I hope the summer is treating you well and you haven't been battling a constant heatwave like we have had to in London!

Great News: This week, leaders’ letters made the top 30 leadership newsletters.
A big thank you for your continued support.

On to today, I wanted to share my personal collated report from H1 so you can learn from others and hopefully protect yourself from many blind spots that came to the surface.

So, let’s dive right in.

In H1 2026, I spoke to, coached and advised over 30 businesses and their leadership teams.

Different industries, very similar problems.

7 quiet patterns kept showing up; if these continue to go unchecked, they will quietly drag your H2 off course if they haven’t already.

I wanted to create a dedicated resource to address these 7 themes and offer proactive solutions for you.
There are 3 docs included today (i) an AI manifesto template, (ii) a 2x2 framework to complete and (iii) an exec worksheet to complete as a leadership team.

YOUR FREE FULL GUIDE

I have made the report available as a free download as a PDF, if you prefer to go through on Google Slides, you can here.

Please hit the share button and let your friends and colleagues know about the report or copy and paste - https://leadersletter.substack.com/p/212 into your favourite leadership group on iMessage or WhatsApp

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Are These Your Ugly Truths Too? I’m going to ask you to be honest with yourself;

• Do you have these issues? Or

• Are they going on undetected? Or

• Worse still, deliberately ignored?

If you want to go through more quickly today, below is a condensed version for execs and leaders who want signal and to address the noise!

1. AI: More Activity, Less Advantage

AI came up in every conversation. Not as an advantage, but as confusion.

• Tools everywhere, guardrails nowhere

• Quantity of content up, clarity and quality down

• Teams “offloading thinking” to AI and struggling to explain decisions or make decisions without AI support (often driven by leadership teams’ rush to AI)

Recommendation: Define where AI is allowed to help, where it is not, and who owns the outcomes. Create one living “AI manifesto” and central hub of approved use cases. Reward better work, not more work.

FYI: I have a template (shown below) I offer in my AI transformation programme; let me know if you’d like to purchase a self serve copy.

2. Marketing Ops: Numerous Ideas, Poor Execution

The issue was rarely “no ideas”. It was:

• No central knowledge base or source of truth

• No one connecting dots across teams - ops is hard when you haven’t and don’t put the effort in to help guide your teams

• Cross-functional work breaking at launch or even pre-launch
  

Recommendations: Pick one internal hub for knowledge and results. Assign a clear owner. Improve cross-functional updates with short, asynchronous video updates instead of more meetings.

If you have no marketing ops muscle, rent it in. I help and specialise here.

3. Crisis of Confidence: Nobody Knows What Works

Leaders could list what failed, but not what actually worked or why. That created:

• Spray-and-pray planning

• Nervous, vague C‑suite communication

• Low confidence in headcount, hiring, and delivery
  

Recommendations: Run a simple “What really worked?” review. Then ruthlessly narrow to five big bets for H2, each with an owner, 3–5 actions, and clear deadlines.

Remember, momentum beats perfection.

4. Work Slop: Content Without Impact

Auto-generated documents, summaries, and updates are now flooding systems and team members’ brains. It is something so many have overlooked and undervalued the ripples it’s sending through orgs.

• People can’t keep up - so they turn to more and more slop via AI

• Quality drops and continues to drop as there are no safety guards or guidelines

• Real communication suffers - opting for more comms, not focused comms

Recommendations: Reduce automatic creation and demand a human in the loop. Set expectations for what “good” looks like in updates: shorter, clearer, grounded in real numbers and decisions.

5. Learning & Development: Budget Spent, Capability Stagnates

L&D spend often flowed into conferences and generic courses, while real gaps stayed untouched.

• Little guidance on where to grow

• Minimal knowledge-sharing after training

• “AI coaching” giving generic or misleading advice

Recommendations: Make feedback specific and regular so no development conversation is a surprise. Co-design L&D plans with your leaders. Formalise guidelines on when AI is allowed to “coach” and where you need real, experienced humans.

6. Suspect Strategy: Tactics Wearing a Strategy Mask

Many leadership teams:

• Confuse tactics and KPIs with strategy - this is a real worry in 2026

• Have no clear pillars beyond revenue - this is actually worsening rather than improving, especially in PE businesses

• Treat strategy as either rigid principle or ever-changing whim
  

Recommendations: Ask each leader to describe the company strategy on one page. If you can’t align those pages, you don’t just have a strategy problem; you have a leadership problem. Do this exercise until you all co-create the 1-pager to drive your business forward.

Build in flex at the tactical level, not at the strategic intent level.

7. Founder Fit vs Fit Founder

If you are a founder and wonder if you are actually fit, its time for you to gather real feedback on what sort of job you are doing and how you should improve.

A recurring tension:

• Is this the right leadership team for the next 12–18 months?

• Do the founder’s rules and instincts still help, or now hinder?

• Is anyone able to say, “This doesn’t make sense”?

Recommendations: Score your leadership team on skills, EQ, impact, and cultural influence.

For founders: identify two “rules” you might need to change this quarter and why. Then take action and apply these!

The Blind Spots

Across all of this, four blind spots kept showing up:

1. You don’t actually know the real impact AI is having, and no one can speak to AI ROI

2. Cross-functional work has no clear owner and it’s clearly impacting results, but no one wants to call this out internally - big problem!

3. Hiring is being delegated to algorithms without clear criteria and this is having a real impact on confidence and ability to deliver on the targets set

4. Leadership low confidence is bleeding into rushed decisions and avoidable layoffs

Recommendation: These blind spots are not a surprise; they have been covered here on Leaders Letters. However, it is apparent there is so little actual leadership and wanting to put heads above the parapet or have conflict with their C-suite peers.

Please take these on; the only way performance improves is by leaders stepping up, not stepping out.

How To Prioritise What To Fix

Use a simple 2×2:

• High impact - High urgency: AI guardrails, cross-functional ownership, strategy clarity

• High impact - Lower urgency: Leadership team fit, L&D redesign

• Lower impact - High urgency: Work slop clean-up, comms hygiene
  Focus H2 on the top-right first and protect time in your calendar to do it properly.

I strongly recommend running this exercise as a leadership team in your next ELT/SLT/leadership meeting. If you are looking for an exec worksheet for you and your leadership team to complete, please request access here

Remember, You Can Go Deeper: For a deeper dive into the data, examples, and tools behind this email, read and download the full H1 2026 Leadership Coaching Report on Google Drive as a PDF or on Google Slides.

Thanks for reading and I trust you find this resource helpful within your business.

Danny Denhard - Lets Connect On LinkedIn or say hey by hitting reply

More resources for you by me:

• How to crack LinkedIn by a former LinkedIn insider

• Want a swipe file loaded with daily updates on business improvements and marketing campaigns with why they are so good and how to replicate? Then my free daily dose swipe file is for you

• If you’re company is struggling with PR here is how to win for the next year

The world of work feels harder than ever. We have had to live through probably the hardest business landscape in decades.

So congrats, you’ve made it this far!

Here’s a timeline of what we lived through:

• We have had to lead through the pandemic

• The evolving landscape of HR, DEI and world events

• The huge investment rounds our competitors raised

• The survival phase of 2022-2023

• The crypto/blockchain hype cycle

• The headcount resets of 2024

• 2025 - the hype year of AI

Today, in the AI era, where the pressures on reducing headcount are increasing daily, going all in on a technology you are still working out, some team members are against AI, other team members want to build a bot army based on the latest LinkedIn viral video, and then many brands are crying wolf on the doomsday power of their latest model.

Today’s market feels funky.

There are thousands of podcasts, a huge amount of LinkedIn fodder, and thousands of articles written about the impact of recent job losses. Very few have tackled it from an AI and HR perspective that helps leaders think and tackle this challenging situation differently.

Enter Dr Kelly Monahan and our recent conversation

I had a fantastic conversation with Dr Kelly Monahan on my twice-weekly podcast and wanted to share it with you, as it’s going to add a huge amount of value.

Kelly brings a rare mix of high-level data science and a grounded, human-centric approach to HR (formerly a leader at Upwork and Meta), exactly what VP-level and above leaders need to hear from right now to cut through the noise and hype of AI and headcount cuts.

» If you prefer audio, you can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or on any of the other major podcast players.

Would you like to go through slides rather than listen along?
Please enjoy here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1VqQbe9LcQyuImIUlNojidZar5XaX-ftaZfAE6cR3LkA/edit?usp=sharing

→ If you enjoyed this interview, please consider subscribing to my 2x weekly AI -10 minutes podcast delivered every Monday & Friday below

AI Moment Podcast

The AI Moment podcast is a bite sized podcast for busy executives and business leaders wanting to understand and thrive in the AI World by Danny Denhard & Jonathan Wagstaffe

Here are my top notes and takeaways from our conversation to help leaders tackle this current landscape.

The Big Picture: Strategy & Purpose

1. Challenge the “Wealth Maximisation” Default: For too long, business has been defined solely by shareholder profit. We need to use Gen AI as a forcing mechanism to ask: what is the new purpose of business in an era of democratized intelligence?.

2. The “Elevator vs. Skyscraper” Trap: Don’t just use AI to go from floor 1 to 5 faster (efficiency). Use it to reimagine the entire blueprint of your building (the “skyscraper opportunity”).

3. Prioritise Ruthlessly: Most teams are drowning in too many priorities. AI often lands at the bottom because it’s “too much”. Your job is to pick 3–5 core business goals and integrate AI into those specifically.

4. Avoid “Blind Adoption”: Moving at high speed without understanding human consequences is a recipe for disaster. Stop chasing “AI peer pressure” the feeling that you’re losing just because a competitor has a better marketing wrapper.

5. Reclaim Your Core: Don’t abandon your core business just to pivot into being an “AI-enabled company” for a valuation bump. If the backend is just a messy ChatGPT integration, you’re adding complexity, not value.

Leading Through the Agentic Era

6. Agentic AI Adds Complexity, Not Just Ease: Moving from traditional “1+1=2” automation to Agentic workflows introduces grey areas. In healthcare, for example, the same claim could now be processed in multiple ways, raising massive legal and fairness questions.

7. The Trust Paradox: Research shows the top 25% of AI power users are starting to trust AI more than their human colleagues. We must ensure AI is seen as a “moral machine,” not a substitute for human empathy.

8. Small Units Move Faster: Large organisations fail when they try to implement one giant, rigid AI strategy. Instead, set the high-level principles and let smaller functions design their own specific workflows.

9. Beware the “Human Connection” Hit: If we automate too much like retail checkouts, we risk diminishing the customer experience. Sometimes, a “human-first” lane is a powerful brand differentiator.

Redefining the Workforce & HR

10. Democratised Expertise is a Threat: AI can give someone in weeks the knowledge it took an expert 10 years to acquire. This is humbling and scary for high-tenure, high-paid leaders; we must manage this transition with dignity.

11. The Power Paradox: As leaders rise, their field of vision narrows, and they lose sight of how their “speedy” AI decisions impact the rank-and-file.

12. Stop “Playing Checkers”: Cutting 20% of your staff because of AI is a short-term move. Playing “chess” means understanding exactly what skills you are losing and how expensive it will be to buy them back in three years.

13. Distributed Teams Will Win: Remote teams have more “digital exhaust” - recorded meetings, transcripts, and documented workflows. This makes it significantly easier for AI to learn and augment their processes compared to in-person “hallway” knowledge.

14. Combat Information Hoarding: High “Political IQ” (PQ) players may try to keep their knowledge away from AI systems to remain indispensable. You must incentivise putting knowledge into the “collective”. Political members of the team will continue to play the game, preventing this from impacting your business in the era, which is critical for business leaders.

Governance & Human-in-the-Loop

15. Identify Your “Pilot” Moments: Just as planes still require human pilots for takeoff and landing, identify which parts of your business are too critical for safety or regulation to be left to autopilot.

16. The Hallucination Cost: AI fails 8–10% of the time. Do you have a governance framework to decide who is responsible when an agent makes a legal or financial error?.

17. HR Needs a Seat (and a Data Set): HR leaders need to move beyond “firefighting” human dysfunction and start measuring people as assets with specific “AI skills,” not just costs on a P&L.

Actionable Leadership Principles

18. The “Human Differentiator” Rule: Clearly define: “No matter how good AI gets, this specific part of our business will always be human”.

19. Dollar-for-Dollar Investment: For every dollar you spend on AI technology, spend a dollar on upskilling your people. Technology without the right human infrastructure is a future crisis in the making.

20. Measure “Revenue per Employee”: Instead of just looking at cost savings from layoffs, use revenue per employee to measure how AI is augmenting your team’s ability to scale.

21. The 45-Minute Fallacy: You cannot solve an existential business crisis in a 45-minute meeting between emails. True innovation requires closing the laptops and having a “timeout” for real dialogue.

22. Grieve the Losses: If you do have to downsize, don’t celebrate it as “efficiency”. Treat it as a loss, account for the human consequences, and help those people return to the market.

23. Focus on “New Scarcity”: As knowledge work becomes commoditised, identify what is becoming rare and valuable in your industry (e.g., ethical judgment, deep empathy) and double down there.

24. Personal Over Professional Development: Don’t just wait for your company to train you. Invest 30–60 minutes a day in your own “AI coaching” to ensure you don’t fall into the widening gap between managers and true leaders.

25. “Reclaim the Plot”: Avoid the “drift” where layoffs and automation become normalised just because everyone else is doing them. Stay focused on value creation and job creation, not just being a “$1 billion company with no employees”.

Here are my personal hidden gems from our conversation

1. The “Power Paradox” of AI Adoption

While many assume leaders are afraid of AI because they don’t understand it, Kelly identified a deeper issue called the Power Paradox. As leaders rise in power, their field of vision narrows, and they may lose sight of how their decisions impact others. This leads to “blind adoption,” where executives move at high speed without realising the human consequences of their technology choices.

2. The Risk of “AI Peer Pressure”

I highlighted the phenomenon I am witnessing, and I have dubbed AI Peer Pressure. This is when leaders feel forced to accelerate and take a “velocity route” simply because their peers appear to be further ahead.
This often results in companies abandoning their “core” business to chase an “AI-enabled” label for the sake of valuation, which can actually add more backend complexity and errors.

3. “Digital Exhaust” as a Competitive Advantage

In our chat over remote vs. in-person work, Kelly suggests that distributed and remote teams may actually win the AI race. Because remote work leaves behind more “digital exhaust” (recorded meetings, transcripts, and documented digital workflows), it is much faster for agentic AI to “catch up” with the team’s implicit knowledge.

4. The Threat to “Expertise Dignity”

AI doesn’t just threaten jobs; it threatens the status and identity of high-tenure experts. Kelly notes that it is incredibly humbling for someone who spent ten years in school to realise that a prompted AI can gain similar information in minutes. This creates a “preservation mode” where experts might hoard information to stay indispensable.

5. Playing “Checkers vs. Chess” with Headcount

Dr Monahan argues that many CHROs are currently playing “checkers” by making arbitrary 10–20% staff cuts to please boards. “Playing chess” would involve analysing the specific AI skills and human judgment being exited from the building and calculating how expensive it will be to re-acquire those assets in three years when the company realises they are still needed.

6. The “Pilot” vs. the “Checkout” Model

To decide what to keep human, Kelly uses two real-world analogies:

• The Pilot (Safety/Regulation): We have the tech to automate planes, but society demands a human for the most critical moments—takeoff and landing.

• The Checkout (Customer Experience): Some retailers are removing automated checkouts because they found customers spent more and were less frustrated when interacting with a human.

7. The $1-for-$1 Investment Rule

A striking “gem” is the discussion of the investment gap. Kelly mentions a “terrible stat” where millions go into technology while less than a dollar goes into the people using it. She advocates for a dollar-to-dollar match: for every dollar spent on AI infrastructure, a dollar should be spent on upskilling the people who have to manage it

Kelly’s new book, Reclaim the Plot, drops this fall, definitely one for the pre-order list if you want to navigate the delirium of this AI moment without losing your soul (or your core business).

Please consider purchasing Kelly’s new book and connecting with her on her site and across LinkedIn

• Personal site - https://drkellymonahan.com/

• Company site - https://www.beyondthedesk.com/

• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kelly-monahan-ph-d-18879413/

Have a great week, and thanks for reading today.

Danny Denhard

Dear leaders, leaders know all about the challenges being faced inside businesses, not just from the revenue squeeze, the pressures to hit targets in a bifurcated market, the battle for headcount and now the pressures from new tech.

Unfortunately, the world is going through a lot, and it seems AI has got in the middle of it, and it’s impacting many people’s day-to-day.

Today’s newsletter is here to make AI actionable for you and your business.

I know most people are bored hearing about AI and the pressures associated with AI, not just which tools to use and why, but the headcount pressures (fire, not hire), the re-investment challenges and how to ensure we do this right.

Help Is Here

I wanted to tackle this head-on, and remove the AI hype (well, overhype in most cases) and help leaders to tackle what’s really happening and how to be successful.

AI Hype Vs. Reality Presentation

I put together a slide deck and a walk-through video of what is really happening on the ground, what it means and how to get ahead even if you are just starting.

The Google Slides Deck

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zR3qKaYgC27leESC5UWmJdp7dAJidPgT2igfb1yy5wU/edit?usp=sharing

Here is the rundown and the most important actions to take:

AI Hype vs. Reality & Current State

Now Phase

• Operational and Transformational Shift: AI is not just a technical change but is equally about change management and operational excellence - this is where most have got it wrong so far

• The 3T’s Framework: Successful AI adoption is guided by: Time (saving energy), Trust (data privacy), and Truth (validating output).

• The 2V’s: The output must be Validated (data, info, source) and Verified (you are happy to put your name and brand to it).

• So Far - Low ROI: A survey of 5,000 knowledge workers found that 59% of AI use cases are basic task assistance, with only 2% considered advanced automation and only 15% likely to generate ROI for the business.

• Focus on Problems, Not Tools: The key struggle is that many companies focus on “What tool should we use?” instead of identifying core business problems that AI can solve, such as scaling analysis or answering customer issues.

Next Phase

• Adoption Phases: Most companies are stuck in Phase 1 (Ask & Answer), while the real value lies in Phase 3 (Agentic), where AI can autonomously research, negotiate, and complete transactions.
  The progression is Ask & Answer → Assistant → Agentic and many are stuck in the old way of thinking, which is Phase 2 - Assistant

• AEO is a New Marketing Channel: Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is critical, as businesses must adapt their marketing to how LLMs answer long-tail queries and recommend specific products with purchase links, like the example shown in ChatGPT.

The Next Phase: Agentic Future

• Shifting User Journeys: The customer journey is evolving from the traditional path to Assistant-Mediated (AI-recommended purchase) and finally Fully Agentic (AI researches, negotiates, and completes the checkout).

• Agentic Commerce ROI: Examples from Walmart and Amazon show that AI-assisted shopping sessions are driving significantly higher purchase values and conversion rates (e.g., Amazon’s Rufus assistant sessions converted at 3.5x the non-Rufus rate).

The Critical Action Items

My presentation outlines several actions for immediate implementation:

• Create a detailed problems list (not a tools list) for AI to address - the only way to win AI is to address problems and build from there.

• Run an AI Workshop to align departments on usage - I highly recommend external facilitators (yes, like me) vs an internal facilitator that will struggle to hold the room and follow up work required (away from a senior title)l

• Budget for experimentation, as there is “no one-size-fits-all tool.” - there will be requirements from EA’ to Finance to Growth to Product for dedicated tools

• Create the Company Context Doc immediately. This is a non-negotiable, living document detailing ICPs, style guides, and market positioning that every LLM will reference to prevent endless re-prompting cycles. This will help any of the major LLMs from Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT and Google Gemini (my favourite is still Gemini)

• Host an AI Hackathon to solve “mid-effort, mid-reward” problems - hosting hackathons, you really see the change in front of you with the right cross-functional setup.

• Appoint AI Captains and Champions to drive monthly adoption, roadmapping, and training.

• Rethink Distribution: Move away from “over-polished” content and trust internal experts (developers, PMs, ops leaders) to provide authentic, screen-recorded walkthroughs of how AI is solving problems. Quality over quantity is critically important

• Map Out Buyer Journeys: Add how the Assistant and Agentic phases will impact and optimise your buyer journeys. I have two exercises included for you to run through and complete

• Map out reskilling and upskilling: This isn’t something I explicitly call out, however, understanding how you and your team need reskilling and upskilling with and against AI is something so many are not doing and it will protect headcount fights

• Map Out AI Roles: Understand how AI will make team skills more blended and impact roles (e.g., the addition of a new AEO role and where AI will impact, say your Product and Marketing departments - this exercise is going to be essential)

I know this can feel a lot but I trust this helps you and your business. Hit reply if you would like to discuss any of this.

I am offering in-person and remote AI training so do get in touch or book a slot in with me to discuss.

Thanks for reading today and have a great week!

Danny Denhard

Today’s newsletter isn’t just a list of tips you can flick through, it’s me opening up battle scars, war wounds and sharing many personal experiences (as I say it includes my corporate blood, sweat and some tears) - I guarantee you at least half will help you in February alone, and they will guide improvement at the leadership level.

The hints, tips and enhancements are from my experiences, coaching and consulting, so if you are experiencing any and would like some support, happily hit reply or email me danny@dannydenhard.com.

» Work With Me: I am taking on projects - so if you are struggling or need 1-2-1 or 1-2-few training, happily let me know coach@dannydenhard.com

I have broken down the 65 tips into 3 categories:

(i) operations
(ii) executive leadership team (ELT) and
(iii) communications.

These are ideal for those in the C-Suite, in SLT and ELTs or ExCo’s, and if you are about to join these levels, this will be an operational way to onboard & hit the ground running & lead from the front.

Some of these have been shared previously on leaders’ letters, so some will be net new, and some will be bundled together to help you move forward and develop yourself and those around you.

Audio Version 🎧

If you prefer audio, here is NotebookLM’s take on the 65 tips

Visual Version 📁

Or PDF download (this is automated but very nicely done)

📝 Visual Guide To 65 Leadership Tips

10.4MB ∙ PDF file

Download

👋 15 slide version of the 65 leadership and leadership team tips

Download

The Actionable Leadership Advice

Operations 🔧

• Create a high operational skills level between the C-Suite, set the bar high - it will create the right standards, it will be noticed in the business, and when partnering externally, it will be accepted as the norm.

• Roll out a Decision doc (« free template) - highlight and identify what, how, why and when you made a decision as a leadership team. This is to be shared across the business

• Have a “Sit Down” each week as a leadership team - debrief is critical when the business is doing well or doing badly (like a stand up but more debrief and more relaxed - this brought one of the leadership teams I sat on closer than any other team building or bonding)

• Walk and talks always beat in office chats - remove the barriers of the office, and remove the status updates

• Remove status update requests (especially in 1-2-1s or department meetings) - async is best for status updates

• Rehearse QBRs - QBRs are more than just numbers and commentary; they often are a performance that needs practice and performing

• Reduce the number of unofficial apps and channels. The side iMessage, WhatsApp groups, the numerous Slack and Team channels you have back and forth on, especially those negative channels

• Build collective scar tissue - leadership teams often don’t build muscle memory together, help to build tolerance and muscle together, togetherness and team spirit are critical at the top

• MRS (meeting recovery syndrome) is real and can impact your day and week, reduce the meeting load and audit your calendar. Only by auditing and owning your time can you control MRS

• Run management performance updates - allow Q&A, be the exec sponsors, allow department leads to own this and back up where required. Be engaged!

• Team and department plans, not strategies - “strategies” remove the importance of the company strategy - words matter especially between tactics and strategy

• When goal setting and frameworks start to fail, look to centre everyone back to simple goals. Think big act small by when for deliberate focus and simplicity work best in my experience

• Run 1-2-1s and check-ins away from the office - office environments often create low-trust environments

• Complete the 9 box exercise (you choose if you involve HR) - this is a hard point for many to control; however, identifying and sharing your high standards sends a signal to your leadership peers - expect questions and push for headcount removal or reduction. You have to manage this. Headcount is always a tricky subject but an essential one, planning and scoring removes painful drawn out issues

• Have grievances with an executive colleague? Air it out in person first, not on chat apps or email - if you need to protect yourself, move to email over chat apps (document or record everything you need to)

• Embrace HR

  • Into the leadership team meetings

  • In regular updates and 1-2-1 style catch-ups with them

  • Reduce the fear of HR as a leadership team (and if you cannot - embrace the fear factor of HR, this is political advice and will need you to be use this trump card if and when required)

• Give interview practice internally - especially if you are not hiring, interview each other and allow those more junior to be the interviewer

• Create a cross-functional pairing will help you and your colleagues to collaborate and drive performance improvements. Review the pairing and match well; poor pairings lead to cross-functional issues or individual status games

• Coaching, training & reverse mentorship

  • Pilot reverse mentorship - connecting you with cross-functional colleagues who can provide updates, insights and connect you to the pulse of the company is invaluable

  • Actively coach and mentor management layers - you should be coaching each other and those layers below you. This doesn’t have to be weekly, but regular mentoring and coaching will set standards and indicate how important development is

  • Find an executive trainer away from the business who can facilitate and hold the room - this is a high-trust role that needs the right fit. Do not always trust the internal trainer you have to run important work streams, they are often inexperienced or have one model they use, not many.

• Bring in experts and specialists into ELTs - ensure there is an “exec translator” to help bring clarity (someone in the team who can explain between departments and department heads)

• Remove vanity metrics when reporting up into the C-Suite; this is always overlooked and causes confusion and distrust

• High Potentials & High Performers

  • Identify “high potential” and help to shape their development. Who you see in your team, others might see others

  • Identify “high performers” and connect with management and leadership levels - studies show high performers raise those up around them

• Identify internal influencers - they will be great at sharing messages and insights, and they also have an outsized influence on decision-making with their peers

• Phase re-onboarding back to the business - people operate in 3 stages,
  (i) what the company used to,
  (ii) what it is today and
  (iii) what it’s going to be - most operate in phase 1, you should be operating in phase 3 and pushing the business into phase 3 at every given moment

• Get around the campfire - eat together, the connection and trust increase. Lunches over dinners work too - do not wait for exec dinners and dates way in advance

• Always align on cross-functional requests - no alignment = no performance

• Ensure your number 2s have a strong relationship together and with your leadership peers

• Specific working relationships are closer than others - call these out and agree on them being normal

• Call out the boundaries you have individually & collectively created (inside and outside of work)

• Agree to onboard new leaders onto the leadership team - it must be able to understand your relationships (most important), your rhythm, your flow & your comms cadences. Often this is overlooked and we expect execs to hit the ground running when many leadership team dynamics take months to be understood

• Have a collective impact (like a hype file) Slack/Teams channel - share great feedback, great campaign and results - this can be company-wide or at the leadership level, remove the reply all congrats, this is a real fake status game

• Culture means many different things to different people. Some are happy to come in and do their job, others would like everything to change, and many want a perfect environment - your job as a leader is to drive performance and create a safe environment, allowing people to thrive where they can. Always manage expectations around culture

• Have members of the leadership team who are customer-obsessed & those who are competitor-obsessed (for their strengths and weaknesses) - but they have to meet in the middle, this has to be connected and cannot blindly copy competitors and ignore customer/consumer feedback

ELT 👩‍💼👨‍💼

• Share your executive lessons - this can be small or large. Sharing exec lessons helps you all learn and develop together

• Allow critical distance - allow others to step away and think through issues. Critical distance is the difference between good and bad decisions, especially when the stakes are high

• Optimise meetings, optimise agendas, feedback loops, communication styles etc. Do not settle for a style - they stagnate and frustrate many, and only come out when someone has had enough or blows their top at a peer

• Decide if you are a writing and document leadership team, a meeting team or something else. Writing is deliberate and challenges your thinking; without this rigorous approach, many will talk and talk and become a low-action organisation (if you can be a discussion-based business, you have to hold people accountable with docs and systems)

• Tiering happens in leadership in the C-Suite team, be prepared to be tiered, and if unhappy, address head-on - don’t let it bubble under the surface. This is one of the most unspoken areas (often, CMOs are tier 3, CRO’s, CPOs are often tier 2, CEOs, COOs, CFOs are tier 1)

• Set deadlines for feedback loops. Call it out and set reminders; this also ripples through the business, hold accountability

• Agree to disagree - disagreement is healthy as long as action is taken

• Leave the dispute in the board room, don’t take onto the floor and don’t burden this on your leadership peers or your own management team, this causes huge behavioural problems

• Disagree and commit only works if all members of the leadership can actually disagree and commit - this approach takes a long time to mature (Amazon’s famous working style barely works in most leadership teams)

• Remove I told you so and every variation of I told you so - and if it rears its ugly head, kill it as soon as it happens

• Allow AMAs to happen in public - if you are confident in the C-Suite AMAs drive performance and create a deeper level of connection and high trust. If you or your colleagues are not as good on your feet, expect this to be a work in progress and hard work to begin with. Be wary of the problematic employees attending

• Set colleagues up for success - ask pre-approved questions to set them up for success (especially in group environments)

• Declare what type of meeting you’re going to host (a brainstorm, a decision-making session, a performance review, problem-solving etc) - this is the only way teams can work through important meetings

• No agenda, no meeting rule at senior levels - and that goes with the CEO too

• Create management pods - pods that can support each other and rotate if you have a large ELT

• Have designated roles within the C-Suite - the approachable one, the direct one, the one who speaks in front of the business etc. The clearer the roles, the easier it is for your company to have the right people at leadership levels

• Reduce drinking cultures away from the C-Suite, but go for food or drinks together. Drinking can be a real benefit, but often leads to problems and causes distrust (many feel pressured to drink or cannot handle drink in an exec environment)

• Increase / decrease volume and presence of the leadership team in the business - too much volume = noise, lower volume = trust

• There will be a time you have to remove a C-Suite peer when their and or their department’s performance isn’t good enough. Have the criteria set - often this won’t be completely agreed upon, but then reduces any surprises

• Combat vs conflict - understand there is a difference and call it out once it becomes conflict

• Play to your strengths as executives and work out if your weakness needing fixing or can hire / invite others in to address these

• Have your executive roles - the ones who are approachable, the ones who are front-facing, and the others who are happy to be behind the scenes

• Embrace cultural differences - this improves how you work together and removes executive groupthink and biases

• Enable skip meetings - especially with number 2s with founders and CEOs. Increases bonds and trust levels throughout the business (also helps with success planning)

• Politics is going to be played. Either agree to play as a team or prepare to be played and manipulated - and even when it’s agreed, political players play the game (PQ = political intelligence is a critical part of work)

Communications 🗣️

• Agree on the leadership sub-culture you have and what is in and what is out of culture. Your leadership sub-culture leaks into the business and sets the tone and behaviours that others mimic and copy

• Kill jargon and your discipline buzzwords in important meetings - remove the need for translation and too much cognitive load

• Remove overcommunication - you are short on time and energy; if people are overcommunicating, it is taking time from everyone. The same goes for no communication, which is a choice many make; they are actively deciding not to communicate

• Remove long emails and long threads. Have a rule of x length & if hits it arrange a call or call for clarity

• Remove long docs - leverage tech with BLUF (bottom line upfront), use deliberate updates on the front page. Long docs are powerful providing there is a style and agreed working style with them

• Create exec work with me docs - this is a way to understand how to communicate, collaborate and work with each other at a deeper level

• Understand that everyone has their audience size they thrive with, whether that’s 1-2-1, 1-2-few, 1-2-group, 1-2-many - help colleagues to thrive and own where there are confident and comfortable

This can seem like a lot, and being deliberate in improving your leadership is hard work, but it is critical not just for your performance but also for those around you and those reporting into you.

Need Help?

I am always happy to discuss these or help with coaching, you or those around you. Happily get in touch → coach@dannydenhard.com

Have a great start to Feb, and hopefully I will land in your inbox again soon.

Danny Denhard

Dear leaders, you are invited to become a part of the AI movement.

As you may remember, my last leaders letter 207 was on the agentic web.

It’s the next phase of the web where we tell an automated bot to go and execute a task for us.

It could be:

• Buying a product for the best price

• Find and book me a professional to fix the crack in the wall

• Search for the best solution
  or

• It could be booking a multi-stop holiday for 6 people and a dog.

It’s a big step forward.

But Right Now

There are companies like Microsoft and Anthropic (which created the AI tool (technically a LLM) Claude) that are building for the agentic future.

But, what I have also come to realise, whilst hosting AI workshops and talking to many C-Suite execs, most leaders are just at the beginning of their journey, and there’s no place where they have found to help them.

It’s either the most distributive tech ever and thousands of updates or overly technical descriptions and tool demos (that break).

This doesn’t help busy executives! Even CTOs are struggling…

Most leaders want to understand how AI works, how to select and use the AI tools, which tools are the best, when to use AI and how to stay on top of releases and understand the most important movements.

I polled 100 C-Suite leaders (there was a lack of CTO’s) in July, only 26% were confident in AI and were part of leading AI. 55% felt behind

Enter The AI Moment

This has led to the AI moment podcast, I have joined forces (via an introduction from a friend of Leaders Letters, author and leader of genius box Andy Reid) with Jonathan Wagstaffe (who’s been in AI since before ChatGPT) to explain AI to executives in under 9-minute podcasts.

Each podcast tackles a single event in AI, and every episode is deliberately actionable, with absolutely no filler.

As I explained to a friend recently, it’s an executive summary of the most important AI moments.

We share the links to everything we discuss in the show notes so you can go explore.

I explain the podcast as; pick your own journey through AI, as the order of pods shouldn’t matter as much, the podcasts are as timeless as possible, and where they are more timely, we explain to tackle a big release and the “so what” of that release.

We designed the podcast deliberately to be enjoyed on the go, in the car, on the train or as a quick fix in between meetings. All bar one is under 9 minutes.

So if you are on your AI journey or worried about colleagues understanding it and you haven’t had a chance to dedicate the time to understand it and play with the tools, I have you covered.

Join me and Jonathan twice a week on your favourite player of choice - Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Substack, Amazon Music, Pocketcasts or on YouTube Podcasts

Here are a couple of podcasts you will want to start with:

AI Moment Podcast

AI Truth & Who Says What Truth Is

Thanks for listening to the AI Moment podcast today…

Listen now

a year ago · 1 like · AI Moment Podcast

AI Moment Podcast

Episode 4: AI Policies Versus Manifestos Podcast - What's Your AI Manifesto?

Listen now

a year ago · AI Moment Podcast

We have already answered a listener question, How to improve leadership with AI?, which comes out next week!

Want An AI Written Taster?

Prompts Explained

If you are struggling with going from search on Google to prompts on AI (LLMs), here are the key techniques we have shared in the podcast series so far:

• The Role - AI What role to play ("you are an expert lawyer")

• The Problem - Explain the problem you are experiencing (“I am experiencing this (x specific) issue with IP law”)

• The Context - ("We are a DTC brand in the pet space")

• Explain The Output (“explain this to me like I’m an intelligent 40+-year-old” and “I would like your output to be in 5 bullet points”)

• End prompts with "ask me clarifying questions if unclear" - with the new models you shouldn’t need to say this but always worth including

The Bonus Section

• Cross-prompt (copy and paste the same prompt) between the different AI tools (so you could do this on ChatGPT and on Claude and on Gemini) for varied perspectives. This is advice from AI researchers

• Voice Works Great & As It’s Now Natural Language - If you are better at speaking than typing, use voice input for faster interaction, especially for busy executives

The prompt would look like

“You are an expert lawyer, we are experiencing a competitor copying our product, we are a DTC pet brand in the UK, I would like help to understand the best next steps are. Explain the answer to me like an intelligent 40 year old. Explain my next steps in 5 bullet points. If you have any questions, please ask clarifying questions”

Obviously, I would always refer to your preferred lawyer; however, if you are trying to make a decision and are not well-versed, this will provide you with confidence and an opportunity to understand the options at hand.

You can always copy and paste and then edit into a situation or scenario you are going through.

Kickstart Your AI Use

I wanted to make this email as actionable to you, so here is the 5-day plan (listen below) I recommend to leaders to kickstart their AI leadership journey. Tools like ChatGPT and Claude are best for these:

AI Moment Podcast

Episode 2: Learn AI In 5 Days - 5 Day AI Plan Podcast

Listen now

a year ago · AI Moment Podcast

• Day 1: Ask "Help me understand X about Y" with a real business problem - I use Product pricing as the usual example I provide

• Day 2: Plan a team offsite or meeting - ask AI to help you plan a specific offsite and make it actionable

• Day 3: Brainstorm solutions - brainstorming is often a use case that many users rely on AI for

• Day 4: Request different approaches to existing challenges - this is the use case that unlocked AI for many at a recent AI workshop I have hosted

• Day 5: Create templates for repetitive tasks - templates and frameworks are usually created for you, and something most will never create themselves.

If you have any questions on the podcast or need help with AI, happily drop me an email directly at ai@dannydenhard.com

Have a great week!

Danny Denhard

Dear leaders, apologies, it has been a while.

Why? I needed the break. Content creation is harder than most think, especially high-quality content you will want to read and then choose to use the recommendations.

I have been deep in AI since December. I have been focusing on understanding AI, not just at a foundational level, but how it works, why it is disrupting industries, why it is removing headcount (hint it isn’t as much as the headlines are suggesting) and confusing executives to go all in OR go human+AI until they are confident in the narrative to the shareholders and industry at large.

The narratives are so important that it outweighs the HR firing and associated issues.

I have hosted AI workshops for brands, leadership teams and Marketing teams, which have been great, I love workshops, and helping team members to get closer to their (AI) AHA moment. It has been equally eye-opening - many professionals still believing it is “cheating”, “not trustworthy”, a “fad” and not something they fundamentally believe in.

Here’s an outline of what the workshop could look like for your business:

» If you or your business needs help with AI, just get in touch — ai@dannydenhard.com

The Agentic Web: Today I wanted to share a new technology shift that is about to start appearing, it is the agentic web (it will be agents (bots) working across the web to complete tasks we set them to complete and automating tasks the agents believe we should be doing to be more productive.

This executive briefing is designed to highlight the implications agentic web will have and why it will be critical that you are ahead of this next phase of AI.

Got questions, hit reply.

Want answers on the agentic web, hit reply. Or chat with me here

Agentic Web Executive Briefing

Prepared for: Board and C-Suite Level Executives

Prepared by: Danny Denhard, Coach, Consultant, Advisor

Date: 28/05/2025

Executive Summary

The agentic web is the next phase of the internet. We are about to embark on a shift from human-created web (from researching product or problem to transacting), to agents (bots) creating and organising content, completing tasks, connecting with brands and other agents and transacting on our behalf (somewhat autonomously)

Bottom Line Impact: Larger SAM, bigger revenue opportunity, large investments required. We have to be a first-level mover. By moving early, we can capture early adopter revenue and become the brand humans and agents trust, gain a first mover advantage, we need to be able to change internal thinking to influence our market position. In this current market, our competitive advantage will have to be leading the market in adopting new tech and creating great user (human and agent) experiences.

Critical Industry Shift Overview

Current Web To Agentic Web

Timeline: 18 Months - Starting Now. Expect ramp Q4 2025

Magnitude: High Impact - Industry-wide change required. From opening up bot access (most are now disallowed and protected via tools like Cloudflare), amending web protocols (APIs, etc) and technological shifts. Once the agentic web starts, it will not stop.

What's Happening:

• A permission-based web protocol is being enabled in the AI technology shift

• Microsoft are leading the charge of allowing agentic (bots) to complete tasks such as researching, downloading and transacting on websites/apps (or agent-to-agent (aka A2A). Microsoft will be using the Anthropic (Claude) MCP protocol and building on top of protocols to enable agentic transactions.

• Low to no adoption yet - this is new technology, but will accelerate with huge investments being made into AI and directed by Microsoft

• Microsoft appear to have aspirations of policing the agentic web similar to how Google does currently

Strategic Implications For Our Business:

Opportunities:

• Market expansion will grow over time, being long-term focused is vitally important. More productive humans will mean an increase in the market and growth of brand and tech opportunities.
  Being seen as the brand and go-to for core products in our space is more important than ever to ensure revenue growth, market expansion, and any moats we believe we have.

• Customers will follow the usual crossing the chasm cycle; innovators and early adopters will invest significant time and money into being first in the automation of tasks and building the best agents. The early majority may have to shift into early adopters, not to be left behind in productivity and cost savings. Customers will demand the brands they know, like and trust lead the market

• Short term:

  • Improve technology and tech stack,

  • Invest in hiring the right FTE, and external consultancies will increase our capabilities. Many team members will struggle to adapt, and could see team members leave

  • Ways to incorporate new AI planning and build out new revenue models. First mover advantage while competitors struggle with how the web is evolving is imperative

• Mid-term:

  • Create a high-trust brand, increase revenue and repeat customers (agent + human customers/users), early ROI in AI investments and automations

  • Expanding our scope, there will be an opportunity to scale, whether this is in supply chain, increase national/internal ordering and fulfilment and in some cases consider offering a fully translated global experience

• Long-term:

  • Increased SAM and SOM, market expansion, more productivity will likely mean more ordering and more effective Marketing

  • Revenue acceleration through 24/7 autonomous operations and enhanced customer experience

Threats:

• Short-Term:

  • Poor technical implications and low trust (negative press) will erode trust and impact transactions.

  • Not handling customer support effectively and quickly - agents will expect real-time error handling and real-time solutions - otherwise it will go to another site or agent to transact

  • Increase in hack attempts - hacks will be more sophisticated

  • Early overinvestment based on output on audit and strategic review

  • Huge increase in tech and infosec may be premature while market matures and catches up

  • Underinvestment will lead to poor outcomes and revenue loss

  • Right now, there is not a verification engine/vetting platform planned; this will need to be built, or verification will be controlled by a big tech player like Google, Apple or Microsoft

  • New human and agent behaviours will lead to an increase in issues, from credit card rejections, chargebacks (unwanted actions taken, wrong tasks set by human-to-agent), incorrect attribution, and new configurations required for CRM systems (agents to be connected to customer accounts and approved)

• Mid-Term:

  • Poor risk calculations and implementation will mean high fraud or claim backs from agents and humans unaware of transactions

  • Questions that need to be answered will be: who do you market to - human and agent or to agent to handle and filter?)

  • High discount use and race to lowest price with pressure from automated systems to reduce pricing, as it will be hyper effective in finding savings, the lowest price and the most effective ways to buy items or plan trips.

  • If we are slow to the market and slow down agent actions, we will loss sales, market share and it will impact how we are seen by LLMs guiding agents and customer satisfaction will drop quickly.

Required Response:

Short Term: Today - 6 months

• Full specification of the new tech architecture requirements, new budget will have to be assigned

• A full strategic review and realignment of priorities is to be completed post-tech audit and review. Expect many mid to high effort, mid to high impact tasks to be reassigned

• Full training is required to connect the business with the new seismic shift.

• Workforce change management - experienced leaders and those with transformation experience are critical to take the lead in market shifts - potential new hires are required to deal with project and scope change

• Marketing and Growth to build out new flows, including Marketing channels, CRM flows. Customer support will require new levels of training, and any AI implemented will need to be updated and prepared for new levels of Q&A and interactions

• Budget reforecast and reforecasting critical - there will be a need to bring forward spend and request additional investment to win

• Urgent need for new AI and agent governance frameworks and compliance protocols

• Regulatory uncertainty requires proactive engagement and adaptive strategies

Would you like this as a Google doc. Request below

Request Google Doc

Still not convinced? Here is the Microsoft CTO explaining the Agentic web and how they are planning for it

I have also been busy embracing Growth & Marketing through my coaching, I have created a few podcasts with smart people:

• How the CMO role has evolved and why being an executive is so challenging for most

• The secrets every Marketer needs to know about their content failures

• The future of SEO and why it is going to go hand in hand in AI

I cannot promise more regular content, but when there is something as important as this, I will definitely be hitting your inbox with something that will help you for months to come.

Enjoy the rest of the week

Danny Denhard

Dear leaders, you will have noticed I reference playing the game or what I call PQ (Political Intelligence) several times throughout the 205 leaders letters. 

PQ Is Everywhere

PQ comes up in meetings, always in mentoring sessions, it is always a talking point over coffee with industry peers and is frequently discussed when I am coaching, whether that's CEOs, founders, COOs, Marketing and Product leaders, we are all impacted. 

Almost everyone hates the fact you have to play the game and those who opt out often lose. 

There were 3 moments in my career where game-playing made a lasting impact 

1. In the earlier days of my career in my first week at a new role, a senior leader sent an email to the whole of the company, calling me out and criticising my slowness to react, I was gobsmacked and went straight into his office and addressed his approach.
   The second order effort as he took over the budget from me on a campaign and burnt a whole month’s spend in 6 hours… - let’s call that a draw

2. In the middle of my career - One of the founders of a company I worked at was trying to remove one of the other co-founders and demanded I support them in their efforts or I’d loss my role. It was a ruthless battle and took months to play through and there wasn’t a winner - another draw

3. I was told verbally I would be gaining a promotion and it was used against me by the person in the role and it rippled through the senior leadership team. The person who told me verbally backed off and suggested I was making a move which wasn’t the case - ultimately a win for the person suggesting I was being promoted, not so much for me and my former colleague.

Danny “Wise Up”

At a turning point over a decade ago, my former mentor told me it was time to wise up

“Being an executive is hard work, it is constant work, it takes smarts and getting used to conflicts, it is, however, executive work”. 

This is one of many reasons why I love coaching and consulting with companies, the chance to help and address imbalances is something that gives me energy. 

The Game Plays With Or Without You 

You can always decide to opt out but you have to remember the game keeps playing even when you declare you are out and often you declare it will be fodder. 

This week is a dedicated post on understanding the 8 simple steps to take to be more politically savvy and know the game(s) you are playing and not always leading to hating the other players.  

1. Start Small - start by creating an overview, map out how decisions are made and see who holds the official & unofficial power. Who influences how things get moving? Create a simple 5-step plan to understand how official power holders make decisions, what they are driven by and how you connect into the system. Then tackle unofficial power holders and influencers  

2. Build Strong C-Suite Relationships - Your peers can be your best friends or can feel like your biggest enemies. Your peers will semi-support you or criticise you (you have likely experienced this publically in leadership meetings or away from your ears behind your back, on Slack and in 1-2-1s), build these relationships and help your team(s) leads to do the same.
   A big hint; the CFO or FD is often the person who ultimately says yes or no, so definitely make a real effort to build a relationship with them  

3. Understand The Leadership Landscape - understand who makes the decisions, who influences them (is it the COO, CFO, CPO, HR etc), what drives their choices and decisions, what causes celebration (targets hit, staying within budget, becoming internally or externally famous etc) and what creates fear and chaos in the business. By understanding the dynamics of the C-Suite and the real role of HR, “get” the leadership landscape and you can start to positively influence it 

4. Understand What Wins The Internal Battles - is it passion? Is it departmental performance? Is it who is willing to step up? Who battles hardest? Who doesn’t step back from the battle? Who battles the smartest? Or is it who’s trusted by the CEO/founder? Get under the hood and work this out to play well with others and sway battles towards success   

5. Create Communication Flow - On many C-Suites and leadership teams it can feel disorganised, the most organised or the most operationally savvy tend to lead the communication flow and actions for others. If you can be savvy and improve communications and the actions of others it’s an easy way and a long-term victory 

6. Always Connect To The MIM & Company Goals - you have to demonstrate whether you are a Product leader, Marketing leader or Tech leader how the work you are working on ladders up into the company goals and the MIM (the most important metric). You must do this to show you are a driver of success and you will struggle to have considerable influence or have any sway with your peers or on the company. If you are struggling to make an impact consider how you collaborate to improve these goals or how you make that big step change into showing your department is the force in your business. 

7. Money Follows Attention, Then Performance - if you are not grabbing the right attention, investment into your budget will not follow. When you are asking for more budget without the right attention budgets won’t be unlocked, performance is the carrot you have to dangle, however, often attention is the big unbreakable stick that wins first and wins out budget battles. Be better at grabbing the right attention and buy-in from colleagues and ensuring performance is there to back it up. 

8. Remember: Large Teams + “Poor Performance" = Distrust & Becomes An Easy Target - When you are seen to have a large team (this is especially true for Marketing leaders) you are often told you have a large team/department and then an easy target while peers question where the performance is? By connecting back to the goals, and celebrating cross-functional wins you are building more trust and becoming less of a target. Product leaders and Marketing leaders are often reminded of their cost centres and will be first when performance drops or slows to cut headcount and prove their value. 

I have spoken to headteachers/principals, soldiers, professional athletes, entrepreneurs and successful company leaders and although all rank and file roles, they all agree you have to play the game to be more successful…

There are no short-term hacks, and no TLDR for being more politically savvy but being more informed and understanding who is playing, when and how will set you up for more success and often will enable you to identify how your peers and your team members often will create a target on your back and go for said target. 

Will you start playing the game now? Or will you play more effectively? 

Thanks and have a good weekend, 

Danny Denhard 

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Dear leaders, you may have noticed I have a small yet positive obsession with understanding how other companies operate, how they rethink issues, and how they problem-solve. 

Many customers and coaching clients mention this when I offer to share alternative methods.

So, here are some of my favourite ways for other companies to tackle problems and rethink issues, with hyperlinks included to explain more. 
» Happily hit reply with your favourite

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24 Working Styles & Problem-Solving Techniques To Be Inspired By

1. Amazon’s Paper Cut Teams - teams designed to fix smaller issues so they aren’t overlooked. When you have a Growth team focused on Product features this is a critical team to ensure you sweep up those annoying Product issues.  

2. Amazon’s Memo Culture - writing a six-page memo in their S-Team (exec team meetings), it is narrative-driven, everyone reads before the meeting commences and can challenge where you are and how you propose to move forward with purpose away from a presenter-led PowerPoint. 

3. Amazon’s Internal Press Release - having ran Product teams and business lines one of the biggest issues is allowing the company to understand product rollouts and prepare everyone to the same level of understanding. Amazon’s internal press release is smart and easy to implement. I strongly recommend if your Product Managers just tells the company something live, this is the approach to make them more effective in comms.

4. 37Signals - Their only method of communication is through their own software basecamp and ensuring threaded discussions are in written format. Basecamp and other brands under the umbrella have few meetings and being deliberate in written communications ensures it is well-thought-through for the writer and the audience.  

5. 37Signals - Guide to writing and principles are all shared, their guide to making decisions is straightforward for all employees and open to new employees. I highly recommend introducing a similar guide internally. I am a firm believer that writing will be the critical form of comms for the next decade

6. Pixar Plussing - Pixar is in a business where everything has to be great for everyone (from Grandparents, Parents and kids) they have a working style called Plussing where they accept critiques from anyone and discuss how to improve the movie.

7. Disney Imagineering - Imagineers is the creative engine from a small group that Walt Disney implemented towards the start of Disney, to make the impossible possible. 

8. CEO Reverse Mentorship - I first heard of the successful use of reverse mentorship from a friend who was at a large sports brand and was remotely reverse-mentoring her CEO. It gives the CEO inside access to the company with a good match and enables priceless exposure to the CEO for the mentee.
   One trick I recommend is having it over coffee (in person does have some advantages) and lasting 30-45 minutes. The reverse mentor must be strong and speak up well. 

9. My Decision Doc - My favourite tool to recommend and roll out with clients is a company-wide decision document that acts as the canonical document to help understand decisions, when, why and how they were made. Easy to create, roll out and keep updated.

10. Stripe’s Former COO Claire Hughes Johnson Offsite Planning - Claire Hughes Johnson’s book is brilliant, not just for COOs and CEOs but a book to help organise and connect many teams. Claire’s approach to offsites is brilliant, I particularly like her approach to “forming, storming, norming, and performing:.  

11. Shopify Bursts - a deep and immersive way to work together. Shopify bursts help the whole company get closer together by redesigning outcomes   

12. YouTube’s $100 Voting -  This is something I have heard a few companies use, including Reid Hoffman (the LinkedIn founder), offering each person connected to voting for important decisions to metaphorically use when voting/investing on what's the most important action or choice. A good question to pose to fellow senior leaders would be, where would you invest your $100 in big projects?

13. Think BIG, act small by when framework - This framework is something else I recommend when company-wide goals and frameworks like OKRs struggle. This framework is used by many businesses, however, it has not got the same widespread notoriety. Think (1) the 3-5 big company wide goals, the 3-5 tactical projects you are going to do and by when you are going to do them by.
    » Simple wins over complicated every single time!

14. Pre-Mortems - A famous approach shared in HBR and used in well-known fintech brands (including Stripe) use to plan and review their upcoming projects as if they failed so they can ensure they improve performance. I suggest a BAR (before action review which is borrowed from the military) to do the same but take learnings from previous missions and projects

15. Pinterest’s OKR Pyramid - OKRs are often a real mess and a full-time job to manage as a management or exec team Pinterest uses quant and qual OKRs and has a methodology to manage and keep on top of OKRs and KRs.
    A good take on a difficult working style

16. Coda’s Two-Way Write-Ups - Holding team members accountable and having structure is key to Coda’s way of working. Their two-way write-ups force people to show they have read updates and structure feedback with automation connecting their actions.
    A very smart way of approaching a problem we all face, accountability and ownership.  

17. Emmitt Shear (Twitch Co-Founder) 1-2-1s - 1-2-1’s either work well or don’t, more often don’t, Emmett has a system he has shared that helps frame 1-2-1’s FYI, DO X DO YOU APPROVE, I'M THINKING THROUGH A, B, C. When many company leads struggle with keeping up and connecting with their leadership, this 1-2-1 approach is something that can be copied and replicated from large to small businesses 

18. Mikel Arteta’s (Arsenal) Principles - If you are a football or soccer fan Mikel’s name should mean something, Mikel Arteta is the Arsenal manager and is highly regarded as a deep tactical manager rethinking an old rigid system and someone who goes over and above to prepare his players. Mikel has many principles that guide the club from a song he found and co-selected with fans and players to principles he shares at every game. 3x Principles from a recent game was recently leaked in the British press

19. Twilio Founder’s People Values Not Product Values - Communicating your people’s values and being clear about people's values or your product values. Often leadership teams pick people's values, communicate them and don’t make them stick, making your people's values stick and ensuring everyone can recite them is imperative. Borrow this if you’re struggling to land new agreed-upon values (like Twilio found out the hard way) 

20. Use Of Slogans - Lulu Cheng Meservey is a highly trusted PR leader, operating at brands like Activision Blizzard, and Substack and is now a board member at Stripe. Lulu has some great ideas to rethink PR including use of Slogans and how important slogans are internally and externally. Slogans can be seen as cringey if half-hearted but ensuring you provide a slogan that people get behind and won’t forget is one of the best internal and external levers to pull. Lulu went on a podcast appearance spree about a year ago and well worth listening to many

21. Shareholder Letters As Internal Compass Letters - Stripe, Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway all write brilliant annual shareholder letters, these in fact help shape the future of the business and act as an internal compass. Bob Iger the Disney CEO also suggests you should manage your company by press release (committing to your words by actioning what you say you will). Something I recommend is writing a letter guiding the strategy for your business. All the decks and emails will blend together unless you have one space you save and people know to return to. Make the internal letter count. 

22. Exec Briefing Document - This is another approach I developed more recently, a two-page document created by heads of and department leads to brief the exec team of important work projects, updates and things to be aware of. This works best in companies that have hierarchical approach and those who are divisional.
    This approach isn’t solely for the exec team but is at a high level to reduce noise and increase confidence. I recommend this approach where middle management struggles to show value or is struggling to put across what their teams are doing and increase trust in leadership teams. This also works cross-functionally as there will be no hiding places and clearly reminds everyone of the owner of the project and the deliverables. 

23. Growth Requirement Doc - A template I share when I work with companies is a new Growth requirement document (GRD), I tweak slightly with each company to ensure it fits or in some cases deliberately conflicts with how it’s always been done. Think of a growth requirement doc as a way to plan work, align teams and encourage connection around core upcoming product features and builds 

24. Power Half Hours - Lastly, one of my favourite ways of addressing issues and problems internally, especially between people and often managers and their team members is power half hours, where you act as the intermediary and ask the questions that aren’t being asked or won’t be and align the team or cross-functional teams. The person running power half-hours has to have high trust with both sides and have the respect to understand management is hard. 

Do you have any methods I should know about? Please hit reply and let me know if you have any that would help others and I’ll happily share with the other Leaders.

With everything happening in the political space, this week has to focus around your leadership and leading through change here.

Have a good week and I’ll land in your inbox next week.

Thanks,

Danny Denhard

PS — If there are any specific topics you would like me to cover or questions you would like me to answer please hit reply email me directly leaders@dannydenhard.com

Dear leaders, every five or so years what a leader looks and acts changes.
We have a set image and then it is rewritten by a few factors - (i) wider cultural shifts, (ii) accepted working styles, (iii) big company performances and (iv) tech changes.  

2020 — 2024 was a unique phase for all businesses, we have seen a big swing through, from high EQ to policing work IQ — making mass layoffs, returning to the office mandates and becoming more financially efficient, which has been rewarded and made the latest vision of what a leader is.

Today’s “Accepted” Leadership Style  

For around a decade, we have followed the model that has led many to believe that a values-based leader is the leader we must emulate. 

The other attributes that we have all aspired to follow are:  

• Leverage High Work IQ - when the company needs to know they have a smart and switched-on leader 

• Modern-day EQ - not just showing emotional empathy but knowing when to blend in tough love 

• Applying PQ - a way to switch up the leadership and management teams, knowing how to rally the troops, address the wrong metrics and update cadence within the business. Adding in the ability to nail inspirational talks when performance drops, adapting to the big shifts in the market and reconnecting cross-functional teams and leaders. 

Modern-day leadership does not stop and there is a move to bring back this 247 always-on leadership style from over a decade ago.

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Enter In The New Leadership Manual? Founder Mode?

Last week I referred back to founder mode being explained by Airbnb CEO to Professor Scott Galloway. It was light-hearted, guided but direct and shows how it has been thought through. 

Until…

Is Founder Mode Broken? Unfortunately, another video was released at a conference interview. It is an uncomfortable watch, a deeper look inside Brian Chesky's inner workings of Airbnb and the way he shaped Airbnb with his core leadership team.

I am going to call it out, he is in a unique position, he is the co-founder, and the CEO and the system appears to be more for his system and operates the way that works for him. 

How Founder Mode Was Explained: 

“founder mode at its core though is about the single principle to be in the details great leadership is presence not absence so to go back to my lesson it is not good for you to hire great people and trust them to do their job how do you know that they're doing a good job if you're not in the details”

Or here’s a quick video explainer

Brian’s System — Not The Company's System 

Something clear, this system is Brian’s system and it’s turned into the company system (includes the one product roadmap, everyone working on the one roadmap at the same time under one leadership), this system will not work in the majority of businesses and even new startups looking to emulate it.

Below I break down the risks and benefits of Brian Chesky’s operating principles and offer ways you can embrace his version of founders mode and, in other words, see them as real risks to your organisation. 

» FWIW Founder mode could be adopted and adapted by many different companies and organisational types it doesn’t always need a founder in play to embrace founder top-down decision mode.

Risks ⚠️

• Too Many Directs - despite what Jensen Huang (the NVIDIA CEO) suggested & now Brian, it is not normal and sustainable for most CEOs to have too many direct reports and going over 12 is a challenge, this is the same at Airbnb. Yes, as a leader you want to be connected but being across so many people directs or “directs of directs” means you never stop and the buck likely is always escalated up to you. 

• Orgs Shifts = Staff Turnover - You cannot set up and shift organisations quickly, it can take well over a year to repurpose the current set-up. You will lose good people along the shift  

• HR Nightmares - All operating system has issues, but this has many big nightmares baked in. Moving toward founder mode becomes an HR nightmare, for team members, for managers, for the HR department and places crosshairs on everyone. A shift to cross-functional teams is a huge change let alone a complete reshaping. Be fully aware that a huge shift like this will be a nightmare from day 0 of the proposed change  

• Long Reporting Line Pains - Shifting reporting lines is a messy business - moving a department like Design (which is Brian’s fundamental skill and love) out of Product, for the example used, will take 6 months and much alignment and many will look to leave or push for a political reshuffle within their orgs. The ripple effects of reorgs and re-shifting departments into a standalone department with new reporting lines take 2-3 years to fully work out. If you hire a new CPO or CGO the step change can be huge, let alone moving two execs and realigning teams and the exec team. 

• Thinkers & Deliverers Doing Both - in most businesses there is a requirement to split out those who operate at the 10000ft view and those on the ground to deliver. The trick is to have the right blend and allow everyone to understand the feet they operating in and between. Yes, those with the 10000ft view should help with the doing when required and understanding the heartbeat of their departments, however, there is a need to be more disconnected and be able to step in when needed and know when you should step out and step up again.  

• (Lack Of) Trust For Managers - In this system, employees know their manager will ultimately have to run everything up the chain and this puts managers in awkward positions. High PQ employees will exploit this time and time again. Often making managers vulnerable. Managers need some space and time in this system it is likely you will be flattening out organisations but also creating unhealthy tension between department leads, their peers and their team members 

• Direct With My Directs Direct Reports - Knowing your team and their directs is a must, (I highly recommend regular skips and leadership teams interacting with level below management as frequently as possible) knowing what they are working on and how they are operating is often a competitive advantage. By having so many meetings and updates you are requiring a whole new set of updates and interactions and alignment is critical without an elite operational practice these will spiral. On many occasions senior leaders will allow their team heads more space and time than others, there is a chance here that everyone has to be treated the same and removes the personal leadership that is vital to giving everyone a fair chance for success

• Big Losses In Bad Times - You may struggle to see that the company loses when the CEO goes on annual leave, becomes ill or something major happens to create distance. The company is well looked after/controlled = great but if controlling without contingencies and clear backup plans the company will struggle greatly.
  The CEO loses whenever a link in comms breaks, a negative event happens in the chain of directs or your health declines and without a number 2 and 3 and a way of connecting these across everything the company will struggle to adapt. In smaller businesses or underperforming businesses this is common, however, the same applies and is well worth considering as a leader

• The Best Talent Won’t Want To Join - A major red flag for great talent is the level of management and the chance to get on and do great work, in this setup there will be many great employees who will struggle and feel micro/overmanaged and will leave the business. Your business doesn’t have to be for every employee but employees have to be set up for success and to acquire great talent you have to understand how you are ever going to be successful

• Steve Jobs Was A Brilliant Mind But A Complete A-Hole - Not everyone can be Steve Jobs (Job’s is a clear inspiration for Brian - he mentions Jobs and Apple numerous times) and it wouldn’t suit the majority of modern-day work.
  Apple and Apple’s setup was mentioned many times - we can all be inspired, but replicating old ways of working at different times will lead to issues  

Benefits ✅

• Being Closer To Performance - “CEO reviews” can be something you leverage and ensure you are closer to the performance and understand motivations and decisions. Good communication can reduce the amount of reviews that are needed and the large rounds of reviews

• Better Org Design - Something Brian touches upon is org design and many managers hiring more and more staff to complete work in their teams versus working cross-functionally or functional org. There is a trend to hire more and analyse what you need and how to get the most from an operating model. Better org design and cross-functional leadership will reduce empire-building and managers looking to solve problems with more people (often bringing more ways of working and problems than actually solving and innovating on said issues) Brian explains divisional vs functional org design & micro-manager vs founder mode in this Decode Podcast far better than in previous podcasts.

• Clear Decision Making - In top-down organisations, most employees know big decisions will be top-down and their recommendations will be heard but ultimately the buck stops with the leadership team to say yay or nay.
  High-performing companies often have D-teams (decision team) who lead and then drive the teams to execute.

• Better Comms - Being on exec teams and leadership teams you develop your own language, as does your teams, in this set-up the language should be more aligned and less time spent on translating terms and phrases. Culture is often shaped by how communications flow through businesses and the reduction of miscommunication is vitally important  

• Increase Quality Density - Fewer steps to management enable the best ideas to be discussed and high-quality staff members will have the chance to bypass the “you’re only as good as your manager game” that plays out in many larger orgs.  Increased talent density is proven to work, and improved and deliberate comms also improve businesses, if you can leverage this, definitely do so

• Better External Storytelling - Moving to bigger external stories to tell and fewer Product feature launches is how Airbnb sells its release process. This can work with great Product Marketing and good PR, the issue is most brands need more stories to tell their industry to gain cut-through and become an essential tool. If you look to shift to 2 releases per year, be mindful that you will need to package up tremendously well 

• Macro Vs Micro - Having highly hands-on and functional level Department leads removes the disconnect (but also ramps up micro-management) - this potentially leads to richer campaigns (it does however make every decision a discussion)

• Better Interview Processes - I am on the fence if this is a benefit or a big risk but interviewing and senior hires going through and up to Brian and CEOs is a surefire way to vet “great candidates”. The risk is time, being held up by schedules and if you need a specific profile and the CEO disagrees it will instantly prevent that hire. Having over 20 direct reports and hiring in the growth stage is brutal, let alone at the scale and size Airbnb operates.

There are many benefits to operating in founder mode, but there are just as many risks, if not more in today’s work world.

If you are looking to change the way you operate you could adopt a number of these operating principles and have some positive change, but please remember small shifts all compound without great leadership and everyone being brought into the same journey, especially at the executive level and their departmental leads.

Founder mode is not for everyone and it likely wouldn’t be for me to excel in but would it be a year in change for your business?

Have a great week!

Danny Denhard

Connect with me on LinkedIn

If you are struggling to make cross-functional work…work here is my breakdown.

Dear leaders, how do you feel your company is performing at this phase of the year? 

Do you sense the company culture shifting from under your feet?

Disconnected OR Disengaged Leadership? 

Often as a leader, you are intentionally disconnected from the day-to-day, sometimes even week-to-week. The benefit headspace, the risk if the team around you do not provide great updates you will be 10 to 14 days behind performance movements and that causes real issues. 

As a leader, you have to understand how connected you are or make a conscious decision of how removed you want to be. There is no right or wrong answer, my guide to most is you should be no more than 3 days behind performance.  

A leader is always judged on how engaged or disengaged they are.

Founder Mode Or Focus Mode? 

Despite the recent narrative around ‘founder mode’, (below is a good video explaining what founder mode is and is not from Airbnb CEO & co-founder Brian Chesky) we have to be connected to what is happening and the why behind it.
Our ultimate role as a business leader is to know when to (i) step up, (ii) step in or (iii)step out of the running of the business and our departments. 

Expected: If you are deliberately focusing on stepping out and allowing your management team around you to own these areas this is what you are expected to do and likely mimicking your former bosses.

Unexpected: what is not said often enough is; once your focus is too far away from the general flow of the business, you have to decide how you re-address the balance.

If you aspire to be an effective execuitve or in the future a long-term CEO knowing when to take this action and then apply muscle memory is frequently the difference between good and great executives. 

Time To Step Up OR Step In

There are ways that you can step up as a leader and gain a better grip on company performance and company culture. 

Often it’s about working smarter and harder (sorry there are rarely shortcuts with performance and culture) there is a BUT, there are several smart ways to step up or step in to help re-address issues within your business. 

Being intentional and encouraging deliberate actions and behaviours is what good leadership is.

Formalise Your Approach - Make It A Ritual, Not Routine!

A quarterly check-in and agreement on formalised action plans will help you and your management teams to be more empowered to make better decisions.

Making something a collective ritual is creating a shared experience you look forward, versus, becoming routine which is seen as boring and “doing it again”. Rituals are experiences we long for within the business world, we will do anything to get out of another routine x or y.

As executives, we are often overly busy and time is stolen from us, however, this methodical approach creates a tactical and actionable plan to understand patterns, understand signal over noise and purposefully improve performance.
FYI: Culture often takes longer to address than performance optimisations.  

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Ways To Improve Your Read Of The Business 

Short Term

These are activities you can take in the short term, roll out for mid to long-term success and are low effort x low cost. There are time investments you will have to make and decide what to remove from your current commitments and workload.

1. MIM - the most important metric updates and ownership notes from colleagues and discipline owners - big hint: go a level deeper with the layering up metrics. Many C-Suites are missing the laddering and when performance drops it takes 5 to 10 people out of their day-to-day to uncover these. If required create a checklist that the teams go through and you can review it together. 
   You’d be surprised how this connects teams and leadership, and rebuilds trust for both sides.

2. Cross-functional Check-Ins - I hate dotted lines as a concept, it is confusing and goals often conflict with that said, I do believe there should be more accountability and check-ins cross-functionally. Not as formal as reporting lines but the ability to connect managers and leaders together and remove some of the politics that can be at play and gain valuable insights and feedback. This can be done asynchronously or in real-time. 

3. Reverse Mentoring - a powerful way to understand the business and sections of the business are connecting to up-and-comers or internal influencers to help you understand the business 

4. Work Alongside The Specialist Managers Inside Your Business - specialist managers rarely exist they went out of fashion in mass layoffs however you will have great dedicated managers who will understand performance and motivations far better than someone who has too many direct reports and struggles with check-ins

5. In All-hands Meetings Step Back & Observe How The Teams Behave - with what signals employees are putting out and their reactions to what is being said. If you can read body language and not hosting this is a critical part of understanding culture and how the company employees feel about leadership and the direction of the company  

6. Meet The Official Number 2s - despite the inbuilt competitive nature of number twos, you will find out a lot more information and more in-depth information from formal number twos while building rapport with future executives.
   I personally believe more time should be spent cross-functionally with different management heads and less on update meetings. 

7. Create Fortnightly Performer Awards - I personally don’t enjoy being recognised with awards at bigger awards in front of the whole business, however, I know many love the recognition from their peers and an opportunity to be praised publicly. This is an affordable way to gather feedback and create healthy competition.  
   Remember it is about finding the right blend and for many managers it is knowing what stage is their team members stage.

8. Set Alerts For Your Company - this can be overwhelming if you are at a well-known or buzzy brand but often it will pull in interesting takes and forum discussions you wouldn’t be privy to without a tool or suite of tools. This will be something your Marketing team should have set up. Sentiment analysis might also help here (there are extra costs with detailed alerts but there are ways to leverage AI and a new alternative approach to classifying information and the language used will be critical for adapting messaging)

9. Introduce Fika - A Swedish way to connect over coffee and a cake/pastry or snack, this is usually a great way to connect and have open conversations. Go deeper with fika and encourage how the company can fund this, especially with how many team members struggle in hybrid settings

10. Small Reward System - many employees prefer a well done, a thank you (this is often called Trivialization Effect in behavioural economics) or a small meaningful gift over a costly present. Consider how you integrate small rewards for good behaviours and how team members can reward colleagues with thank you’s that total up to smaller rewards. Think Coffee’s, simple collective lunches and things that colleagues can enjoy together.

Mid Term

These are activities you can take in the mid-term with smaller investment needed, these recommendations will impact your mid to long-term success and are mid effort x higher reward activities. Some of these recommendations will require operational shifts.
There are time investments you will have to make and decide what to remove from your current commitments and workload.

1. Skip Meetings - skip meetings are designed to keep up to date with information flow and how your teams are performing, I believe skips are incredibly important and act as a leveller if you have game-playing managers or specialist department heads who struggle to communicate or to connect to some of their team members. 

2. Cross-functional Pods Aka SWAT Teams - I have rolled this approach out three times across three different organisations, it is specialists working together on core projects or problems. It will create buzz and better measurable work while gaining more feedback. If there is a way to develop SWAT teams in your business I’d highly recommend looking at this specialist approach as this can galvanise change and growth. (Here is my deck for SWAT teams and how to think about them more deeply)

3. Review Manager’s Performance - review the (manager) reviews is a quick and easy way to enable you to understand how managers are actually performing (away from performance numbers and official goals set) and if they are issue creators or problem solvers. If they are issue creators you will need to address this and introduce a step in the plan.

4. Gain Insights From Industry Experts - this should be seen as an investment - speaking to industry experts to discuss what they see in your industry, while understanding shifts within your market, understanding the performance of competitors and taking in recommendations to progress forward.

5. CSAT Scores (Or Ratings) - something that has been used for years but is a real indicator of performance done right is customer satisfaction scores. You can take alternative measures of CSAT and create your own guide from a tweaked version of feedback baked into your product or asking for more detailed feedback in 1-2-1 user interviews or testing sessions.  

6. Quarterly Business Reviews With “Tier 2” Of Management - QBRs are great ways to look at previous performance but struggle with looking ahead and re-reviewing the vital areas of performance. Revisit this with the heads of departments and their experts to understand performance and create owners and co-owners of QBR actions and department plan tweaks based on these discussions.

7. Regular Executive Coffee Drop-ins With HR - create regular touch points with the HR department and HR partners to understand official requests, feedback and any behaviours that are concerning. Ensure these are away from official leadership meetings to build a better relationship. Many HR teams will be reactive to Leadership teams and often senior HR managers will struggle to get their voice heard and do not want to be the bad news team, by proactively engaging with HR you create strong bonds of trust.

8. Introduce Exiting NPS Scores - often it is too late to gather detailed feedback most managers dislike feedback from staff who have chosen to leave them but an exit score will help you understand how they have changed over time especially if you keep a matrix of your team members. I did this with leadership teams and it is enlightening when key people leave in good or ‘bad’ times. 

9. Review Glassdoor Reviews - some executive teams obsess about their internal scores and the bad reviews. The neutral reviews are also indicators of what’s happening or perceived to be happening and often it is something you can address or reduce down. Be mindful, most Glassdoor reviews will be on the negative end of the scale and score, consider this like having a bad meal and telling anyone who will listen, versus keeping a place a secret and not telling many people. Glassdoor can be doom and gloom so potentially look to review monthly as a leadership team versus worrying about each review and asking for instant feedback unless critically important.

10. Review The Reviews - if you are selling products or multiple SKUs you are likely on a review site or many. Review the reviews is an interesting leadership tactic that is often overlooked, understanding the language used and direct feedback on customer support and success will help you speak to customers and address small papercuts that will otherwise be overlooked as will not fit into a traditional stack rank model

11. Search Teams/Slack For A Set Of Important Keywords - a possible grey hat tactic, this isn’t always going to surface brilliant examples you want to hear about and share with the wider business, however, this is likely to highlight examples in the open conversation where you are not working hard enough or ignoring clear signals. It is important not to rely on this as a way to review peers and team members, many of this is seen as semi-private and a safe space.

12. Read Peer-to-Peer Reviews & Awarded Perks - this could be seen as another grey hat tactic but this is a way to understand the language and sentiment colleagues use with each other and how they praise and reward colleagues. Some will always be popular but those who go over and above and are called out for this is a sure sign they are on the right path and a great colleague.
    I have previously found this is a way to pick out high performers that haven’t been seen by management yet. 

13. Feedback Cycles With Freelance, Consultants & Agencies - often overlooked and never actually undertaken, discussing with external resources provides you with a whole new perspective and allows you to understand how the company operates. Many consultants are experienced and won’t be scared to provide true feedback.

14. Roll Out Internal Podcast - a former recommendation made here, internal podcasts allow personality and professional expertise to shine through while making it lighter and more digestible than huge long emails and a space on the wiki. Roll out an internal podcast for performance highlights, great teasers for new campaigns and a way to connect with the different leaders across the business

Long Term

These recommended activities are for the long-term success of your business, requiring sufficient time investment and a dedicated budget assigned to gain the maximum impact. The recommendations require time to bed in and repetition to gain full traction and importantly trust. Some of these recommendations will require operational shifts.
Review carefully and ensure you assign time wisely.

1. Customer Panels - if you have decided to be an innovator or be a company that builds without constant customer feedback customer panels are great ways to understand how products are being understood, how they can be improved and can be a VIP service for important customers 

2. Run Company Awards - one of the best ways to see engagement and understand the motivation of team members is a running an annual company awards, voted for by the employees. If you want to see how the teams see each other and celebrate each other awards are a great way to connect teams and bring people together under a celebration. 

3. Hire/Appoint A Culture Community Manager - every time I mention a culture and community manager I receive feedback, I cannot emphasise enough how HR is mostly not trusted and cannot ‘control’ culture, whereas a dedicated person or mini team can help understand, feel and help to shape and mend key areas of the subculture. In a company of over 75 (and under 2000) a single culture community manager will be a valuable hire or internal hire and someone the leadership team will trust and empower to help steer the company forward 

4. Speak To Headhunters & Recruiters For Honest Feedback From Candidates - this approach brings forward red flags and conversations will provide you insight from outside-in. A slightly political edge to this is understanding how other departments are doing and what they’re lacking in or doing badly.
   Sometimes it can be good to load up your arsenal...

5. Create Internal Conferences - a larger piece of work but I have only ever had great experiences with setting up internal conferences and bringing in great external speakers and setting challenges. You will see more about your people this way and a chance for them to share experiences 

6. Regular Round tables - this can be with colleagues or bringing in external experts to discuss key areas, round tables are good ways to engage and build confidence in new areas alongside understanding how engaged team members are with questions and attendance

7. Lunch and Learns - a quick and easy way to engage team members, bring in experts and see engagement levels. I recommend offering a time slot on the same morning or afternoon that doesn’t eat into lunch breaks.

There is a lot here, and many you can take to your next leadership team meeting and address issues within the business. If you need help with any of these and would like outside assistance, hit reply or drop me a direct email.

Thanks and have a great week and good luck discussing this with your senior leadership team.

Danny Denhard

Dear leaders, how did last weeks newsletter on culture fit land with you?

Exec Problems? Did you know that executive tenure is slowly decreasing?
The average tenure for a CMO is as low as 16 months and many CEOs do not last more than 5 years. 

Why? This is down to the pressure of the job and the performance in these roles. 

In contrast; It’s uncommon to hear of a CFO leaving a role within a few years and they rarely leave their roles, often meaning they are the longest-serving C-Suiter. 

In my exec coaching and regularly speaking with a breadth of c-suite execs, I ask about three phases of their role, (1) onboarding (& re-onboarding) (2) reviewing their own work and learning from this (3) performance and impact: improving their planning to perform at their optimal best and making the time to review the cycle.

The TLDR: 

1. Onboarding and re-onboarding weren’t ever really considered. 

2. Reviewing their (own) work and proactively asking for feedback wasn’t something they actively did.

3. Performance was based on official reviews and the performance of their teams, often leaving peers to have outweighed influence on their tenure. 

Today I am going to concentrate on onboarding and planning and within this, I have included reviewing performance and owning as much of your leadership journey as possible. 

Planning: Understanding The First 100 Days 

Many mid-to-senior roles will ask you to map out your first 90-100 days, but what if the first 100 days aren’t the first 100 days on the job? (Read how to plan your first 100 days here)

Joining a company and connecting timelines is very different. Your first 100 days will be -30 days before joining. Not the day you join as an employee, so you should be planning between 130 and 160 days. (In the UK some executives have 6 month notice period, commonly three months, whereas in the US and other parts of the world, the notice period is much shorter - 14 days)

Many executives struggle to map out their onboarding and do not own the process, this means you are not taking the relevant steps to help you understand the business, your actual role (not just what is on the job description and tweaked verbally) and you own the expectations far more quickly and they are not crammed into week 1 when it is “make or break” for many of us. 

My 365 Framework

If you are looking for a new role or entering into a new promotion into a senior role, below is a tweaked framework I share with coaching clients and recently shared with fellow CMOs in an active group. 

When you accept your role, you have two options,

1. Onboard early and progressively or 

2. Onboard in week 1, week 1 is a whirlwind and you have to hit the ground running and you will have a lot to consume and navigate.

You will know what is best for you, however, option 1 is best in 90% of instances and will set you up for week 1. 

Before we dive in: Weeks-long listening tours aren’t accepted anymore even at the CEO level, so setting yourself up for success as early as possible is more critical than ever before. 

I have placed day placeholders in the timeline below for a reference point of how I have planned my 365 days in a role. 

Day -30 (30 Days Before You Join The Business)

• Team Onboarding (meet and greet) 

• Exec Onboarding (drinks/food)

• HR Onboarding - this will take until day 5 after joining

• Handover from exiting C-Suite you are taking over 

• Review recent business financials

• Understand the 4 levels company culture & culture fit

• Listening Tour 

• Understand the MIM (most important metric) and North Star and how other metrics ladder up 

Day 0 - 2

• Organise 1-2-1s 

• HR check-in

• Organise team lead check-ins 

• Find out how decisions are actually made (for example: HiPPO only, leadership team and filter down or more a Leadership - Strategic, Management - Tactical Or Operational Team Members) 

• Understanding vanity metrics and starting to de-prioritise from existing set-up 

Week 1

• Budget review and forecasting

• Kickstart CFO relationship 

• Company strategy review & review associated goals 

• Undercover “The big problem to solve”

• Internal relationship building

• C-Suite relationship building 

• Understand company culture & sub cultures 

• Arrange CEO 1-2-1's (Or who you report to & organise skip with CEO)

• Organise 1-2-1s 

• Identify the important skip levels or arrange monthly 

• Learn internal systems (especially software and tools if new to you) 

• Reporting and dashboard review 

• Review existing results & comparison (1-3 years) 

Week 2-4

• Kick-off Full Audit (Concentrating on) 

  • Cross-functional deep-dive

  • Budget and spending

  • Numbers/Data review 

  • Analytics Review 

  • HVE (High-Value Employee) identification

  • Goals / OKRs review & development 

  • Find out what the company/department/teams are hiding 

  • Find out what has worked, what has not worked, and what could work via the recent ideation sessions

• Implement your company-wide decision document

• Product deep-dive & CPO relationship-building 

• Identify internal influencers 

• Identify the key cross-functional team members 

• Connect with board/investors (if CEO/CFO/COO this should be before day 1)

• Userbase/Audience analysis

• Infrastructure & tech stack review 

• CS ticket analysis and top-level review

• Reforecast (if required or you require to move spend) 

• Build out your growth plan

• Sales (Or Partnerships) relationship building 

• Review your impact and the actions taken to drive performance to date 

Week(s) 4-12

• Hiring Plan

• Dedicated Firing Plan

• Org design project and alignment to hiring and firing plan

• Product Roadmap Review

• External Relationship Building 

• Existing GEOs, markets review & development 

  • Pricing Analysis 

  • Markets review 

  • Local 

  • National 

  • International 

• Connected global plan

• First 90-100 day review - show the results made and upcoming results 

• Audit findings and action plan 

• Show how you are getting closer to resolving the big problem you are solving or how you have solved parts of it 

• Ramp-up phase of performance and optimisation of work streams 

• QBR planning and optimise discussions

Within 12 weeks if you have not shown real change and impact you will be in a difficult spot to improve performance and will struggle to know you have executive buy-in. 

Week(s) 13-26

• Kickstart new Department plan of action (aka your department “strategy”)

• Agency(s) review 

• Leadership team meeting optimisation (this is critical and should be something you consider earlier, if inefficient move to before week 12) 

• Review personal performance alongside departmental performance and proactively seek feedback from colleagues and executive peers 

• Plan out training or personal coaching and book in (weekly to fortnightly is the best cadence)

• Continue board and advisor (add investors to this if you are a COO, CEO, CFO and CMO) relationships 

Week(s) 26-52

• Annual Planning - department and company (optimise inputs, reporting and strategic planning)

• LRP (long-range planning) 

• Arrange work getaway - whether this is 1-3 days and have hard goals from this session 

• Department reshaping (hiring and firing to be bedding in) 

• New agency pitch cycle &/ bring in-house 

With this timeline you can revisit from week 2 and replan annually, reviewing, optimising and improving operational efficiencies. 

The questions to ask yourself every week: 

• How do I unlock potential? 

• How do I unblock problems within my department?  

• How do I empower more? 

• How do I call out good behaviours? 

• How do we collectively problem-solve?

• What was this week's performance?

• What was our impact this week? 

• What are the biggest priorities next week? 

• Where can I optimise 

• Where is the next 10% coming from? 

Although much of this is what we should do, most of us don’t and forget that political intelligence and relationship building are what make the real difference in most roles, especially new roles at new companies or in promotions. 

Go and make a positive change!

>> Let me know what you are going to be adding into your plan moving forward by hitting reply or emailing me on leaders@dannydenhard.com. 

Have a great week ahead. 

Thanks, 

Danny Denhard

If someone would benefit from this update please hit forward on this email or share within your group chat with fellow leaders.

Dear leaders, leaders letter 201 comes from a rainy and autumnal London. 

Firstly, a big thank you to everyone who requested and joined me for the (free) power hour slots I offered in leaders letter 200. I learnt a tonne and I know there was a great value exchanges. 

Today’s LL BLUF (bottom line up front) is going to give you a different way to consider culture fit and how you can consider the culture and cultural fit at the levels it requires.

Culture Fit Was Never Explained Or Written Down

Culture fit is something companies used to hide behind when hiring, phrases like “I'm sorry you just aren’t a cultural fit for us” used to be commonplace. 

When pushed no-one could actually explain what it really was and why you weren’t actually a fit. 

I was once told by a headhunter that the company said “my approach and high-demanding work style wouldn’t align and I was not a culture fit’. 

I asked if there were any more layers of feedback on cultural fit and why demanding high quality output did not align, I did not receive further feedback. 

In my coaching I speak to c-suite leaders who struggle to hire, they struggle to select a candidate or worry that this senior hire might not work inside their business and it often is mislabelled as cultural misfit. 

I often suggest you hire more than just on skill and interview skill, you are better hiring towards a profile you have shaped and then you hire on 4 different cultural levels. 

Introducing The 4 Culture Fit Levels

Level 1 » Company Culture Fit

How will this candidate fit within the company, how will their skills and personality match the demands of the business and do their values align well enough or compliment those around them. 

Level 2 » Sub Culture Fit

This is a level or tier I associate with their Management Tier, what level of management or leadership will they be on and will they be additive to the company, will their values, skills and behaviours be a driver towards success. 

Level 3 » Department Culture Fit

Departments all have their own unique set of people, skills and requirements. Some departments have high levels of output, they are close knit and can demand more than others departments. Many candidates struggle with departmental rounds of interviews and its not a match or the candidate does not ask or push for more specifics. 

Level 4 » Team Culture Fit

Most teams have a different subculture, they might be friendlier, they might work later or start earlier, they could be a think-for-me team, not a deliver-for-me team within their department set-up.

These cultural factors are all critical.

When 3 of 4 Might Not Be A Good Fit 

I have had a brilliant candidate who would have taken over a number 2 role within a company, and would have ticked 3 of the 4 cultural fits, their shortcoming was their own leadership style and digging into that, it meant their hands-off management style wouldn’t have addressed some of the issues and helped to rebalance the existing department issues. 

Their leadership style would have been challenged constantly by the other execs and caused issues within every leadership meeting.

When you hire execs or the next generation of executives you have to understand org design alongside how they will interact and drive the business forward with their behaviours and styles. 

Such situations are where you have to be straight up and explain the scoring.
There is then no challenge of cultural fit. 

This particular candidate was deliberate in their approach and was confident enough not to want to change it and to this day I fully respect their conviction and leadership decision not to change for that role.  

Leader Culture Fit 

I’ll speak from a leadership hiring perspective, when you are hiring a fellow C-suite exec, you need to understand the person: 

• What makes them tick 

• What truly motivates them on the darkest of days 

• What demotivates them 

• How they are wired for fight, flight or do they freeze (freezing can mean taking a beat and letting something play out or actually holding the company up)

• When they have to step up or defend their section of the business  

The leadership candidate needs to understand: 

• You (leadership team) and your business 

• Why your leadership team is set up and configured in this way 

• Why your onboarding process might be set up in a certain way 

• How they will be successful (and the steps that ensure success)

• How the company culture is shaped and rewards/punished and then their potential new departmental culture and how it operates. 

This hire has to work both ways, in hiring leadership team members you have to think about how they will add something extra to your leadership team, how they will complement the existing members and potentially where they could add some clarity or create some healthy tension.

It is vital to remember combat is short-term and addressable, conflict (long-term conflicts and fighting) is long-term and often toxic. 

A Critical Cultural Value Can Be Time Constrained 

There are some values that will be prove to be show stoppers and time x impact is one that everyone wrestles with. 

Some cultural fits will take a while to embed, adjust and adapt and that is ok if this time period is managed, if not then good luck proving your value quickly enough and this is often at the root it is cultural.

Being from a large company and going into a startup is a huge adjustment often nearly impossible to catch up and keep up.

Going from a startup to a larger organisation can be going from a high end speed boat to an oil tanker going in reverse and the majority of times it does not work out. 
You have likely experienced this or experiencing this now.

Good Cultural Hire 👍 Vs Bad Cultural Hire 👎

A good hire can accelerate the company, boost team morale and build a strong rapport with the department and cross-functionally drive collaboration for instance.  

A bad hire can knock the department and teams back months, and the lasting impact of a bad hire can take years to overcome, re-hiring, re-energising the department, re-building trust etc all impacts the bottom line and employee happiness. 

Hiring Is Hard! Hiring brilliant candidates is hard and dedicated work, hiring high-class executives can feel like an impossible task, however, moving forward you have a potential framework to hire against and question are my team members a good fit across the 4 cultural fits and if they aren’t, question can you work it through with them or is this critical and they may need to move on. 

» If you have enjoyed or agree with today’s dedicated leadership newsletter, please hit forward and share with industry colleagues.

Have a great week ahead. 

Thanks, 

Danny Denhard

Dear leaders, It’s been a while since I last wrote to you. 
A lot has happened in the last six months for us all…

Over the last six months, I have continued to enjoy coaching leaders and advising companies and I was at a global marketplace as their interim Chief Growth Officer. 

This newsletter is exclusive to subscribers only, the following newsletter is broken into 3 sections.

1. Addressing The Content Tsunami

2. Claim Your Power Hour

3. 6 Must Reads

1» Addressing The Content Tsunami

I took a break from being part of the content tsunami we are constantly being hit by. As someone who is particularly mindful about this and written about this a lot, even I felt like I was drowning.

We are drowning in the amount of content available and being served aggressively.
From work email → work chat → social media → group chats → Podcasts → YouTube → Slack → to email and then many newsletters.

The break has helped me think more critically and see the landscape more clearly.

Here are three elements I have observed this year and recommend to leaders to reduce content overload and undue stresses of social and chat.

1. 👎 Social Media Isn’t Social Anymore - If you find yourself doomstrolling and you rarely engage, set limits on your phone (under 20 mins) and unfollow/unsubscribe. Trends are not trends anymore so as soon as you hear about them they are gone. Look for waves not ripples…

2. ❌💬 Leave Group Chats - Most IM groups are quantity over quality (and most admins are looking to monetise quickly now), anything over 60 members becomes a broadcast and platform for people and that’s not healthy to constantly consume

3. 🚫 Slack & Teams Are 80-90% Noise - Depending on your org and your role most Slack and Teams are questions and chatter and not useful work. Moving to async documentation for many companies can be tricky without a dedicated plan and leader, however, the sooner you can central knowledge and remove the knowledge hoarders and the performative side of work chat the better. Reduce noise and convert to signal and an organisation that can self serve through documentation. FWIW Notion AI can be great to find answers to questions.

2» Claim Your Power Hour

I want to break through the waves/noise today (and inbox filler and all those outreach emails and asks you receive) with a free power hour/clinic session for you and your business.

I am going to be offering 4x 1-hour slots - I have offered this quietly for over a decade and senior leaders use these sessions as: 

• AMA’s 

• A strategy review 

• A departmental plan review / sanity check

• A leadership lunch and learn 

• Office hours like VCs offer 

• A coaching session for their leadership teams

I have 23+ years experience in Product, Growth & Marketing and have led business lines and large business model switches so if these sounds useful, claim your spot today.

My Ask? All you need to do is reply to this email (or email me to leaders@dannydenhard.com) and let me know who you are and what you would like from the free virtual power hour/clinic. That is it!
(FYI to make it fair, the free hour is going to be — first come (replying to this email) first serve). 

» I genuinely love these sessions and I look forward to hearing from you!

3» 6 x Must Reads

I have written quite a lot over on my new blog, here are the six must-reads you will appreciate as leaders: 

1. Know Your HVEs (High Value Employees) 

2. Improving Mentorship In Hybrid & Remote Work

3. The 7 Most Frequent Recommendations To My Coaching & Advisory Clients

4. Hodinkee’s CEO Gets Their Audience, What You Need To Know

5. Brands You Don’t Have To Say Anything!

6. Why Practising With The Best Is So Important

Have a great week ahead and moving forward I aim to write leaders letters monthly.  

Thanks and go well,

Danny Denhard

Dear leaders, have you ever sat in a meeting and stagnated, whether that’s with your team, in middle management or at the senior executive level?

The one way most likely way to move forward for most is parking it and revisiting it. That’s long, frustrating and slows down decision-making.

Others like to grind it out and then meeting recovery syndrome is brutal and sends shock waves through businesses. 

I prefer scores…

I have a sports background, I played almost every sport I could, I played basketball, tennis, soccer, cricket and even lost a few fights in Muay Thai as a kid. 

Scoring Systems

• Almost all of these sports have dedicated scoring systems for each version, even when playing soccer with friends you create a score or ongoing system to know who wins and loses.

• Martial arts are great at scoring, as you know the quality of your opponent by the belt they wear, they are graded and scored regularly. 

• In MMA (UFC) and boxing they both use scorecards, both disciplines have versions of the same scores but they are private until the end of the fight. Who wins is based on the judges' scorecards - this is always hotly contested when it is close but a winner comes out of it and has their hands raised at the end.

• Cricket is a sport where you track every single ball, you have it logged and basically you could understand the momentum shifts, from a bowler losing confidence to a batman hitting their first boundary (like a home run in baseball) and then it’s up to them to concentrate and continue scoring. 

Momentum, Mindset, Winners Mentality 

In tennis, it’s easy to know who is winning, by the game, by the set and by the match. 

My brother and I would basically play until we were too tired to ride back home, but my brother is ultra-competitive and always wants to win, especially when I would go up a set and he would typically come back. 

He was always the better player (pains me to say) but momentum in sports is a huge thing and when I had true momentum I would out-battle his quality advantage and beat him. 

Momentum: This is the same in business. Momentum often swings and beats the incumbent without them noticing and without having a scoring system away from metrics and how they are progressing towards their Northstar metric. 

Winner Mentality: Some of the greatest ever tennis players are naturally gifted and super athletic but the top 1% of the 1% is down to their mindset and having the winner mentality.

In business solo players like this can struggle to influence enough people to have the same elite winners mentality. 

Scoring To Win

Something you will notice is the importance of winning and the importance of keeping score.  

If you are not keeping a record of the score, how do you know how you are doing? 

Scores in business are often the run rate, the costs or the flow of the business. 

Often we ignore scoring our campaigns, our people and our product performance until layoffs or 9-box exercises are given to us. This is then a hard job and when you need to explain decisions it can be extremely difficult to explain something others understand and accept. 

This is where many businesses can make better decisions by applying scoring and having a scoring system that allows everyone to know the metrics and the guidelines for success.

Audit Scoring 

I always encourage all product teams to audit and audit aggressively. 

By scoring and using an open-to-for-all scorecard. I created a scoring system to apply across the user journey to know where to work and what is going to have to be improved to keep customers happy and remove product decay. 

Do you formally audit and keep score? If not, why not? 

The Exec Netflix Score

At Netflix, they created a scoring system -10 to +10 on big business decisions, this came after their very early call to switch business models to go super early on streaming when a large percentage of customers were DVD only (the famous Qwikster business). 

This is a recent quote from Reed Hastings the co-founder of Netflix from the Tim Ferriss podcast that I love: 

My important question for you today is - Do you have your own scoring system? 

This week's focus action is - Can you make smart decisions by asking your team to score and score regularly? Not like eNPS or other metrics that are too situational.  

Remember:

• The best managers energise their teams by person-to-person management and ensuring they have a personalised target that energises them towards success. Everyone is engineered differently, the best managers know this and can press that button. 

• Whereas, the best leaders can inspire teams of people when the chips are down with a rally cry, or a great way to re-think to move forward or they unlock a way to score others just haven’t seen.

Will a scoring system be that for you? 

Have a great week ahead!

Thanks,

Danny Denhard

Dear leaders, who do you serve? 

And in what order do you serve them?

I remember an all-hands I attended and the EVP stood up and read from a very simple slide:

It stuck with me, I was in a follow-up meeting and the same priorities were repeated, followed by: 

“We have to remember who we are serving”.

Whenever I brought this up with leadership colleagues they failed to remember this, not just because we were clearly saying we serve two other layers of the business before the staff but because it was quite subtle, despite the slide being clear for all to consume. 

This prioritisation isn’t uncommon but isn’t spoken enough in businesses.

Survive — Thrive 

Survive: As a business when you are trying to survive you do everything you can with conversion rate optimisation (CRO), take rate (if you have a checkout) and inside of the CFO’s spreadsheet including its complex formulas to drive the most value for the shareholders (or for the owners).  

Thrive: When you are thriving you do the same, however, you do have the luxury to add more value through your product or pricing to make it more equal, and the customers tend to get a slightly better value exchange.

CVO aka Customer value optimisation was a trendy phrase towards the end of last year and at the beginning of this, it’s essentially how you get the most amount of value from your customer, increasing subscription prices, creating surge (demand-based) pricing or reducing down the basic packages to drive upgrades. 

Some brands will use shrinkflation (making items smaller) to drive up efficiency. 

Rightly or wrongly - all of this is business first and as a business performance is paramount.

Netflix Competing Priorities

Netflix has been doing this for the last few years and it’s worked wonders for their share price but not necessarily for their customers. 

Netflix is even trying to remove the basic entry-level package and recommending downgrading the user experience (yes making it a worse experience) to fulfil their advertiser numbers - adding ads for £3 less per month. This tactic has proven price elasticity studies lower quality tariffs improve subscriptions numbers.

Advertising is a way these platforms make more money, paying a high subscription to move away from ads was the way streaming enabled customers to move away from the burden of ads and cheap/low-quality content. 

Netflix is now TV (adding live content like sports into your schedule) without it calling itself TV now. 

Is this smart? Or is this market dominance pushing for more that may lead to less for consumers? 

Managing Expectations & Packaging Prioritises + Problems

Having led Product teams, a startup within a company, big company changing pricing projects and helping subscription businesses to switch their business models, the common theme is putting the business first and constantly trading what you can do for your customers, your external customers through product improvements and your internal customers (staff) by helping them manage workloads and managing their expectations on the tradeoffs. 

It’s now Q2 and most businesses start to find out where they are and what they need to do to improve the business or push harder on what's working. 

Enter Answer Engine Vs Search Engine 

I am a user of perplexity answer engine, it’s not replaced Google completely for me but it has replaced the need to refine my searches for the right answer. 

In a recent podcast (embedded below - start at 13:45 “The Importance of Aligning Shareholder and User Interests” if prefer the audio-only experience) their CEO Aravind Srinivas calls out why Google isn’t incentivised to always offer the best answers and why their business model isn’t geared towards their customers. 

This Google example is a great example of how businesses set out on a mission and then when successful, they diversify. 

Once this shifts you then serve different stakeholders in different orders. 

Google was released in August 1996 and then went public in 2004. = Shareholders had to come first. 

>> I have an upcoming post breaking down the evolution of search engines and what we will see in the near future with “engines” and why Google’s business model is under intense threat. Teaser below

This week’s focus action is to: Consider the prioritisation of your business and associated priorities. If you are a smaller business how can you look to serve your customers first and improve your service to a point that they will continue to use you and keep recommending your product or services. 

Thanks and have a great week, 

Danny Denhard 

Dear leaders, this week I am going to answer a few follow-up questions I received this week via email. 

Thank you for your thoughtful questions and those who fed back - thank you!

The leadership questions I answer to help with:

• (You or your colleagues) to re-think where they think they are in their careers 

• Quick wins for leaders wanting to improve their leadership skills 

• Address challenges within companies 

• How to build your executive edge (not just your ‘exec presence’)

• How to re-boot your career 

• You to learn from hard lessons in my career 

Sharing Is Caring: Hit share below or copy and paste this URL https://focus.business/blog/197 to help a colleague or team member who will benefit from this advice

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» If you missed my AMA Part 1 read today.

What are 5 of the hardest lessons you have had to learn from in your career? 

1. Leaving a workplace can be like a breakup with a long-term partner, everyone has that one former workplace, you can grieve, you will receive some unconstructive feedback, someone will always have something to say about you after you leave, you will receive some nasty comments and you will lose some “friends” in the process. If you feel this could be a case get some help through therapy, this will become more and more common in years to come.

2. Words and actions are often so disconnected you have to learn to dissect the words from the actions and drive the change yourself. 

3. Colleagues will decide between professional friendships and their salary, salary almost always comes first and don’t be surprised. 

4. A bad manager will put your career backwards if you are under them for six months - they’ll put you back a year. I have had two or three terrible managers and thankfully I learnt to get out in under six months. I thankfully had great people around me to guide me into a move for my mental health. 

5. A company on the up is great to work in generally, a company on the way down (especially being hidden) can be an impossible company to operate in and personal development is limited

Bonus: However much you look out for your team members, department heads or senior colleagues you won’t be seen as doing enough for everyone

Are there any quick wins for leaders to get better at leadership? 

• Learn how to present well, from creating a deck (or editing a deck) to presenting with confidence away from reading it word for word, slide by slide  

• Learn storytelling basics and principles - capture attention and imagination, the more you compellingly tell the story and garner engagement the sooner you will improve as a leader  

• Hard decisions have to be made - put yourself in a place where you can make hard decisions and know whether this is a quick or long process 

What are the biggest challenges companies are currently facing today, and how do you recommend the company addresses these?

• Profitability and efficiency targets - hard for most employees to impact directly and have very little visibility. Show staff members how they can move the needle and be more open around performance and ownership. Move away from the spreadsheet view, it's terrible for storytelling and connecting people to performance  

• Culture - companies are dealing with social networks dividing people, political unrest and political opinions are being shared more loudly and many feel they have to have a side or pick a side. Aligning any of this and attempting to drive a positive work environment while building a culture around performance is particularly challenging. Unfortunately, I don’t have all of the answers on this one, what I do recommend is creating guidelines around topics for discussion within the work environment. Coinbase and 37Signals (Basecamp) were called out by recommending this at the time (and didn’t execute it well) but there are some valid points in helping to reduce external factors impacting the workspace 

• Keeping staff happy - while losing colleagues and having to pick up their work. This is common until the headcount is replaced in the old normal but in today’s business landscape, this just isn’t going to happen. This needs leadership to step up, help readjust priorities and remove roadblockers 

• Hard economy - for many it is tough and it's hitting them harder than expected, while some big companies are cutting back on perks and some smaller firms are asking staff to return to the office, travel, food and drink prices increased. There is no fix here but there are ways companies can support their staff, help with travel or proactively help with reducing high prices. 

What are the best methods of career progression when you feel your career has stalled? 

• Go and interview, get the experience back under your belt and understand your worth 

• Build your own personal development plan - take control, write out the areas you have to improve, you want to improve and the areas you have always wanted to go into and set milestones. One follow-up recommendation: partner up with someone who will keep you accountable - this way you aren’t attempting to do too much and not celebrate the progress 

• Get more experience - if that means helping other companies, helping a startup, or creating a side hustle you need broader experiences to help restart how you think and how you view your current situation 

• Start learning again - most people in their career stop learning and stagnate, whether you are a specialist or a generalist you should be able to learn quickly. Reading a recommended book, listening to podcasts, downloading workbooks, signing up for a cohort course, and watching lectures on YouTube are all low-cost ways to learn and ways your company will pay for your development 

• Write a professional SWOT and highlight where you need to improve and where you have the opportunity to drive your career or gain help driving it forward 

• Get a mentor - someone who you look up to or people who will share their experiences and help put you first not just tell you how they did things 

• Get a coach - this is biased advice however a great coach will help improve your skills, help to boost your own confidence and shape your near and long-term future. The best coach won’t just push you, they’ll help to reshape your ‘now, next and future’.  

I have read you need an edge as a leader, what do you recommend?

• Be known for something important (not just your title) 

• Be relatable and approachable (this goes a long way with the layers below you)
  Or be unavailable (time-constricted people’s time seems more valuable - don’t be the exec who celebrates with a busy badge of honour) 

• Operate well under stress - if not you will struggle to drive positive change and the higher you go the more stressful it can become 

• Be additive not defensive - add more than you create slowdown or stoppers 

• Have a catchphrase or a look that sticks in people's minds - this should reflect you authentically but it can also be crafted 

This week's focus action is to:
(1) create a list of actions to help you and your leadership development and the steps you will take moving forward and
(2) then help your team members to create their own plan. 

Have a great week and remember to hit forward on this newsletter to those who would benefit most.

Danny Denhard

» Connect with me on LinkedIn

Dear leaders, thank you for your challenging questions this week.

As you will see there are many great questions, covering Company Culture, Strategy, Google Gemini, Apple AI and my "controversial opinions".

Let’s dive straight in:

Q. What do you think of Google’s release of Gemini and the backlash received?

• Google decided to release early, they felt rushed to compete and if I’m honest it appears they released a product that missed the mark. And in other ways, it overstepped the mark. 

• Google created amazing advertising products (particularly AdWords) and is smart to understand when to play solo or when to be multi-player to own market share through collaboration (Android). This launch will worry advertisers and their business partners.

• The Gemini launch would suggest they are concerned about their competitors and misunderstanding what their customers want from an answers engine, not a search engine. Google is trying to balance being able to do both without upsetting their (primary audience) advertisers and their users. 

• Google is the utility offering, it is the default site and most trusted site for many, and this won’t change for a long time - even with more botched Gemini launches.

• Google will come back bigger and better but until they understand their part to play here, I believe Google will struggle to tame their shift in internal culture and answer user queries in the most effective ways. 

• Always remember Google has a unique powerful ecosystem to leverage and distribute their product, Chrome, Android, and Google Search & importantly not being discussed inside Google Suite (Docs, Sheets, Slides etc) to test, iterate and apply market dominance, whereas others are forcing new behaviour. 

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Q. How can brands learn from recent mass layoffs?

There are a load of lessons that brands and company leads have to take away, here are my top 5 

1. People have to come first, companies need their people they do not need a dream saying a more efficient company - people do not connect or resonate with this, even with huge bonus packages

2. Remove the (HR and business) jargon and quickly 

3. Be first, be human - Don’t send an email, cut access and then force your employees to try and contact you about their employment

4. Many allow HR to do the letting go and tell their department leads not to contact their team members, this is an awful practice, managers reach out, make the time and explain the decisions to individuals - otherwise, you will end up on TikTok and news outlets explaining your bad decisions. Yes HR is there to protect the business however if you want to be a leader, lead from the front in the good and the bad 

5. Layoffs should never be a surprise, if they are or will be in your business, share the business performance and what it will mean. 

Q. Meta has been on a tear, where do you think is their Achilles heel?  

• Most likely would suggest it is Meta’s metaverse push. I believe it is their advertising and topping out on their cross-platform users. Unless they go into China (highly unlikely) Meta will struggle to grow further. 

• Simply put, Meta is an advertising machine (like Google) that often hits them hard when their products struggle to convert users or the costs spiral. Meta will be around for years to come and is an important cultural tool in WhatsApp and Instagram, can WhatsApp make ads work in their chat app and can they squeeze more value from the Instagram app that is at best 20% creator (uploading content) and 80% viewers (who aren’t engaging in content as much and won’t create). 

• WhatsApp being more popular in the US and Canada will delight Meta executives but it will also create trade-offs around advertising and paid subscription options (away from broadcasts) they have struggled to execute and ads are far from natural in chat apps. If anyone can make it work it’s Meta.  

• Say what you want to but Facebook (their original product) is still an important part of their engine for Meta especially with older demographics and international audiences - this will decay over time but the Facebook app will continue to drive huge revenues and advertising opportunities, will another election be a problem for Facebook… 

• I suspect Threads will launch an advertising product and won’t get the numbers to impress advertisers

• Unless Instagram releases a new killer product feature and increases organic reach from the everyday user a little more usage will slow and Instagram will be forced to show more ads and have more ad slots in the feed and within stories and even potentially DM like ads that LinkedIn have.

Q. Who will win Facebook or Apple in the VR space? 

• VR is just a part of mixed reality and although Facebook owns a large percentage of the VR space it is not a space I ever see hitting the mainstream.

• For Zuck to come out and critique the Apple Vision Pro it is clear he is worried about an alpha product and the Apple hardware machine.

• The Vision Pro isn’t perfect but if you hear how people work in them, facetime in them and use them regularly for non-gaming tasks between the two I would say Apple has the advantage in the mixed reality (aka spatial computing) space. 

Q. What are a few unpopular or controversial opinions about today’s business world?

1. Most large tech companies brought on company bloat themselves and never empowered middle managers and could keep running larger layoffs and feel the impact for 12-18 months - in 18 months time many brands will look back and say how did we really get here

2. Specialist managers are going to be invaluable for small and mid-sized companies. Especially those who want to be managers and develop teams and not just play politically. Large companies will have to embrace middle managers back into their hierarchy again.  

3. The chat interface is not going to force mass adoption quickly enough for most AI companies 

4. HR is going to become AI first - human-driven decisions second. HR had so many decision trees and the ability to add in performance data at an individual level that AI can make decent calls 

5. Apple can win the current market in AI with two updates to iPhones - even though this is what investors demand, Apple will play the longer game and make time be on their side

6. Quarterly goal setting is never given enough time to be created, rolled out and evaluated

7. Re-forecasting in large businesses kills morale and wastes weeks of individuals' time - it is a necessary evil in business, too many people are taken out every two weeks kills the delivery of work 

8. There is not enough coaching within businesses and too many won’t push their companies to improve them professionally, most are happy to waste their L&D budget at conferences, waste on on-demand courses and cohort-based courses they will never complete  

9. There are actually 4 layers to company culture, not just one.
   1. Micro - 2. Sub - 3. Leadership 4. Company-wide.

   Micro culture(s) are between individuals and teams.
   Sub-culture is between departments and cross-functional.
   Leadership culture is how they set behaviours top-down and interact and engage with the company, leaders break culture as much as they make it.
   Company-wide culture is a blend of other cultural formations. Most companies struggle with company culture because they ignore the day-to-day micro-cultures and sub-cultures and have not enabled buy-in from the leadership team and leadership teams are often too disconnected from what is happening causing disconnect throughout the business. 

10. Instant messengers (Slack and Teams) encourage over-communication not deliberate or effective conversation and regularly contribute to misunderstanding between colleagues. Many companies never do anything to guide their teams on the usage of instant messengers and how to be effective. Win by telling your teams how to communicate, where and when.

11. Bad hiring creates 18 months of pain and slow decision-making around firing causes 6-12 months of pain - couple this together and the ripple effect is huge. 

Q. Is company culture dead in hybrid businesses? 

No, but it is hard and in most cases transactional, however, that is not always a bad thing if you are prepared to engage with team members more frequently and not just reward performance-first goals. 

The role of a manager in hybrid is likely the hardest it has ever been, many weren’t trained for hybrid, and even being four years into hybrid for most professionals it is still a work in progress and an operating style there was no manual for. 

Simple guidelines, agreed principles and training will help but not create a company culture without deliberate management and as I have recommended before a culture community manager is the person who helps to shape culture (micro, sub and leadership cultures) and interacts between the staff and the leadership teams. 

Many people will perform better in the office (they need a stage and an audience) and other people will struggle to perform when they do not have in-person buy-in and influence. This is some of why the mass return to the office is happening and in office policing (not management) is working for many who never wanted to change or adapt to this way of working. 

Q. My company needs help to connect departments to the company strategy - how could we go about improving their buy-in? 

Strategy means so many different things to different professionals. 

If you have multiple strategies you will lose. If you do not help your teams build their plans into your company-wide strategy you are going to struggle. This is why beliefs, bets, pillars and strategy are my go-to operating model for companies. 

You have to decide if you are top-down leadership first or a D Team (decision team that helps to shape important decisions and strategy) at a strategic level. 

Often the goals are set at the leadership level and then too many people are asked to be involved, causing no build towards your strategy. If there are more than 12 people in strategy you will experience death by opinion and leads defending their department.

If you feel like the departmental plans are not built together with departments and their teams there will be disconnection and often this is where the middle management is lost and cannot help push the company forward in hard times or underperforming times.

So you will need to: 

1. help the teams know how to ladder their tactics into the departmental plan,

2. cross-functionally the departments will need to assign resources and then agree on priorities 

3. Show and tell their department plans to the leadership team and the business while connecting to the core goals they have signed up for 

If you struggle with connecting teams and departments to leadership team set goals, then strategy is going to be extremely hard work. 

Q. What are the 3 ways to improve work for companies forcing a return to the office? 

1. Explain why and how you are improving the office for everyone. If you cannot you are not ready for a full return to the office  

2. Re-onboard the company into the office - so many don’t and won’t, you can win by bringing people on the office journey and asking for regular feedback away from why can’t we work hybrid. 

3. Explicitly say how the office is going to be the connecting force within your company. Stop worrying about everyone else and have a dedicated plan for your office(s), how to collaborate and how to get into deep work mode without distractions. 

Q. What is the best advice you could give someone going from a department lead onto the C-Suite for the first time?

Congrats on your promotion. Here are just a few to get you started -  

1. Learn the business - learn the ins and outs and understand how decisions are truly made (if it is CEO first or always on the CEO or by committee will help you make smart decisions or fit into the leadership culture) - many don’t see this until on the c-suite or around the boardroom table

2. Know that the ELT and board meetings are battlegrounds and you will take many punches and knocks every meeting - you will have to grow thick skin and quick

3. Know when you are going to have to speak up and when you are going to allow others to speak 

4. Find out quickly where the rest of the C-Suite lacks an edge and apply yours to that void  

5. Your department lead experience is going to be invaluable, the difference between the most effective executives is those who use their expertise area, act like a translator and connect teams cross-functionally 

6. Learn what your role is to play in the C-Suite and how you can be a subject matter expert and for instance, speak on behalf of the customer which many struggle to. 

7. Understand where you need to create boundaries and own your own time, if you don’t everyone else will take it and remove all boundaries 

This week’s focus action is to book an hour slot for yourself this week, take a step back and plan for Q2 and your development.

» I hope this AMA helped you, there are a couple of questions that came in over the weekend which I will turn into another leaders letter.
If you would like me to answer a question, please email danny@dannydenhard.com or hit reply to this newsletter.

Thanks for reading and have a great week,

Danny Denhard

Dear leaders, you are invited to the Annual Leaders Letter Ask Me Anything.

» This week I am going to be answering this year’s AMA hit reply and ask me anything, whether that’s strategy related, culture related, what lessons can be taken away from recent business missteps, what I do in my coaching and consultancy or even how I write this weekly newsletter - ask me anything. If you prefer to think and then email me, email me directly → danny@dannydenhard.com

Into LL195, many of you reply to my leaders letters and ask for follow-up recommendations for books, documentaries and podcasts. 

This week I am going to offer you 5 podcasts (in YouTube format for you visual learners) that will help you to improve your leadership, including leaders from Netflix, Stripe, Amazon and Activision Blizzard, with 5 reasons to listen.

Time For Your Podcast Club? In many businesses and leadership teams, I recommend you create a podcast club to improve and share knowledge. Podcast clubs go away, listen, take notes and then come together in 30-minute power sessions, compare notes, discuss what you can roll out internally and then share with the rest of the business to inspire action. 

The Leadership Podcasts

» Tim Ferriss Interviews Ex-Stripe COO Claire Hughes Johnson 

This podcast is great for COOs, People leaders and low-EQ CEOs

Why Listen? 

• Claire and Tim go deep into Claire's working principles from her brilliant book Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building (UK Book Link -- US Book Link)

• Why personality insights are either great guides or seen as horoscopes - insights discovery is probably the best and most accurate I have seen and if you roll it out internally it will become internally viral (shared colleague-to-colleague and then team to team)

• Why many Managers & Department leads actually waste time on underperformers rather than high performers - and how you can move your department forward with leadership 

• How to set clear goals and keep on top of progress while not overburdening your team

• Understand board responsibilities and your long-term commitment as a board member 

» Elizabeth Stone Netflix CTO is interviewed with Lenny on Lenny's Podcast

This podcast is great for data driven leaders and CEOs looking to refresh their C-Suite with different approach to leadership.

Why Listen? 

• Understand why leaders' journeys are so varied and not as straightforward as you think (from data analyst and trader to CTO of Netflix is not)

• Why data so closely linked to Netflix's success and why Netflix is in the pole position as the industry leader in streaming 

• Why being present is more than just being in a meeting and engaging in meetings and working sessions - just being there is not enough 

• How breaking the rules on sharing important information and updates is critical 

• Open slots in your calendar are vital in building the right internal management culture - think of why 'skip meetings' and cross-functional relationships are so important (tip: do more cross-functionally than other leaders, it pays back)  

» Vinted CEO Thomas Plantenga & Investor Alex Taussig On 20VC

This podcast is great for GMs, CEOs looking to make a real impact and rethink their relationship with their board and investors.

Why Listen? 

• To understand marketplaces and marketplace dynamics properly. I can tell you from working across numerous marketplaces so many do not understand how two and three-sided marketplaces work and how to assign resources accordingly 

• Why cheap isn’t always a bad business - but challenging 

• Why going again and again was critical for Vinted (and will be for you too) 

• Why pricing changes were critical to survive and then thrive 

• Why localisation of product is critical and why many fail with localisation of their product 

» LuLu Cheng Meservey On How I Write Podcast 

This podcast is great for comms leads, CEOs with less PR and press support and Marketing leads wanting to improve Product releases.

Why Listen? 

• Learn how to write important updates and consider how to write for the right audiences 

• Why writing is much clearer than speaking (and why writing will be critical for leadership for years to come) 

• How the right updates (externally) make the real difference, rather than just BAU and noisy product feature releases 

• How the next crisis might not be as bad as you think with the right prep and right PR work system 

• Understand the tech you are promoting and be prepared to answer the difficult questions - you are front and centre

» Jeff Bezos On Lex Fridman Podcast

This podcast is great for founders, CEOs, CMOs and operators who are looking to step up and re-calibrate their company for long-term success.

Why Listen? 

• Jeff Bezos masterclass on metrics and why so many are looking backwards not forwards 

• How space is being rethought and why Blue Origin is about hope and having a big personal project for a good cause 

• Understanding principles and setting business principles so your leadership team and their departments can move the business forward 

• Why companies who ignore papercuts (small problems) lose - concentrating on the big problems with teams and ignoring papercuts is bad business and bad leadership 

• How enforcing day 1 thinking helps businesses to focus on the customer and not 

Share

This week’s action is to select the podcast that jumps out to you most and then listen and share insights and your notes with your fellow leadership team.

Thanks and have a great week improving as a leader.

Danny Denhard

Dear leaders, I'm going to let YOU into a secret, there’s an interview question I love asking, it is one of three questions with challenges I ask to find out the best candidate(s).  

This is an in-interview question, not a challenge to set with any pre-warning. 

If There Were Three Boxes In Front Of You - What Would You Do? 

Here is the breakdown: 

You don’t know what is inside of  

• Box 1 

• Box 2 

• Box 3 

Some Guidelines 

• You have 30 seconds to view the boxes 

• You can lift the boxes once 

• You cannot shake them  

• You cannot open the boxes or see inside of them - they are padlocked 

• You can walk around the boxes and look under the table 

• You cannot ask for the exact contents of the boxes - but there are varying amounts of money inside 

• You have 5 minutes to complete this challenge - remember to set the timer so there is pressure associated 

Phase 1A

I will let you ask 3 questions to qualify the boxes 

or 

I can give you 3 hints:

— Do YOU pick the questions or the hints? 

Phase 1B: Questions Or Hints 

The 3 hints are: 

1. 1 sentence to explain vaguely what inside box 1 

2. Offer you to pay a % of what is inside box 2 

3. Box 3 needs breaking open 

» Readers stop here: Question —What is the best option for you? 

Phase 2: Answer Questions Or Pick 

Answer questions with varying answers. 

Note: Almost all questions will be trying to validate what's inside the boxes and which is best. 

Which do you pick?

Or 

Do you want to carry on qualifying? 

Phase 3: Select Step Forward Or Step Back? 

Ask:
(1) Step forward and select a box
(2) Do you want to step back -- if step back ask them if they want to ask 1 more question or select 1 box to be removed. 

Phase 4: Offer A Question

If I were to ask you to start again would you change your decisions so far? 

Phase 5: Box Selection

Ask what box you are selecting and why?  

» So, which box did YOU select? 

Here are 6 presets to make this successful for you and the candidates:

1. Set the money amounts for each box before the challenges 

2. Vary these amounts at each interview some candidates share online and it could be gamed 

3. Set the timers to view “the boxes” and the 5 minutes - many will run out of time 

4. Have a slide with 3 boxes set up or a set of boxes you can pull out and run through the exercise 

5. Work out if you are going to let the candidate see the other two amounts 

6. Money could be £, $, €’s or could be notes, a cheque, a mocked-up bank statement, a USB stick etc - be sure to know the contents and the order of least to most 

Share

I know what some of you are thinking, this is either a clever challenge or a stupid challenge and you might be right, it could be clever and stupid at the same time. The but: you need to understand the candidate and without some form of challenge and working session how do you get to know them? 

Why This 3 Box Challenge? 

• The challenge is designed to understand the decision-making process and understand first, second and third-order thinking from your candidates. 

• One of the biggest challenges in interviewing is to understand your candidates' working style and decision-making while asking questions 

• ‘No questions all answers candidates’ are typically a red flag to me - this is where a gambler and a calculated risk taker show themselves.
  This is on you as the interviewer to understand and bring out of the candidate 

• This is a collaboration challenge - you learn if they are a collaborator or make their decisions on their own, if they select not to collaborate ask questions on why this was the case. Hint many selfish managers and above will make the decision not to collaborate, understand the engineering behind this 

• Making a decision in a controllable environment is what they will likely have to undertake week in and week out 

• You will find out a lot about the candidate's confidence and conviction 

• Candidates who think outside the box often get into the box 

• This challenge doesn't have a right answer per se and often within business you have to make a hard or what seems an impossible or stupid decision fairly quickly

• This challenge is a simple challenge designed to:  

  • (1) Challenge the candidate's mind 

  • (2) Understand if the candidate wants to change their mind and how many times they change 

  • (3) See how the candidate makes up their mind and challenges themselves and you

• You find out if you would want to work with and trust this candidate in the early phases of working together 

• If the candidate does not ask about the motive or what's in the other boxes, do they demonstrate a growth mindset? Or have they decided to move on and not look back…

Why did I share this today? Many interview questions are bland and restrictive and they do not effectively test candidates in a working environment and you do not understand your potential colleagues at an operating level quickly enough. This is why I have 3 questions and challenges to test the candidates and the interviewing team to deeply understand each other and the dynamics moving forward. 

💡HIT REPLY💡:
Do you have a go-to challenge or interview question you ask that helps you - hit reply and let me know 

This week's focus action is to review this challenge and see if you could use the 3-box challenge in your mid to senior candidates and whether you find out enough about your candidates in your interview process. 

Have a great week and I'll land in your inbox again next week,

Thanks,

Danny Denhard
→ add me on LinkedIn

Remember to hit forward to your management colleagues or copy and paste https://focus.business/blog/leaders-letter-194/ into your Slack or Teams to improve your company’s leadership

Dear leaders, how are you and your managers and management team doing? 

It is business week 8 (where has 2024 gone already) and typically you get a pretty good baseline of how things are going, how the business is shaping up and how your team have performed. 

One question that is often asked around now is: 

How do I know when it is time to review your leadership team? 

And connected follow-up question: 

» Is it time to review my management team around you (those who report to you)?

The big question you have to ask yourself is:
How are you performing and how are the relationships and dynamics helping the team and the company progress?  

You might be in one of three situations: 

1. Leaders like their colleagues but don’t love their output. 

2. Leaders dislike their colleagues and the team around them but they perform.

3. Leaders wouldn’t mind if they left and it wouldn’t impact performance. 

If you land with option 1 or option 3 you are ultimately in a place to consider performance plans or a reshuffle. 

Letting go of people you dislike but perform within their role is what makes or breaks leaders and tests your executive chops. 

The Cost & Effects Of Hiring & Firing

Hiring and firing is a core part of being a leader and many struggle with hiring replacements, understanding the demands of their org and then replacing almost like for like or go to an extreme opposite and miss the subcultural impact. 

The Caretaker AKA The Number 2: Others thrive in the firing but the replacements are often not lined up and can take a long time to replace, you are then expecting someone internally to step up and often this will see performance stay as is or improve.

You are then left in a place with a number 2 who will ultimately have two decisions to make: 

1/Is this number two role enough 

2/ Will this new boss feel threatened and can I learn anything from them to progress my career further? 

Often the ‘Number 2’ will move on and you will be left with a hole and a six to twelve-month window where you will have instability and turbulence.  

Middle management is a tricky place to operate and often when you are in the mid to senior end of your career a new boss coming in to replace your old C-Suite boss is a big swift and has months' worth of impact on you and the team around you. 

Executive Changes = 24 Months Of Hard Change 

If you notice what happens in many companies, a new CEO comes in, assesses their colleagues and their board and the supporting management team and then makes changes, some make sweeping changes and bring in their people, while others refresh core areas and often make the management team smaller. 

This approach is often about the CEO being successful first not always directly correlated to the business being successful.

10 Leadership Levels Questions To Consider

There is no one size fits all but here are 10 important themes to consider and bake into your plan (sidenote - always check with legal and HR to ensure you have taken the right legal steps to protect you, the company and the individuals you might be letting go). 

1. Any Move Is A 2-Year Bet: Don’t make big and rash decisions if you haven't planned out the next 2 years 

2. Identify The Right Interim Lead: The next question to ask and answer is: Is there is someone within the team who can and will step up or will there be another exec who is tasked to step up and run dual areas

3. Thrive Vs Chaos: Some departments thrive in change, while others don’t. Chaos and confusion are never tolerated - find out which the departments are and how you remove any confusion with a timeline of next steps and actions 

4. Back Up Plans: If you are an exec and department lead understand how you are reshaping a team/discipline lead will impact the business for the next 12 months and have backup plans for additional support, hiring consultants, agencies or reshaping to adding more headcount under the original level will help to get back into the driving seat. You will naturally need to step up and have relationship managers with external vendors to own the alteration  

5. Sub Culture & Cultural Impact: Culture can be made and broken by hiring and firing mistakes, hiring is more important than firing, if you hire badly you have six months to understand their capabilities and influence and then be confident they are right for the next 12 months 

6. Popularity: Popular employees being let go sends ripples through businesses, from gossip to direct questions about them and their performance. Understand the impact of these decisions and how you will address this 

7. Comms Plan & Plan Execution: Communication is key, what you say to the key member of staff you are hiring and firing is critical it stays between you. 

   1. Welcoming new senior staff or a shift in operating models requires a well-thought-through comms plan. Time and energy are critical here 

   2. You will need to have a company-wide notice to explain the reasons and what the future looks like clearly. Over-communication and over-sharing lead to questions and a reduction in confidence 

8. Difference Between Small Biz & Large Orgs: If you are looking to make many changes inside a small business it will reshape quickly, if you are in a mid-sized business it takes longer to understand the impact, in large and enterprise businesses it can be 9-12 months for the effects to come out in the wash 

9. Talk Of The Town? Big exec firing will lead to external questions and will be the talk of recruitment/headhunter firms, C-Suite groups and industry press. Knowing how to frame the layoff and reshuffle externally is as critical as internal comms. Know internal comms will be shared and screenshotted to be shared across social media and chat apps 

10. Day 0 Influence: If you want to restart a department's performance you will have to think about the executive in charge and their relationships and influence over their department. If they have influence and sway you will need to understand how to replicate this, if they don’t think and plan about how you will restart from day 0 of letting them go.

This week's focus action is to review if you should reshuffle your exec team, review the list of exec hiring and firing notes and make an action plan on who, what, when, why and how to move forward with reshuffling your executive team. 

Best of luck this week and if you are in doubt ask yourself, if this person were to leave on their own terms what would the plan be, versus letting them go as the leader? 

Thanks and have a great week,

Danny Denhard