It is important to be transparent about these differences to ensure that technical experts do not feel hard done by if passed over, and can receive adequate growth opportunities to develop and demonstrate the needed leadership skills.

We may wish to look for ways to test the specific skills needed for the next role, within their current role. It is important to be objective about the factual results of these tests. As Nobel-Laureate Daniel Kahneman demonstrated, our ability to predict success based on intuition is severely limited. The more objective we can make the process, the better.

So that is the “Reverse Peter Principle.” With that, we end our sports-related series on how hidden talents can contribute to winning teams. Next week, we will summarize this series and describe how you can make it work for you.

Thanks,
The Impactful Executive Team

PS - free free to share this newsletter with anyone that would find it useful.

Whenever You’re Ready, There Are 3 Ways We Can help You:

1. Find out more about TIE’s Top Team High Performance Program. Visit ImpactfulExec.com, read our 5-slide TIE teaser or 20-slide full TIE introduction.

2. Score your organizational health. Measure across our three levers, three levels, and nine elements using our 7-min Diagnostic assessment and emailed pdf report.

3. Improve your top team’s performance. Send us an email if you have further questions and schedule a 15-min triage call to see if we can help you.

Last week, he introduced the “Reverse Peter Principle,” a phenomenon in which some people do not “rise to the level of their incompetence” but instead perform better as they rise into more and more challenging situations. We used basketball player Derrick White to demonstrate this point.

Derrick White is, of course, not the only example of this principle. Once we notice it, we can see it occur throughout many fields. Winston Churchill, for instance. Surely, earning A’s in school is objectively “easier” than leading the British Royal Navy, which is itself less challenging than leading the country itself as it faced its greatest existential threat in 400 years. Yet Churchill was a poor student and a mediocre military leader (leading the disastrous Gallipoli campaign in WWI). His greatest successes came in his most difficult role.

Here's another example. Which of these three would you consider a most difficult task:

A)      Earning a strong performance review as a technology hardware salesman

B)      Serving as Director of Retail Operations for a retail business with four locations and $4 million in revenue

C)      Leading a company that nearly doubles in size every year for 13 consecutive years, going from $1 million in revenue to over $2 billion.

Most of us would agree that C is the most difficult, followed by B. There are many thousands of people who can successfully achieve A.

And yet, Howard Shultz earned a 3 out of 5 on his reviews as a Xerox salesman and was considered promising but flawed as the Director of Retail Operations for Starbucks, yet was able to achieve tremendous success once he became CEO. The more difficult the challenge, the more successful he was.

We can find numerous other examples, though perhaps not as numerous as we might otherwise, were in not for the fact that the Reverse Peter Principle buts into Reverse Survivorship Bias—people who struggle in lower roles rarely get the opportunity to see what they can do more challenging situations.

So, how can we explain this occurrence?

One explanation is that people just try harder when they are in more difficult situations. As Shakespeare wrote, “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” Perhaps those who have “greatness thrust upon them” are just able to rise to the occasion through greater focus and effort.

In reality, though, most people are trying hard in every role. Take the examples above. Derrick White didn’t average 17 points per game in high school (instead of, say, 30 points per game) because he wasn’t trying. Churchill’s efforts at Gallipoli didn’t lead to 250,000 deaths because the Royal Navy leader was insufficiently challenged. Shultz’ experience as a Xerox salesman, in which “the rejection every day was so significant,” was certainly not the result of laziness.

No, people try hard throughout their careers. But requirements for their roles are different.

Let’s look again at Derrick White. To be considered among the two or three best players in your State in high school and a potential NBA prospect, one skill matters more than any other: the ability to score lots of points against a defense designed to stop you. This situation remains true in college; the best players draw the majority of defensive attention, and the ones who can reliably score in that situation are the most valuable.

But what if you don’t attract the most defensive attention? What it there is someone else on your team who plays that role? Then, your ability to attack a defender 1-on-1 or even 1-on-2 and find a shot is far less valuable. Instead, your ability to hit open shots directly off a pass from a teammate becomes more valuable, as does your ability to do other things that do not involve having the ball in your hands: defending, rebounding, moving without the ball, etc.

As Derrick White’s level of basketball gets higher and higher, the relative value of the skills he possesses become relatively more important, and the value of the skills he lacks become less important. When your team has LeBron James and Kevin Durant and Stephon Curry, and when the ball will be in their hands 90% of the time, your ability to do exciting things with the ball in your hands is not especially important. Your ability to do all the other things that contribute to winning, is.

And thus we arrive at a key point in the Reverse Peter Principle. If we are predicting how much success someone will have at a higher level or in a more difficult role, the best information we have is not always how successful they are at their current role. If the skills and mentality required for the new role are a better match with he skills they possess, they may succeed despite the role being more “objectively” difficult.

Next week, we will compete this series with a look at a few further implications of the Reverse Peter Principle for business leaders.

Thanks,
The Impactful Executive Team

PS - free free to share this newsletter with anyone that would find it useful.

Whenever You’re Ready, There Are 3 Ways We Can help You:

1. Find out more about TIE’s Top Team High Performance Program. Visit ImpactfulExec.com, read our 5-slide TIE teaser or 20-slide full TIE introduction.

2. Score your organizational health. Measure across our three levers, three levels, and nine elements using our 7-min Diagnostic assessment and emailed pdf report.

3. Improve your top team’s performance. Send us an email if you have further questions and schedule a 15-min triage call to see if we can help you.

The 2024 NBA playoffs were the best of times for Jaylen Brown. He scored 29 points per game in the conference finals and 21 points per game in the finals, leading his team to the first NBA Championship of his career, and taking home the MVP award for both series. So when a spot opened up on the US Olympic team through injury, he was the natural choice. Instead, the spot went to his teammate, Derrick White.

Now, making the US men’s basketball Olympic team is no easy feat. Of the roughly half a million high school boys basketball players in the United States, less than 1% will earn a spot on an NCAA Division I team. Just 1% of that group will be drafted into NBA. Of the 350 or so American basketball players in the NBA, 12 make the Olympic team (3.5%). These players are the best of the best of the best of the best.

Derrick White was a good high school player—he averaged 17 points a game for a small high school in suburban Denver—but he was not one of the 1% to earn a Division I scholarship. Instead, he attended Division II University of Colorado Colorado Springs, where he played for three years before finally earning his Division I scholarship at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Again, he was very good, averaging 18 points per game and earning conference All-Defense honors. He was selected 29^th overall in the 2017 NBA Draft—the second to last pick of the first round. Late first round picks generally find it difficult to hang on in the NBA. They play an average of 6 years, scoring 6.3 points per game.

Derrick White was more successful than that.  After 5 solid if unspectacular years with the San Antonio Spurs, he was traded to the Boston Celtics in 2022. While never a star, he became an elite role player, earning second-team all-defensive honors in 2023 and 2024. He was a key contributor to the team that won the championship in 2024, though he was the least heralded of his team’s five starters, and the only one never to have played on an All-Star team.

So it was certainly a surprise when White was selected to the Olympic team over Jaylen Brown. But once in Paris, White thrived. In fact, he played in more games and earned more total minutes than his other superstar NBA teammate, Jayson Tatum.

In high school basketball, there were thousands of players better than Derrick White. In college, hundreds were better. In the NBA, dozens are better. And in the Olympics, only a handful of players are better.

Has Derrick White been improving? Sure. But there is a larger trend going on here: every time he moves up to a higher level of basketball, he becomes more effective relative to his peers. Players who outperform him at lower levels underperform him at higher levels.

We can call this the “Reverse Peter Principle.” You are familiar with the Peter Principle, a concept introduced by Laurence J. Peter in his 1969 book titled The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong. This principle observes that employees are often promoted based on their performance in their current roles until they reach a position where they are no longer competent, effectively resulting in them “rising to the level of their incompetence”.

The ”Reverse Peter Principle” refers to the opposite: when people, like Derrick White, rise up the ranks and somehow get better in more challenging roles, either absolutely or relative to their peers.

How does this happen? What does it mean for business leaders?

We’ll discuss that next week.

Thanks,
The Impactful Executive Team

PS - free free to share this newsletter with anyone that would find it useful.

Whenever You’re Ready, There Are 3 Ways We Can help You:

1. Find out more about TIE’s Top Team High Performance Program. Visit ImpactfulExec.com, read our 5-slide TIE teaser or 20-slide full TIE introduction.

2. Score your organizational health. Measure across our three levers, three levels, and nine elements using our 7-min Diagnostic assessment and emailed pdf report.

3. Improve your top team’s performance. Send us an email if you have further questions and schedule a 15-min triage call to see if we can help you.

Heading into last season’s NBA Finals, the numbers seemed to favor the Boston Celtics over the Dallas Mavericks. During the season, the Celtics had won 64 of 82 games with an average point differential of +11.3—the 5^th highest mark in NBA history. The Mavericks, meanwhile, had won just 50 games, with a point differential of +2.1. The playoffs were more of the same. The Celtics had gone 12-2 on their way to the finals; the Mavericks, 12-5.

So why did more than half of the NBA experts at ESPN pick the Mavericks? Why did both senior analysts from the popular show First Things First on Fox do the same?

Let’s let Fox’s Nick Wright explain why he picked the Mavericks to win, 4 games to 1:

“I think Luka is the best player in the series. I think he’s the best player in the world right now. I trust Luka to get it done in a way that I don’t trust anyone on the Celtics to do it.”

There is some logic to this explanation. After all, nearly every champion in NBA history has included either the best or nearly the very best player in the league that season. In the book, “The Numbers Game,” (2013) authors Chris Anderson and David Sally contrasted the “Strong Link sport” of basketball with the “Weak Link sport” of soccer. They argued that the best way to upgrade a basketball team was to improve the best player, while the best way to upgrade a soccer team was to improve the worst player. NBA history seems to validate this idea. And Luka Doncic, the Mavericks best player, was playing at a higher level than anyone else in the NBA. Meanwhile, the Celtics’ best player, Jayson Tatum, seemed to be tired at less than his best.

So what happened? Well, Nick Wright was correct about who would be the best player in the series. Luka Doncic averaged 29 points, 8 rebounds and 6 assists, compared to Tatum’s 22, 7 and 7. Doncic shot 47%; Tatum shot just 39%.

…and the Celtics won the series, 4 games to 1. None of the games were particularly close.

So what made the Celtics so difficult to beat, both in the regular season, and in the playoffs, and in the finals? Why were they able to withstand a sub-par performance from their best player?

The short answer is, they were a very good team. The Celtics had so much talent that three of their four American starters made the US Olympic team—and the only one not selected for that team won both Conference Finals MVP and Finals MVP. Their 5^th starter was a 7-3 former All Star playing as well as he’d ever played.

The more important answer is in how these players enabled their team to play. Because all of their players could make 3-point shots, they could run a run a vaunted “5-out” offense, opening up the area around the basket for drives to the basket. Because they could all pass and drive, they could run an equal-opportunity offense in which the defense never knew who would attack. Because all of their players were strong defensively against different types of players, there was no one for the opponent to attack. Everything the opponent tried to do was difficult.

When they made substitutions, the players who came in did not have the talent of their starters, but they all had the same qualities: they could all shoot 3-point shots, they could all dribble and pass, and they could all defend. As a result, the Celtics could continue to run the same extremely effective offensive and defensive schemes all game long.

Contrast this to the Mavericks. While Luka Doncic was the best offensive player in the series, his defense was sub-par. The longer the series went, the more the Celtics went after him, earning easy shot after easy shot. For all the points he created on offense, Doncic gave up nearly as many on the other end.

The Celtics were able to beat the Mavericks (and every other opponent), not because they had the best player, or even because they had the highest number of really good players, but because every player they put on the floor had a common mixture of skills—3 point shooting, ball-handling, passing, and defense—that allowed them to play in a way no other team could match.

This philosophy only worked because all of their players had all of these skills. The moment they would have inserted a player who, say, could shoot well but could not defend, or could score near the rim but not make a 3-point-shot, everything would have fallen apart. They would have lost their entire advantage.

The point is this: In general, basketball may be a “strong link sport,” but not always. In this case, the strength of the team came not from the best player, but from the worst. And not from all players being generically “good,” but from having a specific mix of skills that made their team able to excel in a specific way.

Some successful businesses have looked at their team’s the same way. They have certain non-negotiables that they know they need everyone on their team to share, or the way they do things will fall apart.

Many companies talk about generic non-negotiables like “character” and “integrity” and “kindness.” Those matter, sure, but that is not what we’re talking about.

Look at the list of skills the Celtics’ players need again. It is not, “needs to work diligently,” it is “needs to reliably make 3-point shots.” This is a very specific skill that many people don’t have, but that everyone on the Celtics needs.

As mentioned in a previous post, finding players at certain positions who can do that is difficult, which is why most teams cannot play this style. But if you do have them, and you can play that style, it is a major advantage.

Let’s look at a couple examples of similar ideas in business.

McKinsey & Co. famously hires people with little or no experience. It is popularly believed that they hire all of their Associates fresh out of business school, but that is not actually the case. There are PhDs in chemistry and philosophy, former Peace Corps volunteers, military veterans, medical doctors, and on and on. There is a great diversity of backgrounds.

But every consultant McKinsey hires, regardless of background or age or geography, has high aptitude in a few key areas. They can break down a complex problem into component parts, ensuring each one is mutually-exclusive and collectively exhaustive. They can make quick mental calculations and sense-check the resulting implications of assumptions. They can communicate clearly and concisely.

These are not skills everyone in the world has. And they are not required for every job, or in every system. But for McKinsey, if a single consultant cannot do each of these things, the entire process of communication within the team collapses. These are therefore the non-negotiables that go into the hiring and evaluation processes everywhere in the world.

Let’s look at Southwest Airlines. Here is a whiteboard with their “cultural design canvas”. Notice anything unusual?

How about at the bottom in the middle: What behaviors do we punish? A lack of sense of humor. Don’t be humorless at Southwest—you won’t make it.

Ask yourself, what are your non-negotiables? What are the elements of your culture or your system that drive your advantage over your competitors, and what skills are required of every employee—or at least every employee within a certain category of role—to ensure that you maintain and even grow that advantage?

Try to move beyond generic answers like “team player” and to specific answers, like “reliably make three-point shots” and “defend multiple positions effectively.”

Are you explicit about these skills? Are you testing for those skills in your hiring process? Are you working with your existing staff to develop them?

If you want to win, you should consider doing all of this and more.

Thanks,
The Impactful Executive Team

PS - free free to share this newsletter with anyone that would find it useful.

Whenever You’re Ready, There Are 3 Ways We Can help You:

1. Find out more about TIE’s Top Team High Performance Program. Visit ImpactfulExec.com, read our 5-slide TIE teaser or 20-slide full TIE introduction.

2. Score your organizational health. Measure across our three levers, three levels, and nine elements using our 7-min Diagnostic assessment and emailed pdf report.

3. Improve your top team’s performance. Send us an email if you have further questions and schedule a 15-min triage call to see if we can help you.

In our last post, we posed a simple but perplexing question: How is it that two athletes as different as soccer player Roberto Firmino and basketball player PJ Tucker experienced so much success for so long, despite unspectacular abilities in the primary responsibilities of their respective roles? And what does this success have to teacher business leaders and team builders?

Today we will begin to articulate an answer.

First, let’s back up to 2018. As mentioned last week, Liverpool in 2018 lost perhaps their most skilled and creative player, Phillippe Coutinho, yet somehow became better. How?

The simple answer: better defense. The more nuanced answer: Coach Jurgen Klopp’s famed “gegenpress,” in which the entire team defended aggressively as soon as it lost the ball, attempting to win it near the other team’s goal and immediately go to score.

“No playmaker in the world,” Klopp said more than once, “can be as good as a good gegenpress.”

Even though he played center forward, a role normally associated with scoring goals above all else, Firmino’s true value was in his defensive contribution.

The answer for PJ Tucker is similar. His Houston Rockets teams were successful by shooting more 3 point shots than any other team in the league–even if they didn’t make them at an above-average level, the higher points-per-shot tilted the math in their favor over the course of a game–and playing a tough, hard-nosed, “switching” brand of defense in which every player needed to be able to guard every other player on the court.

As the team’s starting center, PJ Tucker needed to be able to defend the other team’s biggest players and rebound missed shots–the core responsibilities of every center in the NBA–but he also needed to be able to guard smaller, quicker players, and shoot three point shots on the other end of the floor.

We could look to other team sports and see similar trends. American football is perhaps the most specialized team sport in the world. Each position has its own techniques, vocabulary, coaching teams, training methods, subcultures, and more. And yet one coach in the modern NFL has repeatedly turned quarterbacks into receivers, receivers into defensive backs, defensive backs into safeties, etc., both in situational spot-duty and as semi-permanent changes based on team needs. That coach is Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots, the dominant coach of the modern era. Promoting positional flexibility allows him to confuse teams with unexpected wrinkles on both offense and defense, overcome injuries more effectively, and make the most out of a limited roster.

In his best-seller Range, David Epstein challenged the famous “10,000 hour rule” of elite performance, and advocated late specialization rather than early specialization in everything from sports to arts to academics to scientific research to career choices. He found that, in nearly every field, elite performers are less likely to follow the path of Tiger Woods—golf prodigy by age 2, best player in the world by age 21—than they are that of Roger Federer, who dabbled in over a dozen sports before specializing in tennis as an adolescent.

Teams, he continued, do better by having members with a range of backgrounds and interests and specializations. Even better than a team with a diverse range of specialists, though, is a team full of individuals who each have a range of skills. Those teams derive the greatest insights and the most effective solutions.

But it is not really accurate to call Firmino, Tucker, or Belichick’s New England Patriots players “generalists,” in the pure sense. Firmino, for example, may not have been the best attacking player in the English Premier League…but he was good enough to hold his own against the best defenders on earth. He wasn’t Ronaldo, but he was still in the top 0.001% of attacking soccer players in the world. PJ Tucker was able to regularly hold his own against the biggest, strongest, most athletic and most skilled basketball players in the world—not really something an average “generalist” can do.

In each of their primary job descriptions, they had to hit a minimum bar, to complete the tasks required of them competently and consistently. And that “minimum bar,” in their cases, was quite a high bar! Very, very few people in the world could hit that minimum bar. And the 99.9% of people in the world who could not hit that minimum bar were not candidates for their positions.

But, of the 0.1% of people who could reach that minimum bar, the difference in effectiveness was not primarily in individuals’ ability to complete their primary responsibilities. Once they could complete their tasks competently (once again–not easy to do!), success came down to their other non-core skills–e.g. defending for Firmino, shooting for Tucker.

This matches the research into elite performance in business and academia. In numerous studies, it has been found that an IQ of ~120 or so is helpful for strong performance in several highly complex professions. A score of 140, however, offers minimal benefit over a score of 120. Creative geniuses in arts and literature, when tested, have shown similar IQ scores, with additional IQ points once again showing little added benefit.

This consistent finding has led to what is currently known as “threshold theory,” the idea that above a certain level of ability, the impact of any one skill (such as cognitive reasoning) on performance becomes limited.

I (Jay) have seen this phenomenon with the graduates of my high school. I was lucky enough to attend a very small, extremely high-performing high school. The median SAT score of my graduating class was above 1400–a level that currently 5% of American high school students achieve, and fewer reached in those days.

Our principal frequently told us that the most successful alumni from the school were often those who struggled through with middling grades, rather than those who achieved consistent A’s. We mostly didn’t believe him. After all, there was a direct relationship between the grades earned and the prestige of the universities graduates attended, and the data across the United States shows a very strong relationship between high school grades and career success.

Now, more than twenty years after graduating high school, I can say for certain that he was 100% correct. There is no clear correlation between high school grades and adult success–if anything, there is a slight inverse relationship, as he predicted.

What would explain such an unusual phenomenon? Threshold theory. Among this group of particularly high-achieving students, everyone’s academic performance was good enough to be removed as a barrier to success, and other qualities (work ethic, interests and priorities, luck) played a larger role.

So what are the implications of this finding for building teams?

First of all, there is more than one way to build a successful team. We will not say that we should over index for threshold theory in every role–sometimes being better at your specific role really is the most important thing!

But in many cases, we can achieve just as strong results without the same superstar talent, by following a two-step process. We can begin by limiting our selection to those who fit the minimum performance bar for the primary responsibilities, and then make our selection among those that meet this bar, based on other factors. We should not necessarily base our selection of CEO’s primarily on strategic vision, of CFO on financial management skills, of CTO on technical expertise, etc. As long as the candidates hit a certain level in their core skills, we can use other criteria to select.

Notably, these other criteria should not be vague things like “how much do I like this person?” or “do they seem like a good fit for how we generally do things around here?” Instead, we should be thoughtful and intentional about the secondary skills and tasks that will impact the person’s contribution to the team, and come to a clear-eyed view of how well they are likely to fulfill these secondary roles, and how much value that contribution entails.

Here is one example. Harvard Business Review published a report in 2017 on the four behaviors that set the most successful CEO’s apart–speed of decision-making, stakeholder engagement, proactive adaptation over the long term, and reliability. Top performers tended to consistently exhibit at least two of these behaviors, while just 5% of lower performers did. Notably, academic performance had no correlation with success, and integrity and work ethic were “table stakes”--not distinguishing factors separating the best from the rest.

Finally, this perspective provides an opportunity to view our internal development efforts from a new and exciting lens. The important secondary skills individuals need to succeed are often much easier to develop later in life than the primary, technical skills. Firmino was never going to become a significantly better scorer or playmaker in his mid-20’s. But given the right attention, effort and support, he could become significantly better at fulfilling his role in the gegenpress. An executive with twenty years of strategy experience may have maxed out on his or her strategic thinking abilities. But if this executive has put less effort over the years into developing top-level stakeholder communication skills, this becomes an area that can drive real performance improvements. 

As we think about our own performance and the performance of our teams, let us not become overly myopic, focused only on the core skills associated with a role. By widening our aperture, we can find and create more value in more places.

Thanks,
The Impactful Executive Team

PS - free free to share this newsletter with anyone that would find it useful.

Whenever You’re Ready, There Are 3 Ways We Can help You:

1. Find out more about TIE’s Top Team High Performance Program. Visit ImpactfulExec.com, read our 5-slide TIE teaser or 20-slide full TIE introduction.

2. Score your organizational health. Measure across our three levers, three levels, and nine elements using our 7-min Diagnostic assessment and emailed pdf report.

3. Improve your top team’s performance. Send us an email if you have further questions and schedule a 15-min triage call to see if we can help you.

When PJ Tucker entered the 2006 NBA Draft, no one doubted his basketball talent. A former North Carolina High School Player of the Year, Tucker had averaged 16 points and 9 rebounds per game as a college junior, leading the University of Texas to the winningest season in its history and earning himself Big 12 Player of the Year honors.

No, PJ Tucker’s problem was never basketball ability. But he did have a problem.

Here is how DraftExpress.com described Tucker before the 2006 draft:

Tucker’s size has to be considered his main (weakness). If he was just 2-3 inches taller, he’d be a sure-fire top-20 pick as it would be much easier to see him becoming a real power small forward. At 6-5, he is shorter than most NBA shooting guards, but is more bit stuck between the 3 and the 4 spots when talking about his true position skill-wise. Defensively is where the biggest concerns come out, as it’s unclear whether he has the experience or lateral quickness to defend the perimeter.

Tucker is most likely a small forward in the NBA, but doesn’t have the same type of range on his jump-shot that most small forwards do. He never really attempted to shoot from behind the collegiate 3-point line, let alone the NBA 3-point line, not with his feet set and certainly not off the dribble.

NBA scouts tagged Tucker with the dreaded “tweener” label: too short to be an effective interior player, not quick enough or skilled enough to be effective on the perimeter. In a league that had become increasingly specialized over the previous two decades, Tucker’s game was like a square peg in a round hole. PJ Tucker, NCAA All-American, fell to the second round of the NBA Draft, the 35^th overall pick by the Toronto Raptors.

And the naysayers were quickly proven correct. Tucker played just 83 total minutes in his rookie season—less than two full games—before the Raptors waived him. With no other NBA team interested in signing him, Tucker headed to Israel. Then to Ukraine. Then back to Israel. Then to Greece, Italy, Puerto Rico, and Germany. He was successful everywhere he went—top scorer in Ukraine, league MVP in Israel and Germany—but no NBA team called again until 2012, when Tucker was now 27 years old and nearing the end of his prime.

When he returned to the NBA this time, things were different. Tucker became an immediate impact player, based not on his scoring or his rebounding, but on what would become his calling card: hustle, grit, and defensive intensity.

Here’s how nba.com described Tucker heading into the 2013-2014 season, his second real season in the league:

What he brings to the table: Hard-nosed, in-your-face defense. Tucker boasts the rare combination of speed and strength that allows him to both keep up with and stand up to his defensive assignment. Hustle plays are commonplace, producing momentum-swinging sequences that don't show up in the box score.

PJ Tucker is still in the NBA today, playing for the Los Angeles Clippers at age 39. He is one of just two players from his draft class still playing in the NBA, and he is so old that another player drafted on the same day he was—JJ Redick—is now the head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers. He spent his entire mid-30s making important playoff contributions for the Houston Rockets, and was a full-time starter in the NBA as recently as 2023.

And here’s the strangest part: He made all those contributions as a Center. Not shooting guard (“Tucker is shorter than most NBA shooting guards”), not small forward (“Tucker is mostly likely a small forward in the NBA”), not power forward, or the “4”, (he is “stuck between the 3 and 4 spots”), but center. The spot reserved for the tallest players on NBA teams, where his opponents typically measured 7 feet or taller, towering over him.

How the heck did that happen?

Before we answer that, let’s consider one other story.

---

Home of the “beautiful game,” hotbed of soccer talent, Brazil produces waves of young attacking players year after year, players who delight fans with their skill and flair and seem, even as teenagers, destined to set the world on fire.

Roberto Firmino Barbosa de Oliveira was not one of those players.

At age 15, at a time when many of peers were already rising up the ranks of some of the top youth academies in the world, Firmino was unable to find a club. He only found his way into the country’s vast professional training setup when a local dentist believed he saw something in the boy, and convinced the second-division hometown club to give him a chance. The coach didn’t bother to learn his name for two weeks, calling him “Alberto” instead.

He made his professional debut at age 18, as an athletic and industrious defensive midfielder. What Firmino lacked in trickery he made up for in speed, technique, and work ethic. His performances in Brazil’s second division earned him a contract with Hoffenheim, a mid-sized club in Germany’s Bundesliga.

Over the next five years at Hoffenheim, Firmino grew into a solid if unspectacular player. He scored 49 goals in 153 matches over five years. His coaches used him everywhere on the field: defensive midfield, attacking midfield, withdrawn striker, winger, and more.

Firmino played well enough in Germany to earn both his first call-up to the Brazilian national team and a transfer to an exceptionally talented but underachieving Liverpool side that had finished 6^th in the English Premier League the previous season.

Even as Liverpool dropped to a disappointing 8^th in the league the next season and replaced manager Brendan Rodgers with Jurgen Klopp, Firmino thrived, scoring a respectable 10 league goals and securing his place as Klopp’s first-choice central striker.

After achieving consecutive 4^th place finishes in the next two years, the team seemed poised for a step backward when it lost its most decorated and creative attacking talent, Philippe Coutinho, before the 2018-2019 season. Instead, Liverpool lost just one match all year, earned the third-most points in the history of the Premier League. It barely missed out on the league title, coming in second to a seemingly unbeatable Manchester City squad. Then, in 2020, Liverpool set a league record for wins in a season as it cruised to its first title in 30 years, leaving both Manchester City and the rest of their competitors in the dust.

Firmino played 52 matches for Liverpool that season, all of them in the role of the “number 9,” the central striker, the most glamorous position on the field. And in those 52 matches, Firmino scored a grand total of 12 goals.

If that doesn’t seem like a lot, that’s because it’s not. Liverpool Right-winger Mohammed Salah scored 23 goals. Left-winger Sadio Mane scored 22 goals. Firmino’s goalscoring production from the center-forward spot was closer to defenders Alex Oxlade Chamberlain (8 goals) and Virgil Van Dyke (5 goals) than it was to his attacking partners.

For a central striker on a team that attacked as successfully as Liverpool did, this was a rather feeble return. Strikers are traditionally judged almost exclusively on their goalscoring statistics. Ronaldo (the Brazilian version) is frequently cited as one of the best 10 players of all time, despite having frequently wandered around the field all game at a mild trot, contributing nothing to his team until the moment he sprang to life and scored a spectacular goal.

And he should be highly regarded for that contribution. Goals are really important!

Virtually every club in the world with resources approaching Liverpool’s would move a striker scoring less than 1 goal in 4 games to the bench, and find a high-priced replacement with a better goalscoring track record as soon as they could.

But not Liverpool. “What can I say about Firmino?” Klopp asked, rhetorically, in 2017. “He’s the engine of the team.”

He grew so well respected that a BBC commentator at the time suggested that a struggling Manchester United side needed to find a striker like Firmino, “not necessarily a striker who scores goals.” It may have been the first time in the history of soccer that anyone unironically suggested that a team needed a striker who did not score goals.

How, indeed, did we get here?

Firmino’s and Tucker’s success appear, at first glance, like unlikely, irreplicable once-offs. It seems like the only lesson from these stories is the always relevant “nobody knows anything.” And perhaps it is.

We contend, however, that there is more to these stories than that. We believe there are important lessons to be learned from these stories about talent identification and team-building not only in sports but in business, academics, politics, and everywhere else. We believe that Tucker and Firmino—and their coaches and teams—have recognized something about how to maximize the performance of a team, something that anyone charged with team-building or team management would do well to consider.

Coming next week

Thanks,
The Impactful Executive Team

PS - free free to share this newsletter with anyone that would find it useful.

Whenever You’re Ready, There Are 3 Ways We Can help You:

1. Find out more about TIE’s Top Team High Performance Program. Visit ImpactfulExec.com, read our 5-slide TIE teaser or 20-slide full TIE introduction.

2. Score your organizational health. Measure across our three levers, three levels, and nine elements using our 7-min Diagnostic assessment and emailed pdf report.

3. Improve your top team’s performance. Send us an email if you have further questions and schedule a 15-min triage call to see if we can help you.

“On their deathbed, no one ever said that they wished they had spent more time at the office.”

It is a ubiquitous phrase, used in living rooms and lecture halls around the world to articulate a feeling many of us share regarding our choices about how we spend our time. On social media, we are encouraged to “live our best lives” and not waste our time in service of work, unless it is to “get the bag” as quickly and easily as possible. This idea nearly always elicits assenting nods and encouraging emojis (“100!” “Thumbs up!” “Love!”).

But is it true? We submit that it is not, and that it can steer us wrong as we consider the very question it purports to answer.

First, a bit of background on the phrase: It was popularized by Paul Tongas, a US Senator from Massachusetts in the 1980s. Facing an uphill battle, he chose not to pursue reelection, and instead to spend more time with his family. By all accounts, this was the right decision for him at the time.

To his credit, Senator Tongas was asking himself the right question, though it is a question many would prefer to avoid. Bryan Johnson and a host of tech billionaires today are convinced that they will soon find the key to eternal life, which will allow them to put off this question forever. They are, of course, not the first people to dedicate themselves to this pursuit. The first written text in documented history, the epic of Gilgamesh, concerns the exact same goal that drives the current “longevity biohackers.” From the Ancient Greeks to the Arthurian knights to the Spanish explorers, the rich and powerful in every society have thought they were just one discovery away from avoiding death altogether.

But they are wrong. And they will lie on their deathbeds, looking back at their life and asking themselves: did I spend my brief, finite time on this planet in the right way?

It is a question every thoughtful person from every culture, in every age, has asked themselves. If they are wise, they ask themselves the question well before they get to their deathbed, in time to use the answer to make better decisions and maximize their time on earth.

Today, most people seem to be answering the question in a similar way: I want to “live my best life”: to drink wine with my friends and travel the world, and have relaxing spa days with beautiful views, and share it all on social media.

But, at our core, we know that this is not what life is about.

Nelson Mandela advised us to live differently. “There is no passion to be found playing small—in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living,” he said.

Mandela’s life was not primarily about comfort or sensual pleasure or fun (though he did, famously, enjoy all three of these). Life was about accomplishing great things, about living the life he was capable of.

Did a dying Nelson Mandela regret the countless hours of hard work he put into freeing South Africa from apartheid? No, he did not. Did a dying Martin Luther King regret the long nights spent planning the sit ins and the boycotts and the marches that brought Civil Rights to America? No.

Accomplishing meaningful things requires hard work. That is reality. Anyone who succeeds in accomplishing something great accepts this fact early on in their journey. Take Mother Teresa. When asked why she moved from the comfort of England to the slums of Calcutta, she answered, “I wanted a hard life.”

Now, you might be thinking, “that’s okay for them, but not everyone is Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King or Mother Teresa. We’re not all saving the world. Most of us are just normal people.”

True. But accomplishing something meaningful matters to normal people as well. I’ll give you an example.

My grandfather started a business fixing heaters and air conditioners out of his garage in 1941. Soon, he was drafted into World War II. He re-launched the business upon his return, this time with a young son (soon, three young sons) to provide for.

He knew no other way to succeed than through hard work. He started in his garage at dawn, worked straight until supper, and then did paperwork until bed. As in many family businesses, his wife became the accountant and controller as the business began to grow. My father recalls that the two of them immediately went to their home office after dinner every night to track invoices and balance the books until they slept.

My grandfather worked 7 days a week. On Christmas, after church and a brief gift-giving ritual, off he went to the “shop.” Easter, the shop. New Years, the shop. He took two days off in a row just once in 50 years—his wedding day, and a one-day honeymoon afterward. His third day of marriage, he was back to work.

My grandfather died when I was in college. I spoke with him in what we both knew were his last days. Did he regret that he spent all that time working? No. If he regretted anything, it was the fact that he could not keep my grandmother in comfort in her final days. He could not keep her from suffering multiple strokes, from developing dementia, going blind, losing her ability to walk and feed herself and bathe herself. If working even harder would have meant he could prevent those things, he would have gladly done so.

My grandfather was not ending apartheid or breaking Jim Crow. He sold kitchen equipment to IHOP franchises and built ice machines for the Holiday Inn. But the work was meaningful for him. It mattered, and he put in the work without complaint or regret.

It’s not true that hard working people, on their deathbed, always wish they had worked less hard. It’s also not true that people never wish they’d worked harder. Few people would say “I wish I’d spent more time at the office,” but many will say they wished they had accomplished something meaningful and lasting in their lives, and that they wish they had spent their time differently in order to have done so.

Now, to be clear, I am not saying that working more hours is uniformly better than working fewer. Many people achieve great things in relatively few hours. We have limited focus and energy, and that energy is often the limiting factor, not our number of hours worked. If Usain Bolt had spent more hours training and fewer hours resting and recovering, he is not likely to have run faster.

But I am saying that fewer hours or less work does not necessarily mean greater fulfillment. The question is not “how can I spend less time at work,” but “how can I make the time I do spend at work—and everywhere else--the most meaningful it can be?”

We all must consider this question for ourselves. But leaders are unique in that they have to think about it on behalf of other people, too. This is a huge responsibility, as well as a tremendous honor. Those of us in this position should take it very seriously.

Your employees, like all of us, have very little time on this planet. They are choosing to spend a meaningful amount of it with you, doing what you direct them to do, pursuing goals you set for them. Yes, you pay them to do so. But the money will not make these hours come back.

You have a responsibility to ensure that this time is not wasted. Set big, inspiring goals. Make them feel part of something meaningful. Create environments where they can thrive and reach their potential, where they can become greater than they knew they could be. Foster a sense of belonging. Show understanding and compassion and empathy.

When your employees are on their deathbeds, what will they say about their time with you? Will they regret spending too much time at the office? Will they be glad that they were able to get a paycheck with minimal effort so they could spend more time on the things that actually matter to them? 

Or will they look back with pride and satisfaction at the teams they were on, the people they worked alongside, and the accomplishments they achieved? Perhaps they will say, “Yes, I worked very hard…but it was worth it.”

Thanks,
The Impactful Executive Team

PS - free free to share this newsletter with anyone that would find it useful.

Whenever You’re Ready, There Are 3 Ways We Can help You:

1. Find out more about TIE’s Top Team High Performance Program. Visit ImpactfulExec.com, read our 5-slide TIE teaser or 20-slide full TIE introduction.

2. Score your organizational health. Measure across our three levers, three levels, and nine elements using our 7-min Diagnostic assessment and emailed pdf report.

3. Improve your top team’s performance. Send us an email if you have further questions and schedule a 15-min triage call to see if we can help you.

Depending on your perspective, this statement may seem either obvious or blasphemous. Nothing is more accepted in the corporate world than the idea of the value-creating company. It is front and center in our language of how we talk about companies and how we measure executives. “How much value did company X create, vs company Y?” “Is this CEO’s performance maximizing shareholder value?”

It is possible, though, that our language obscures the real truth about value creation.

What is a company? There are four categories of things that comprise any company, whether a public corporate or an LLC or a partnership:

1. Assets. Companies have hard assets like cash, equipment, real estate, raw materials, and accounts payable (money others owe them). They have intangible assets such as their IP, their brand name, and their reputation.

2. Liabilities. Companies owe money to individuals and to other companies and governments.

3. Equity holders. The people or entities who own the company and can financially benefit from any value created through the company’s activities.

4. Employees and contractors: People tasked by the owners with managing the assets and increasing the value of the equity. Sometimes equity holders are also part of this group, sometimes not.

Only the fourth is not captured in standard financial statements. But only the fourth group ever actually creates value. Absent any assets, a person or a team can create value through invention and ingenuity. Absent the work of the person or the team, the asset creates nothing. A machine, a building, a brand name, a patented technology—all of these were created by people, and cannot create value absent those or other people. They can appreciate, but that is not the same as creating value. They are mere tools that the people can use to create value.

We often say that a product “sells itself.” But it doesn’t. People have to create the product, build the market for it, create the means to sell it (whether automated or manual), and deliver it.

Value is created by people, and only by people. The value created by a company is nothing more than the sum of the value created by the people and teams within the company over the course of the company’s life. These people leverage the assets the company has, assets acquired or built either by them or by other people who worked at the company before they did.

As I said at the outset, this may seem obvious if it doesn’t seem blasphemous. It may sound pedantic. But I believe it is important because of the implications it has for business leaders. Here are three of those implications.

Implication 1: If your people drive all of your business value, you should take care of them.

Companies are very protective of their assets—especially intangible assets—and manage them carefully. They are protective of their brand and reputation, and consider brand impact before changing prices, entering partnerships, launching products, and a host of other activities.

They should be just as precious about their people. They should listen to what their people are saying, support them in their goals, and create opportunities for them to grow and succeed. They should ensure they create an environment of safety and belonging where people can do their best work.

None of this is new. But it is often considered “soft” or “fluffy,” away from the hard work of value creation. Once we realize that this work is value creation, because these people are the only way our business ever creates value, its importance changes.

Implication 2: Maximizing your people’s performance is the number one job of every CEO.

CEO’s manage a lot of stakeholders. There are the shareholders, to whom they are ultimately accountable. Their major customers, who occasionally want to talk directly to the CEO about products and services. Regulators and governing bodies, especially in the context of public companies. Creditors and debtors. Partners. Employees and contractors.

Engaging with some of these groups—customers, creditors, partners—can be considered the dreaded “working in the business rather than on the business.” If a CEO has strong and empowered leadership throughout the organization, he or she may not have to over-index on any of these groups. Others can do so.

Shareholders, regulators, and employees do require the CEO’s time and attention, and these relationships cannot effectively be delegated. Importantly, though, only one of these groups creates value for the business. CEO’s concerned about creating value should spend their time and energy focused on the group that creates that value.

What does that mean the CEO needs to do? First, make sure you have the right people to do the job. Be exacting in your hiring standards. Second, put them in a position to succeed. Give them the right tools and the right environment, limit extraneous requirements and distractions. Third, invest in their development. Ensure your people are continually growing and improving. No one is a finished product.

This focus is how you can maximize value.

Implication 3: Measure your people performance with as much rigor as you measure financial performance.

We have previously written an article in this newsletter about the problems in the measurement of learning and development efforts, but the issue is actually much more fundamental than that. While companies always measure financial performance and frequently measure their most important KPIs in operations, sales, marketing, and more, the success of their people efforts rarely receives the same attention. Instead, we are like the baseball scouts in Moneyball, confident that our expertise and years of experience gives us all the insight we need, and unaware of the gaping holes in this conventional wisdom.

Again, if we reframe our thinking to recognize that the people we have create our company’s value, this lack of attention is a glaring error. These are not “soft” issues. They are at the core of our business success.

If we’re taking these issues seriously, we have to ask ourselves a few challenging questions.

First, do you understand exactly how each person and each role in the company creates value? What activities drive this value? What are the most consequential differences between top performance and average or poor performance? 

Second, are you able to measure this value creation in a meaningful way, or are you basing performance reviews primarily on the subjective and likely flawed views of a person’s manager?

Third, are you able to articulate the gap between exemplary performance and a person’s actual performance, in a way that makes it clear what they need to work on and how they can drive greater impact?

And fourth, are you able to accurately gauge potential and predict performance in different roles, or are you merely making people decisions based on your gut?

If you’re not able to do any of these four things, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Except, maybe, do worry a little. Because your decisions in these areas will determine how much value your business is able to create. If you are approaching them blind, you are just hoping to get lucky.

If you think of people issues as “soft” and not worthy of the CEO’s time, stop doing so. Instead, take care of your people, focus on maximizing their performance, and make sure you’re measuring that performance with as much rigor as you possibly can.

Thanks,
The Impactful Executive Team

PS - free free to share this newsletter with anyone that would find it useful.

Whenever You’re Ready, There Are 3 Ways We Can help You:

1. Find out more about TIE’s Top Team High Performance Program. Visit ImpactfulExec.com, read our 5-slide TIE teaser or 20-slide full TIE introduction.

2. Score your organizational health. Measure across our three levers, three levels, and nine elements using our 7-min Diagnostic assessment and emailed pdf report.

3. Improve your top team’s performance. Send us an email if you have further questions and schedule a 15-min triage call to see if we can help you.

Here are the reference links for each CEO pain:

The first CEO pain.

The second CEO pain.

The third CEO pain.

While these challenges are formidable on their own, the reality is far more complex. These pains can be deeply interconnected, forming a modern-day Gordian knot that can leave even the most seasoned executives feeling overwhelmed.

The Interconnected Nature of CEO Pains

Imagine a rapidly growing tech company where the CEO finds herself grappling with all three pains simultaneously:

1. Opacity: The company's strategic direction is unclear, with competing priorities creating a fog of confusion.

2. Being Stuck: Despite long hours and constant meetings, progress feels painfully slow.

3. Drama: Team unity is fraying, with rumors and gossip proliferating.

These issues don't exist in isolation.

The lack of clear direction (opacity) leads to unproductive meetings and analysis paralysis (being stuck), which in turn breeds frustration and conflict within the team (drama).

This toxic cycle can quickly spiral out of control, leaving the CEO feeling like they're trying to untangle an impossible knot.

Navigating Complexity

The challenges CEOs face today are rarely simple. They often fall into what the decades-old Stacey Matrix and Cynefin Framework would categorize as "complex" or even "chaotic" territories. These are environments where:

• Cause and effect are not easily discernible

• Quick solutions don’t exist, and require step-by-step diligence

• Solutions emerge through persistence, adaptation, and experimentation

Consider our tech company CEO again. Her challenges don't have clear-cut solutions. The opacity in strategic direction isn't necessarily solved by simply writing a better strategy document. The productivity issues can't be fixed by “declaring a war on meetings”. And the team drama? It's likely a symptom of deeper organizational health issues that require persistent intervention.

Real-World Examples of Interconnected Pains

Let’s look back at our previous examples once again:

1. The Institution Trapped in Strategy Overload As per our earlier newsletter, a large financial institution suffered from "death by strategy." Their obsession with creating grand strategies led to paralysis and burnout. This is a perfect example of how opacity (too many competing priorities) contributed to being stuck (inability to execute) and ultimately drama (team exhaustion and demotivation).

2. The Energy Company's Meeting Madness We worked with an energy company where executives spent 43 hours a week in meetings, many without clear outcomes. This productivity drain (being stuck) was directly linked to a lack of strategic clarity (opacity) and likely contributed to interpersonal tensions (drama) as people struggled to get real work done.

3. The Financial Services Company's Leadership Transition In another case, a new CEO found himself whispering about board members in private meetings. This culture of fear led to slowed decisions (being stuck) and a lack of clear direction (opacity), ultimately resulting in high executive turnover (drama).

The three pains are shown above; in this article we’re focusing on their interconnectedness.

Greatness in the Face of Complex Problems

Common knowledge holds that Alexander the Great simply chopped the Gordian Knot in half with his sword, thereby fulfilling the prophecy that he would rule Asia. This speak to a brute force approach that many CEOs may choose to employ.

However, alternative version of history state that Alexander the Great didn't simply hack through the Gordian knot, as stated, but may have found a clever solution, by removing the lynchpin to work methodically from one end of the rope to the other.

Modern CEOs can take inspiration from this approach:

1. Start with Clarity: Like removing a lynchpin, begin by establishing a clear, focused diagnosis and direction. This addresses the opacity problem and provides a foundation for solving other issues.

2. Implement Smart Systems: Work methodically to create systems that start to promote focused action and decision-making. This tackles the "being stuck" problem by ensuring team members are productive and goals are actionable.

3. Foster a Healthy Culture: As you work through the "knot," pay attention to team dynamics. Create an environment of trust and open communication to prevent and address drama.

4. Embrace Complexity: Recognize that solutions may not be linear. Be willing to experiment, learn, and adapt your approach as you navigate interconnected challenges.

5. Seek Outside Perspective: Sometimes, it takes a fresh pair of eyes to see the lynchpin or the starting point of the rope. Don't hesitate to bring in trusted advisors or coaches who can offer new insights.

By approaching these interconnected pains with patience, creativity, and a willingness to tackle the root causes rather than just the symptoms, CEOs can begin to unravel their own Gordian knots.

It's not about brute force or quick fixes; it's about understanding the complex system you're operating in and finding step-by-step ways to create positive change and wins.

Remember, even the most tangled knots can be unraveled with the right approach. As a CEO, your job is to be great in the context of your organization - clever, strategic, and unafraid to tackle complexity head-on.

Thanks,
The Impactful Executive Team

PS - free free to share this newsletter with anyone that would find it useful.

Whenever You’re Ready, There Are 3 Ways We Can help You:

1. Find out more about TIE’s Top Team High Performance Program. Visit ImpactfulExec.com, read our 5-slide TIE teaser or 20-slide full TIE introduction.

2. Score your organizational health. Measure across our three levers, three levels, and nine elements using our 7-min Diagnostic assessment and emailed pdf report.

3. Improve your top team’s performance. Send us an email if you have further questions and schedule a 15-min triage call to see if we can help you.

Two newsletters ago we discussed the first CEO pain.

In the last newsletter we discussed the second CEO pain.

A quick reminder:

The first CEO Pain focuses on visibility.

This shows up in the short-term as frustration with fogginess or “opacity” of direction.

Longer-term the team risks being “taken by surprise”.

How does this show up in practice?

Read more in the previous article, here.

The next CEO pain then comes into play, which is:

Being stuck, focused on productivity.

This shows up in the short-term as frustrations with being “stuck” in terms of outputs.

Longer-term the team risks being “left in the dust”.

Let’s now continue with CEO pain #3.

Consider the case of a large financial services company.

It’s profitable and has performed well over the last few years.

A long-time CEO resigns unexpectedly and a new CEO takes his place.

At first everything is wonderful. Great engagement with Board; great engagement with Exco and the broader management team.

Within a year of stepping into the role, the CEO no longer looks forward to Board meetings. Board members are quick to blame and criticize, undermining the confidence of the executive team.

Some of the criticisms are valid, however, many are trivial and petty, such as a single spelling mistake on page 87 of the Board submission, causing board members to “worry about the entire argument of the strategy in question.”

This becomes so severe that the CEO begins to reflexively whisper when he refers to certain individuals, even in private 1-1 meetings, as though they can hear him.

Meetings start to take on an air of being in a spy thriller.

Before long, the Board is starting to “request input” on hires one or two levels below the CEO, causing hiring to slow, which is not helpful at at time when executive turnover has increased dramatically.

This dynamic plays itself out for a few years, with strife among executive team members being visible to the whole team. Certain individuals are not welcome in meetings, other walk out of meetings. No one is willing to have constructive and sincere 1-1 discussions.

The various stakeholder don’t want to discuss “team dynamics” as everyone “should just get on with it” and push complicated strategy, and even greater execution.

The dynamic gets so extreme that after a particularly harrowing Board meeting the CEO quits. His executive team are gutted; many leave within a year or two of his departure.

The three pains are shown in the image above; in this article we’re focusing on #3 here.

So, at a fundamental level, the third CEO pain is focused in:

Team dynamics.

Is it healthy?

Is it drama-driven or data-driven?

This shows up in the short-term as frustrations with drama in terms of relationships, engagement, and interactions, in meeting and 1-1.

We’ve unfortunately seen this at all levels of organizations.

Boards. CEOs. CXOs. Excos. Senior management. Middle management.

And it’s easy to ignore or minimize, until it blows up spectacularly.

Frustratingly, it often manifest in the “politics” of relatively small and well-meaning organizations of 20-30 individuals.

It’s always easier to be in denial and avoid the difficult work of team dynamics.

Ironically, it’s easier to work on “hard” strategy and avoid so-called “soft” interactions.

This is precisely why many leaders end up experiencing something similar to “Lord of the Flies” or, perhaps insert your favorite drama or Soapie here.

So, core question: how has this CEO pain manifested for you?

Reply to this email if you’d like to let us know.

It is particularly important to understand the interaction of the three pains with each other. We will be digging into this in our next newsletter.

Thanks,
The Impactful Executive Team

Whenever You’re Ready, There Are 3 Ways We Can help You:

1. Find out more about TIE’s Top Team High Performance Program. Visit ImpactfulExec.com, read our 5-slide TIE teaser or 20-slide full TIE introduction.

2. Score your organizational health. Measure across our three levers, three levels, and nine elements using our 7-min Diagnostic assessment and emailed pdf report.

3. Improve your top team’s performance. Send us an email if you have further questions and schedule a 15-min triage call to see if we can help you.

Last week we discussed the first CEO pain.

As a quick reminder:

The first CEO Pain focuses on visibility.

This shows up in the short-term as frustration with fogginess or “opacity” of direction.

Longer-term the team risks being “taken by surprise”.

How does this show up in practice?

Read more in the previous article, here.

Let’s continue with CEO pain #2.

We once worked with a energy company that was incredibly productive.

The division we worked with had about 200 people.

Everyone was always generating reports, attending meetings, and clocking overtime.

But, months would go by and the same issues would be discussed.

No meaningful decisions would be made.

I sat down with one of the executives and tried to understand the issues at play, and he explained.

“There’s always another Board or Exco report to write, usually to justify what we’re currently doing. And I’m incredibly busy, every day, in back-to-back meetings.”

We wanted to get to the root of the issue, so we decided to gather some facts and reconvened a few days later.

It turned out that two things we’re happening.

First, he was always fighting fires. A very common issue.

These fires were usually based on justifying previous decisions.

Worse still, he was usually doing the work himself, without delegating to his team. He was taking the “player” role vs. “coach” or leader, and it was not working.

Second, he was busy in meetings. Forty-three hours of meetings in an average week, to be precise. And 30-40% of these meetings had no clear outcomes or need for him.

How can you get things done when you spend the equivalent of your entire working week in meetings?

And imagine the change in productivity if he spend 3-4 hours a day less in unproductive meetings!

Some meetings are productive, so be careful what you cull, but many are there for legacy reasons, and not useful.

The three pains are shown in the image above; in this article we’re focusing on #2 here.

So, at a fundamental level, the second CEO pain is focused in:

Productivity.

Individually AND collectively.

This shows up in the short-term as frustrations with being “stuck” in terms of outputs, results, and progress.

Longer-term the team risks being “left in the dust”.

If I was faced with the challenge above I would previously have said: “I wouldn’t let things get this way! I would never accept it!”

You’re probably saying the same things right now.

However, the truth is probably three-fold.

One, organizational inertia is much stronger than we admit. It’s very hard to swim upstream when a torrent of corporate habit is pushing you downstream.

Two, there is always a strong tension between individual productivity and collective productivity, and it’s easy for leaders to mix up their productive roles at any given point, and work sub-optimally in this context.

Three, it is always much easier to add than subtract, as already discussed around the first pain. Another report, another meetings. It’s hard to fault someone for doing more.

Which is precisely why many leaders, CEO, CXO, or otherwise, feel like they are getting stuck in the mud, actually doing much less than they could be, as at team.

Question: how has this pain manifested for you?

Reply to this email if you’d like to let us know.

We will dig into the third pain in the coming article.

We will be digging into team “drama”, and how perfectly rational people can lose their minds entirely with very little provocation!

Thanks,
The Impactful Executive Team

Whenever You’re Ready, There Are 3 Ways We Can help You:

1. Find out more about TIE’s Top Team High Performance Program. Visit ImpactfulExec.com, read our 5-slide TIE teaser or 20-slide full TIE introduction.

2. Score your organizational health. Measure across our three levers, three levels, and nine elements using our 7-min Diagnostic assessment and emailed pdf report.

3. Improve your top team’s performance. Send us an email if you have further questions and schedule a 15-min triage call to see if we can help you.

We once worked with a large financial institution that was great at strategy.

They had detailed corporate strategy documents. Hundreds of pages.

KPI’s, dozens of metrics… the works!

The company had many types of strategy sessions.

Shareholder strategy sessions, board strategy sessions, executive team strategy sessions, strategic reviews, strategic plans. You get the idea.

Over time, constant engagement led to ever increasing strategic scope for the organization, more and more additions for the top team to handle (somewhat reminiscent of Monty Python’s classic Life of Brian skit What Did The Romans Ever Do For Us, for those that have seen it…).

However, if you asked any of the executives to articulate the strategy beyond high-level catch-phrases, you often got more confused looks and varied answers than the number of people involved.

It’s important to note that the strategy was driven by very smart people, doing sophisticated analyses, and developing what can only be called “grand strategy”.

Over the years, the problem expressed itself two-fold.

One, the organization was always seemingly “doing” dozens of things.

Translating organizational purpose into strategy involved lofty vision, mission, goals, values, which are all well and good, but… this “death by strategy” was impossible to take out of the realm of theory, even by a well-meaning and capable team.

In addition to being too much, always adding more “features”, the strategy did not clarify how to get to the destination in granular, tactical, and practical terms.

Two, the organization became paralyzed in its enthusiasm, doing very little in the chaos of endless additive strategy.

There was a huge load to carry, and with lack of clarity on how the destination would be reached, great people churned out, burnt out, exhausted, and demotivated.

This is an example that is symptomatic of the first CEO pain.

But let’s step back a moment.

Over the next few weeks we’re going to discuss the “Three Pains” of CEO in further detail, as first mentioned in ‘A CEO’s Journey’ previously; these pains points are experienced as very specific frustrations and fears, and have addressable solutions.

The three pains are shown in the image above; in this article we’re focusing on #1 here.

The first CEO Pain focuses on visibility.

This shows up in the short-term as frustration with fogginess or “opacity” of direction.

Longer-term the team risks being “taken by surprise”.

How does this show up in practice?

A lack of strategic visibility and direction can manifest in a variety of ways.

It could be a team with no strategy, but this is rare these days.

It can lead to poorly formed, incoherent strategy, that is often a matter of adding random, sometimes competing, objectives together that do not leverage the organization’s advantages.

Or it can lead to over-cooked strategy, that throws in everything “except the kitchen-sink”, in fancy strategies that are not executable.

This organizational myopia can lead to missed opportunities, overlooked threats, and ultimately, the fear of being taken by surprise in a rapidly changing market landscape.

But the solution can begin with recognizing the problem.

The key lies in simplifying complexity, grounding strategies in data and value drivers, and ensuring consistent alignment and communication throughout the organization.

Particularly important is understanding what advantage this particular team has in the context of shifting customer needs and organizational strengths.

We will come back to this in subsequent discussions, but let’s come back to the three pain points, of which we’ve only addressed the first one.

At a fundamental level, the next CEO pain then comes into play, which is:

Second, productivity.

This shows up in the short-term as frustrations with being “stuck” in terms of outputs.

Longer-term the team risks being “left in the dust”.

We will dig into this pain in the coming article.

Thanks,
The Impactful Executive Team

Whenever You’re Ready, There Are 3 Ways We Can help You:

1. Find out more about TIE’s Top Team High Performance Program. Visit ImpactfulExec.com, read our 5-slide TIE teaser or 20-slide full TIE introduction.

2. Score your organizational health. Measure across our three levers, three levels, and nine elements using our 7-min Diagnostic assessment and emailed pdf report.

3. Improve your top team’s performance. Send us an email if you have further questions and schedule a 15-min triage call to see if we can help you.

Today we’re launching the beta test version of the The Impactful Executive’s diagnostic assessment tool. We're excited to share this practical, step-by-step approach to elevating your top team's performance through the Impactful Model.

In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, executives face distinct pain points that can significantly hinder organizational success, as discussed in this article. These challenges can lead to missed opportunities, competitive disadvantages, and internal strife.

The diagnostic assessment tool and report, based on the Impactful Model, gives business leaders, particularly CXOs, valuable insights on the best levers to shift themselves and their teams towards high-performance.

Points to note on the assessment tool:

1. Thirty questions determine your Impactful Model score.

2. Takes only 7 minutes to see diagnostic results

3. Measures across 3 levers, 3 levels, 9 elements

4. Instant access to your diagnostic report

5. Practical, actionable insights

Here is the link:

The Impactful Executive Quick Diagnostic Assessment & Report

Please Note: This diagnostic report is a condensed version of the full Impactful Diagnostic, showing just your individual survey results. A more robust assessment of your company's profile will required input from a broader set of stakeholders. We are in Beta test mode; please share feedback on glitches and how this report can be improved.

To find out more, see our full TIE introductory presentation here, which focuses unlocking the performance of (current or potential) high performing teams.

If you are interested in learning more about what we do and how you can work with us, you can visit our website: www.impactfulexec.com.

We will be unpacking many of these concepts over the coming weeks.

Thanks for reading!

Sincerely,

Dr. Ali Monadjem

For: The Impactful Executive Team

PS - Please feel free to share this article with CXO’s that would find it most useful.

Today we’re introducing The Impactful Executive’s top team high performance program. We will be reviewing elements of this over the coming weeks’ newsletters.

Let’s look at an all too common scenario that plays out in teams of all sizes.

The CEO of a rapidly growing mid-sized tech company found themselves increasingly frustrated. Despite a promising product and talented team, something wasn't clicking. As they reflected on the situation, three distinct pain points emerged:

1. Opacity: The company's direction seemed unclear, with too many competing priorities and a growing silo mentality around prioritizing goals. "How did we not see this coming?" became an all too common refrain in executive meetings.

2. Being stuck: Despite long hours and constant meetings, progress felt painfully slow. The team seemed paralyzed by analysis, with endless discussions but little concrete action. The CEO feared they were falling behind more agile competitors.

3. Drama: Tensions were rising. Rumors and gossip proliferated, and team unity was fraying. The CEO felt like they were constantly "herding cats" rather than leading a cohesive team towards a common goal.

These daily frustrations were evolving into deeper fears.

The CEO worried about becoming the next "Blockbuster" – a once-promising company blindsided by market changes.

They feared the company might become another "Detroit" – unable to adapt quickly enough in a rapidly evolving industry.

Worse, the CEO began to doubt their own leadership, feeling like an imposter while struggling to unite a fractious team.

This can be avoided.

Research by McKinsey & Co. shows that companies in the top quartile of organizational health achieve up to 3x higher total shareholder returns compared to those in the bottom quartile.

At The Impactful Executive (TIE), we focus on three key levers to address organizational health based on the pain points above:

1. Clear Direction

2. Focused Action

3. Thriving Team

TIE begins with a comprehensive diagnostic, often revealing that the CEO's or top team’s experiences are symptoms of deeper organizational health issues.

We then embark on a structured improvement journey, using a unique "Field and Forum" approach that combined workshops with daily habit formation.

So, let’s take the scenario above forward.

Over the next few months, the CEO and their team worked on:

1. Clarifying the company's direction and priorities, ensuring everyone understood their role in achieving these goals.

2. Implementing systems to move from discussion to action more quickly, breaking down silos and improving cross-functional collaboration.

3. Building trust and improving communication within the team, fostering a culture of constructive feedback and shared accountability.

The results were transformative.

Within six months, decision-making became more efficient, cross-functional projects started delivering results, and team morale significantly improved. The CEO no longer felt blindsided by issues; instead, they and their team were proactively addressing potential challenges.

Financially, the impact was clear.

By the end of the year, the company's performance had improved dramatically, with productivity up by 20% and employee satisfaction scores reaching all-time highs.

Reflecting on the journey, the CEO realized that by addressing the underlying health of the organization, many of the surface-level issues had resolved themselves.

As one retired CEO had said, "The running thread of leadership is that everything is punctuated by human dynamics."

This story should not be unique, but it’s easy to get stuck in the status quo and not act.

In today's complex business environment, many CEOs find themselves grappling with similar challenges. As we move forward in 2024 and beyond, perhaps it's time for more executives to consider: could improving organizational health, now, be the key to unlocking more of your company's potential?

To find out more, see our full TIE introductory presentation here, which focuses unlocking the performance of (current or potential) high performing teams.

If you are interested in learning more about what we do and how you can work with us, you can visit our website: www.impactfulexec.com.

We will be unpacking many of these concepts over the coming weeks.

Thanks for reading!

Sincerely,

Dr. Ali Monadjem

For: The Impactful Executive Team

PS - Please feel free to share these with CEO’s that would find it most useful.

Today we’re recapping the last seven weeks of newsletters, written by Jay Kloppenberg, a top-tier management consultant and CXO advisor.

Jay is a seasoned professional with over 15 years of experience in education, people development, and organizational performance. His career spans from founding an innovative school in South Africa to consulting for McKinsey & Co., where he helped companies globally enhance their performance.

A published author and frequent guest speaker at graduate schools, Jay brings a unique blend of practical experience and academic insight to performance improvement initiatives.

Why Corporate Training Often Fails: A Comprehensive Recap

Corporate training is a $300 billion global industry, yet much of this investment yields disappointing results. Over the series of articles, we explored six key problems that undermine the effectiveness of most leadership training efforts.

Let's recap the main issues and potential solutions.

1. Training and Work Are Treated as Separate

Many companies view training as something separate from daily work. However, the most effective learning happens on the job.

As exemplified by successful teacher development programs and McKinsey's approach:

1. Integrate learning into daily work

2. Provide regular feedback against clear performance standards

3. Engage in "deliberate practice" cycles

4. Leverage apprenticeship models

5. Challenge people just outside their comfort zones

"You have to embed the learning and development process into everything you do, and you have to do so in very carefully designed ways."

Go the the article here.

2. CEOs Delegate Talent Development

Despite claims that "our people are our most important asset," many CEOs delegate talent development to lower-level managers. This communicates that it's not a top priority.

Instead:

1. CEOs should be deeply involved in talent development efforts

2. Treat hiring and development with the same rigor as sales processes

3. Track detailed metrics on the success of talent development initiatives

"Maximizing the amount of value that your people can create is, in many ways, the core job of a CEO."

Go the the article here.

3. Ineffective Measurement

Most companies rely solely on participant satisfaction surveys to evaluate training.

This is problematic because:

1. Participant enjoyment doesn't correlate with learning effectiveness

2. Comfort often comes at the expense of real learning

3. Instead, use the Kirkpatrick Model to measure:

   1. Participant reaction

   2. Learning

   3. Behavior change

   4. Results (impact on performance)

"If you do not know whether your PD efforts drive improved performance, you do not have a clue whether they are useful in any way."

Go the the article here.

4. Training Is Too Relaxed

Effective learning requires stepping out of one's comfort zone. Most corporate training sessions lack the intensity and stakes needed for real growth.

To improve:

1. Introduce elements of "eustress" (positive stress)

2. Create situations of "cognitive conflict" that challenge existing mental models

3. Increase accountability and stakes in training sessions

"Learning happens when people think hard." - Robert Coe

Go the the article here.

5. Overestimating Participant Skills

Many training programs assume baseline skills that participants may lack. This leads to ineffective learning experiences.

To address this:

1. Assess fundamental skills gaps (e.g., reading comprehension, logical reasoning)

2. Address basic skill deficiencies before tackling advanced topics

3. Create a culture where honest self-assessment is celebrated

"The only way for true improvement and growth is through a clear-eyed assessment of where we are today."

Go the the article here.

6. Ineffective Remote Training

With the rise of remote work, many companies have shifted to online training without adapting their approach.

To make remote training effective:

1. Keep groups small (12-15 participants)

2. Limit sessions to 1-2 hours

3. Maintain high interactivity

4. Require videos to be on

5. Incorporate accountability measures

"Remote learning is nearly always worse than in-person learning—but it doesn't have to be."

Go the the article here.

Conclusion

Effective corporate training is possible, but it requires a fundamental rethinking of how we approach talent development. By addressing these six key issues, companies can transform their training from a wasteful checkbox exercise into a powerful driver of high performance teams and growth in value.

Remember, as stated in the introduction: "Corporate executives are experts in manufacturing or financial services or product development, not cognitive science and adult education." By applying these evidence-based principles, we can bridge that gap and create truly impactful learning experiences in the corporate world.

We have incorporated these ideas and many others into the design for The Impactful Executive, which focuses unlocking the performance of (current or potential) high performing teams.

If you are interested in learning more about what we do and how you can work with us, you can visit our website: www.impactfulexec.com.

Thanks for reading!

Please note: feel free to forward this newsletter with executives that would find the insights useful.

After a 6 month hiatus and reader feedback, The Impactful Executive is back, returning with a new format and fresh perspective.

Over the next six weeks, we will be presenting a series of articles outlining the pitfalls of corporate training and talent development and how to implement programs that truly work.

These articles have been written by Jay Kloppenberg, a top-tier management consultant and CXO advisor. Jay is a seasoned professional with over 15 years of experience in education, people development, and organizational performance. His career spans from founding an innovative school in South Africa to consulting for McKinsey & Co., where he helped companies globally enhance their performance. A published author and frequent guest speaker at graduate schools, Jay brings a unique blend of practical experience and academic insight to performance improvement initiatives.

Warm regards,

Dr. Ali Monadjem

Problem 6: You do it remotely (without heeding the lessons of remote learning)

Corporate training is a $300 billion global industry, but much of the training offered is ineffective. Over six weeks, I am detailing six reasons I’ve seen for that ineffectiveness, and how they can be addressed.

Today’s focus…

Problem 6: You do it remotely (without heeding the lessons of remote learning)

The rise of hybrid and remote work has created a paradox that leaders struggle to square. On the one hand, employees prefer and even demand the option of working remotely. An astounding 98% of workers prefer to work remotely at least part of the time, commonly for ~3 days a week. Companies that have mandated full return-to-office policies have frequently faced extreme backlash. Remote work promotes greater diversity, eliminates wasted commuting time, reduces travel demands and helps companies limit their emissions.

At the same time, the evidence for the importance of in-person work is beginning to mount. Remote work has been shown to cause burnout and create security risks. Most employees report that working remotely makes it more difficult to connect with their colleagues, and brain scans have found that people are less “linked” at a neurochemical level when working over zoom than in person. Employers worry about employees losing focus and productivity while working remotely, and indeed, research has suggested that most people can only focus in zoom calls for a mere 10 minutes before starting to zone out.

These problems are especially acute in the professional development space, particularly because the environment is generally so relaxed and consequence-free that people feel more open to distractions (see Problem 4: It is too relaxed). But because we rarely measure the effectiveness of our development efforts (see Problem 3: Your company doesn’t measure it properly—or at all), we do not have great information on the gains we are leaving on the table through remote training, or the practices that can enable us to avoid those losses.

Luckily, there is a place where the question of remote learning effectiveness has been deeply studied for multiple decades: education.

To synthesize the lessons we’ve learned: remote learning is nearly always worse than in-person learning—but it doesn’t have to be.

The first part of this statement is common knowledge. Many people know that the completion rate for massive-open online courses (MOOCs) is abysmally low and has not greatly improved in the past 20 years. They also know that moving to remote learning was an unmitigated disaster for children’s learning—on average, students learned barely half as much remotely as they had been learning in person.

Fewer people are aware of the success stories. For example, Minerva University launched in 2012 with its learning program fully online for quality reasons rather than cost reasons—it allowed its professors to evaluate class discussions more objectively and in much greater depth than they could if these discussions took place in person. Minerva has been named the world’s most innovative university for three consecutive years, has admissions rates below 2%, and produces graduates with skills comparable to the very best universities in the world. Anecdotally, I know from family and friends who have taught humanities courses at Ivy League and Liberal Arts Colleges that their remote seminar courses often felt as effective as in-person classes, and the work the students produced was of similar quality.

So what do these more effective remote learning efforts do differently than the others? Five main things:

1.     They keep it small. A normal group in a successful remote learning experience is less than 20 people—often more like 12-15. Going higher than that makes it very difficult for everyone to stay engaged—it is easier to scan the room and adjust when managing larger groups in-person; remotely, large groups usually mean people check out. Yes, you can incorporate breakout groups, which will increase the interactivity, but there are very often inefficiencies in breakout groups as people struggle to clarify the instructions, get to know each other, ensure everyone is involved and participates, and consolidate responses. Better to keep the full group small if possible.

2.     They keep it short. As mentioned above, people’s attention spans on zoom are shorter than they are in person. Even if we can’t keep our sessions to 10 minutes, we can avoid full-day or multi-day workshops. A good rule of thumb: Do multi-day workshops in person. If you can only do them remotely, just don’t do them at all. Keep your remote training sessions to 1-2 hours maximum—and even that is pushing it.

3.     They keep it interactive. Nothing promotes distraction more than a long presentation. As soon as people realize they won’t be called on or asked to contribute, a large percentage of them will zone out. The examples I referenced above conduct lessons entirely through Socratic seminars—very limited powerpoint, no lectures, mostly people looking at each other’s faces on the screen and talking to each other. Which brings us to the fourth point…

4.     They keep videos on. We get it, not everyone wants to turn on their video. They might not have fixed their hair or put on the right clothes, or they might think their home office or bedroom is too messy. Or, perhaps they are multitasking and don’t want others to know about it. More than 7 in 10 employees report turning off their cameras during remote meetings to hide something they are doing, including looking at their phone (65%), having a conversation with someone else (47%), looking at social media (44%), making a drink or food (42%) and even sleeping (20%)! It is no surprise that effective remote learning experiences almost always require videos to be on.

5.     They keep accountability. As previously mentioned, (Problem 4: It is too relaxed), corporate training often feels like a pass-fail class that everyone is guaranteed to pass, taught by nothing but disrespected substitute teachers. Effective remote learning experiences do not feel this way. A key commonality among the effective remote universities described above is the inclusion of in-class contribution as a major part of the grade. When you know that your engagement (or lack thereof) will be noted and measured, you are more likely to engage and therefore more likely to learn. Participation scores are not generally feasible in a corporate setting, but involving the boss or manager in some way in the training is a good proxy. This, too, is not always possible, but you must provide some way to bring accountability to the effort if you want it to be effective.

In-person experiences are often best for learning, but it is not always possible, or even advisable, to conduct training in person. If we are conducting short, regular sessions with participants spread in multiple locations or frequently traveling to visit clients, remote training may be our best bet. We can make it as effective as in-person training, in the right circumstances and through the right practices. But we have to be very careful about how we do it.

See also:

Introduction: Why your company’s required training feels like a waste of time (it’s because it is)

Problem 1: You consider “training” and “work” to be two separate things

Problem 2: Your CEO delegates talent development

Problem 3: Your company doesn’t measure it properly–or at all

Problem 4: It is too relaxed

Problem 5: It overestimates your skills

This concludes this series on Why Your Company’s Training Feels Like a Waste of Time. It is possible to do it well—but it is not easy.

We have incorporated these ideas and many others into the design for The Impactful Executive, which focuses on a specific type of professional development: ongoing development designed to improve the health of the organization and the performance of individuals and teams. If you are interested in learning more about what we do and how you can work with us, you can visit our website: www.impactfulexec.com.

Thanks for reading!

After a 6 month hiatus and reader feedback, The Impactful Executive is back, returning with a new format and fresh perspective.

Over the next six weeks, we will be presenting a series of articles outlining the pitfalls of corporate training and talent development and how to implement programs that truly work.

These articles have been written by Jay Kloppenberg, a top-tier management consultant and CXO advisor. Jay is a seasoned professional with over 15 years of experience in education, people development, and organizational performance. His career spans from founding an innovative school in South Africa to consulting for McKinsey & Co., where he helped companies globally enhance their performance. A published author and frequent guest speaker at graduate schools, Jay brings a unique blend of practical experience and academic insight to performance improvement initiatives.

Warm regards,

Dr. Ali Monadjem

Problem 5: It overestimates your skills

Corporate training is a $300 billion global industry, but much of the training offered is ineffective. Over six weeks, I am detailing six reasons I’ve seen for that ineffectiveness, and how they can be addressed.

Today’s focus…

Problem 5: It overestimates your skills.

There is a great scene in the Brad Pitt movie Moneyball about the Oakland A’s baseball team, in which the A’s scouts are talking about the potential of a prospect they’re considering.

“He’s got a classic swing,” says one scout.

“I don’t know, he can’t hit a curveball,” counters another.

“He’s noticeable,” replies the first, presumably as a positive.

“He’s got an ugly girlfriend,” adds another. “Ugly girlfriend means no confidence.”

They continue by adding that this guy “passes the eye candy test,” but “his girlfriend is a 6 at best,” so they have serious doubts about his ability to succeed in the pros.

Now, this is a silly scene meant to demonstrate the absurdity of the rationales baseball teams were using at the time to analyze players. I happen to believe that corporations make similarly silly calculations all the time today, even if baseball teams have moved on—but that is a discussion for another article.

In today’s article I’d like to focus on another element of this scene: every one of the scouts in this room believes to his core that he knows everything there is to know about evaluating baseball prospects. He doesn’t need to learn anything new, since he already knows it all. After all, they have all been baseball scouts for decades.

This overconfidence is at least as prevalent among novices as among purported experts. The Dunning Kruger effect is a well-known cognitive bias in which people with low ability overestimate their ability to perform a task effectively. The TV show Idols owes at least as much of its global success to this phenomenon as it does to the great singers who make it onto the final stage.

In an earlier post, I quoted a 2015 study on professional development among American schoolteachers from the non-profit TNTP. It found that through several years of professional development, most teachers saw no performance improvement, and 20% actually saw their performance decline.

The self-assessments of these teachers are instructive. Of the teachers evaluated as a 1 or a 2 out of 5, 62% believed their own instruction to be a 4 or a 5. Of those whose scores declined substantially over the course of the study, 80% reported that their practice improved “some” or “tremendously.”

Novice or expert, young or old, improving or declining, most of us believe that we are really good at what we do, and that we’re getting better over time. It’s just usually not true.

A few years ago, at the behest of an education donor, I visited a high school chemistry class in a low-performing East African country. The students all had their textbooks open, and the teacher was doing his best to give a lecture on the Krebs cycle. The students were paying close attention, looking through their books and taking notes. It was not the best lesson I had ever seen, but not the worst one, either.

Then I asked a few students about it afterwards. They responded with blank stares. I asked again, in a different way—more blank stares. After some investigation, the problem became clear: not a single student in the class could speak more than three words of English. Now, this is not an indictment on them, or even a problem in and of itself—lots of people can’t speak English, and I could not speak a single word of their native language—but it was a problem because their chemistry textbook, their chemistry lesson, and their chemistry exams were all in English!

These students’ inability to pass chemistry exams had nothing to do with their chemistry abilities. Instead, they had substantial knowledge gaps (in this case, the ability to speak and read in the language of instruction) that made it impossible for them to learn what they hoped to learn. Attempting to tackle the task at hand without addressing those knowledge and skill gaps was a complete waste of time.

Less dramatic versions of this challenge occur during professional development all the time. Millions of people lack basic skills that they need to do their jobs effectively—reading comprehension and written communication, number sense and mental calculation facility, logical reasoning and the ability to evaluate evidence. We do not focus our training on these areas—we expect graduates to have already learned these skills in school!—but the gaps in these areas often undermine everything we do. We do not test for these skills or identify these gaps, in large part because doing so would be considered too insulting or stressful for our employees—our cultures have not developed the psychological safety necessary to do so without damage.

Our efforts are not only undermined by gaps in “academic” skills, but also by gaps in self-mastery and interpersonal skills. Perhaps the thing holding someone back from being a good sales person is not the knowledge of how to overcome objections, but a lack of understanding of how to self-motivate to avoid procrastination. Or to prioritize effectively. Or to avoid overcommitting.

These are areas of personal performance that we normally take for granted. We do not train these skills because we assume people already have them, or that exposing gaps would be too psychologically damaging.

But this is a fool’s errand. The only way for true improvement and growth is through a clear-eyed assessment of where we are today. Companies must address the fundamental gaps preventing improved performance, before tackling the surface challenges that seem to hold us back. If that seems too difficult or too psychologically dangerous, then we need to invest heavily in building the type of culture where this sort of self-analysis is both accepted and celebrated, and can be completed without fear.

I wish I could tell you that the solution to this issue is an easy one. “Test people first, find their gaps, and address those gaps. That is how you will make your training and people development successful.” Sure. But these efforts only work in the right sort of environment. In the wrong environment, they can lead to chaos.

Creating that type of culture is extremely challenging. It is also perhaps the most potent force for sustainable overperformance.

 See also:

Introduction: Why your company’s required training feels like a waste of time (it’s because it is)

Problem 1: You consider “training” and “work” to be two separate things

Problem 2: Your CEO delegates talent development

Problem 3: Your company doesn’t measure it properly–or at all

Problem 4: It is too relaxed

Coming Next Week:

Problem 6: You Do It Remotely (Without Heeding The Lessons Of Remote Learning)

After a 6 month hiatus and reader feedback, The Impactful Executive is back, returning with a new format and fresh perspective.

Over the next six weeks, we will be presenting a series of articles outlining the pitfalls of corporate training and talent development and how to implement programs that truly work.

These articles have been written by Jay Kloppenberg, a top-tier management consultant and CXO advisor. Jay is a seasoned professional with over 15 years of experience in education, people development, and organizational performance. His career spans from founding an innovative school in South Africa to consulting for McKinsey & Co., where he helped companies globally enhance their performance. A published author and frequent guest speaker at graduate schools, Jay brings a unique blend of practical experience and academic insight to performance improvement initiatives.

Warm regards,

Dr. Ali Monadjem

Problem 4: It’s too relaxed

Corporate training is a $300 billion global industry, but much of the training offered is ineffective. Over six weeks, I am detailing six reasons I’ve seen for that ineffectiveness, and how they can be addressed.

Today’s focus…

Problem 4: It’s too relaxed

It is 1 hour before Game 7 of the 1962 NBA Finals, between the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, and things are tense. Facing elimination, the defending champion Celtics had gone to Los Angeles and pulled out Game 6 to even the series at 3 games apiece, setting up a winner-take-all grudge match back in Boston.

And now Bill Russell, the Celtics’ best player, is in the bathroom, throwing up.

You would expect his teammates and coaches to be terrified. It is the biggest game of the season! How can they win with their best player so ill that he is vomiting ahead of the game?! What will they do?!

Except, no one is concerned at all. If anything, they are relieved. After all, this is not at all unusual for Russell, who becomes so nervous and stressed that he does this before every big game. So when they hear him vomiting, no one is concerned—they know he is ready to go.

Russell goes on to submit the greatest Game 7 performance in NBA Finals history: 30 points and an NBA Finals record 40 rebounds. He wins a do-or-die game once again—over the course of his basketball career he will go on to go 22-0 in such games, a record no one has approached since.

So I guess the nerves and stress didn’t hold him back too much.

In fact, for all the ink spilled over the years about the negative health impacts of stress, there exists in parallel a body of research showing that some stress—short, acute, intense feelings of stress and anxiety–can lead to increased performance and personal growth.

As this article from the Harvard Business Review puts it, “Think about a time when you experienced substantial personal or professional growth, or a time when you performed at your highest level… we are willing to bet that those times invariably involved some stress or struggle.”

Recall the feeling you have before a big presentation, or a meeting with a demanding client or boss, or a high-stakes sales call. We feel nervous, but also locked in, in a way that allows us to perform at our best. This type of stress is called “eustress,” and is quite different from the “distress” that causes long-term negative health outcomes. But in the short term, it can often feel similar.

Now, think about your last professional development session at work. Did you feel any eustress? If you’re like most people, the answer is no. We normally view PD as the lowest of low stakes. It is like a pass-fail class in school that everyone passes, taught by nothing but a series of substitute teachers. If the session is remote, we frequently multitask. If in person, our minds wander. We are rarely, if ever, required to step out of our comfort zone. We leave feeling positive about ourselves and about the session, without having to go through any pain or struggle.

Sadly, this is not how learning and adaptation works. When we want our muscles to grow stronger, we have to put them under stress (through lifting weights, for example), then give them a break to recover and adapt. Perhaps some companies reason that the real learning takes place during our daily work, and the PD sessions are a chance for employees to relax and allow the adaptation to take place. If that is the case, though, companies might be better suited providing regular mandatory vacation time, which would surely be more effective if the goal is relaxation.

If the goal is learning, however, our professional development cannot be so relaxed. Effective learning only happens when we step out of our comfort zone, into what is called our “zone of proximal development,” and diligently attempt things that we are unable to do on our own.

In the 1980s, cognitive researchers Michael Shayer and Philip Adey developed the “Cognitive Acceleration” learning methodology, which proved to improve the cognitive functioning and abstract reasoning of British children, leading to improved performance across content areas. The key to this method? “Cognitive conflict,” a term Shayer developed to refer to the state in which our current understanding of the world is inadequate to address the challenge we’re presented, forcing us to adapt. (Note that this is not the same as “cognitive dissonance,” which refers to holding two contradictory beliefs at the same time—though the terms are sometimes confused)

This, too, is not easy. As learning scientist Robert Coe succinctly put it, “Learning happens when people think hard.”

And how hard is your professional development session requiring you to think? What are the stakes? Where is the accountability? Where is the stress?

For those thinking about developing people, these are important questions. If your sessions are as relaxed as most, figure out a way to ramp up the intensity.

I’m not saying your employees should be so nervous they’re vomiting before PD sessions…but I’m not not saying that, either.

(Just kidding. I am, in fact, not saying that.)

See also:

Introduction: Why your company’s required training feels like a waste of time (it’s because it is)

Problem 1: You consider “training” and “work” to be two separate things

Problem 2: Your CEO delegates talent development

Problem 3: Your company doesn’t measure it properly–or at all

Coming Next Week:

Problem 5: It Overestimates Your Skill Level