12 min read · The Pillars I Stand On
Four weeks into the program, the client made something clear.
The goodwill was gone. Not my goodwill. I hadn’t done anything yet. The goodwill burned through by the two project managers before me. He wasn’t starting me fresh. He was starting me in debt, and he wanted me to know it.
I understood where he was coming from. He’d been promised things that didn’t get delivered. He ran his group to a higher standard than anyone else in the region and he’d watched two PMs fail to meet it. A smaller leash for the third one? Reasonable. I might have done the same in his shoes. But starting someone in debt before they’ve done a single thing wrong is something I don’t think I could ever do. That’s not accountability. That’s punishment for someone else’s mistakes.
I wasn’t happy about it. But it’s hard to argue with unreasonable. He didn’t know me and his mind was already made up. The only thing that was going to change it was time and proof. I leaned on a Pete Carroll mantra that has never steered me wrong: stay hungry, remain humble, and get better today.
That was the whole plan. Not fix everything at once. Not make grand promises. Just make each day better than the last and trust that a client watching that closely would eventually notice the progress. My company had my back if it escalated above my head. They knew what they’d sent me into and they believed I was the right person for the job. Knowing this steadied me.
But before any of that could happen, I had to figure out what I’d walked into.
· · ·
The man who handed me the program was not failing because he was incompetent. I want to say that clearly. He was failing because he wanted to do it all himself and he did not trust his people enough to delegate properly. Ultimately, he became the bottleneck.
For the first eight hours of every day we put out fires. Then the client signed off and we opened the inbox. Between 100 and 150 emails every single night, some urgent, some not, none of them sorted. In a turn and burn environment you can’t let things sit. All you do is compound the issue and things spiral quickly. Critical messages that had arrived at noon were still sitting there at ten at night, unseen, unanswered. Every email needed to be gone through by the end of the night. After the emails came the routing of jobs to the customer. Every completed job had to be uploaded to the client’s system before 11 PM when their system closed. He did it himself. Every night. Not because it required his expertise. He had made up his mind about his team. They weren’t capable of doing it. I thought that was a pretty wild accusation. It seemed like an elementary task. But that decision, on top of everything else, kept him there until 11 PM every night, the cherry on top of a fourteen-hour day.
I watched all of it and I felt bad for him. I could see where that road headed and I knew it wasn’t a healthy approach to walk each day.
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During the two-week handoff I started asking questions. Not to step on toes. To understand. Why do we route the jobs this way? Why does this email come to us, must we be the middleman? Why are jobs going to quality control (QC) so late? Why are we routing jobs at 11 PM? The answers kept pointing to the same problems. I’m wired to be curious so I continued to ask questions.
I wasn’t panicked. I wasn’t in over my head. I could see the flaws clearly and I knew what needed fixing. That didn’t make it easy. I could have started at 6 AM and it wouldn’t have mattered. It was still going to be me and the cleaning ladies at 11 PM at night, every night, until changes were made. You don’t work your way out of that by putting in longer hours. You work your way out of it by fixing the system that put you there.
· · ·
When I took over I made a decision: Everyone starts with an A.
I didn’t care what had happened before I got there. I wasn’t leading them then. I wasn’t setting the standard or explaining why it mattered or holding them accountable. The client hadn’t given me a clean slate. But I wasn’t going to lead my team the way he’d led me. It’s hard to win people over and build for the future when you start them on a foundation of debt.
The first thing I tackled was the routing. I spent a couple of nights building a training document. The steps, the sequence, the things that would get us in trouble with the client if we missed them. Then I called the client directly and told them: we’re training the team to handle this, there will be some speed bumps early, and I will own every one of them. I just need a little grace while we get there. He gave it to us. Within two weeks the team was routing their own jobs correctly and I got roughly two hours back a night.
The thing he had held onto required his assistance nightly until 11 PM. My team had it in two weeks. It was because I set the expectation, gave them the necessary training, absorbed the early risk, and got out of the way.
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The inbox was its own problem. I was being copied on everything. Technical engineering questions that needed to go to the QC lead, workflow questions that needed to go to the team lead, requests that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the people who actually had the answers. The leader had become the default address for the entire operation. Critical messages sat unread for ten hours while we fought fires at the front of the day.
I built a communications chain of command. Technical question? Start with your peers. If they can’t answer it, go to QC. If QC can’t answer it, go to the project lead. If the project lead can’t answer it, that’s when it goes to the top. My door stayed open for everything else. I was done being a relay station for questions I wasn’t the right person to answer. We also set up a shared group inbox for the team and the client to email. The team lead owned it. He flagged what needed my attention and handled what didn’t. I was giving him more responsibility deliberately, raising his floor, with the end goal of making him my replacement.
The number of daily fires we fought started to decrease. We were getting in front of the problems instead of reacting to them. Instead of waiting for the client to surface a question and fall back on us, we were proactively asking the questions ourselves and bringing the roadblocks to them. That minor shift is what gave me my day back. Directing the flow of information to the correct team members allowed us to proactively manage the inbox instead of drowning in it.
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Around this time I was talking to my cousin who works in software development. He mentioned something called a scrum ceremony. A daily standup built around three questions. What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? What’s blocking you?
The lightbulb went off.
Those were exactly the questions I needed. Not because I was looking for a leadership framework. I had a specific problem: a fast-paced program, a relentless client, and a dispersed team which I needed to keep moving without making myself the center of everything. We ran modified one-hour standups, not the fifteen-minute version most people picture when they hear scrum. And we added a fourth question: when will your job be ready for QC? That one question let the QC team map their entire day based on what was coming instead of reacting to whatever landed in their queue.
I extended the standup model to the cross-functional departments whose work fed directly into mine. Their work had to move together with ours or the work became roadblocked. We could tell those teams what we needed first based on what was going to QC first. Both products now moved in parallel and were completed closer to the same time. If they had roadblocks, we knocked them down as well. A roadblock in any one department was a roadblock for everyone, so everyone had visibility and everyone had a voice every morning. We had a saying: we win together, we lose together.
The first time I heard an engineer mention a roadblock after their job was sent for a quality check, I closed my eyes and shook my head. That’s backwards. Surfacing it after the fact helps no one. Our newly formed standup call fixed this.
What I didn’t plan for was the accountability. When you ask someone every morning what they did yesterday, what they’re doing today, and ask them to specify when their job will be ready for a quality check, there is nowhere to hide. You are accountable to the room.
We knew exactly how our day was going to go after these calls. Not just me but everyone. This allowed me to give the client a heads up if I needed to. A sense of calm falls over you, even when you know the day is going to be rocky. We were all prepared for whatever the day delivered.
Jobs that had been landing every afternoon started coming in by nine and ten in the morning. QC stopped waiting until six at night for work to arrive. The whole operation shifted. Ultimately I went from cleaning ladies at 11 PM, to a team running its own day. We stopped drowning.
The relationship that started in debt ended with us, the vendor, being accepted as part of the client’s team.
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I make it a habit to tell my teams: I would be foolish to think I am the only one in the room with the best answers, when I’m surrounded by specialists who do the work. My job is never to be the smartest person in the room. It is to create the conditions where the smartest people in the room can do their jobs at the highest level and raise the floor around us. Knock down the roadblocks. Get the right questions to the right people. Build the structure that creates visibility without making yourself the bottleneck. Trust people before they’ve fully earned it because they usually rise to the occasion, and they remember who gave them their shot.
When you do those things consistently, something happens that maybe you didn’t count on. The team starts to run. Not because you pushed them harder. Because you finally got out of their way.
That’s the force multiplication. It doesn’t come from working longer hours or demanding more or asserting your authority in every room. It comes from building a team that doesn’t need you to route the jobs, answer their emails, or sit in the middle of every decision. When they can handle the work without you at the center of it, you raise everyone’s floor and ceiling, and you’re free to do what actually requires your talent. Be a servant leader.
You don’t need to make yourself shine. Put your people in a position to do their best work, clear the path, set the standard, and knock down every roadblock that gets in their way, and they will make you shine. Not as a favor. As the natural return on a genuine investment. Something else happens that you don’t plan for. The team changes. They stop doing the job because they have to and start doing it because they want to. The unglamorous parts, the hard parts, the parts nobody volunteers for, they handle it all. Why? Because you showed up for them first. That’s a different kind of team and once you’ve been part of one you’ll never want to lead any other way.
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The man I shadowed had been burned enough times that holding on felt like the only safe option. I understood that. What I refused to do was make the same choice with my team. They hadn’t failed under my watch. I gave them what I would have wanted if I were in their shoes: a clean slate, someone to set the tone, and every roadblock knocked down so they could shine on their own accord.
The routing. The inbox. The chain of command. The standup. The cross-functional departments. Every single one of them received the same treatment, I got out of the way.
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Find a mirror. Any mirror. I mean that literally, not metaphorically. Take a moment. Look into your eyes, not at your face. There’s something real and honest that happens when you look into your own eyes. There’s nowhere to hide. When you’re ready, ask yourself two questions.
Am I the bottleneck, and do I even know it?
Am I afraid that if I get out of the way, I won’t be needed anymore?
Because if the answer to either of those is yes, or even maybe, that’s where the work starts. Not with your team. With you.
Get out of the way.