He looked at the list and asked me one question. Why isn’t your name on here?

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From The Front Lines

I will be honest. I had not put myself on it because I did not think the job, as written, was for me. I was already VP of Marketing, leading a large team and a call center, with a young family at home. The last thing I was looking for was another big thing to carry. And I could tell, when I gave him that answer, that he was visibly annoyed.

This was not the first time John had pushed me toward something I did not think I was ready for. Not long before, right after I had my baby, he had encouraged me to go through coaching training, when I was certain I could not add one more thing to my plate. He kept seeing things in me that I kept talking myself out of.

So this time, I did not say no on the spot. I asked him for the weekend.

I spent those two days actually researching the chief of staff role, learning what it was and, more importantly, what it could be. And then I did the thing that changed my career. Instead of accepting the job as written or turning it down, I rewrote it. I drafted a new version that added chief of staff responsibilities to my existing role as head of marketing. I changed the title. I proposed a salary increase to match the larger scope. On Sunday evening I sent John the email, and I held my breath.

Monday morning he called me in. A few small changes, and that was it. Later that week it was announced that I was now SVP of Marketing and Chief of Staff.

Calling that a career game-changer is an understatement. The chief of staff seat gave me exposure I could not have imagined from the marketing chair. I saw how the whole enterprise was led, how decisions actually got made, how a CEO and a board really work together. Years later, when my own clients started pulling me past marketing and into exactly that work, I already knew it in my bones. This is where it began.

There is a name for what I did that weekend. Researchers Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton call it job crafting, reshaping the tasks, scope, and meaning of a role to fit your strengths instead of accepting it exactly as written. Their work, and the studies that followed, link it to higher engagement, stronger performance, and a better fit between people and their jobs. Most of us never try it. We treat a job description as a fixed offer to take or decline, when it is really a draft.

One Move

The next time you are handed a role that does not feel right as written, do not answer yes or no yet. Ask a different question. What could this job be? Take a weekend. Rewrite the description into something that adds real value to the company and stretches you toward where you actually want to go. Then bring that version to the table. The worst case is a good conversation. The best case is the job that changes your career.

What I’m Paying Attention To

An observation. The best leaders I have worked for did not hand me confidence. They handed me assignments I did not feel ready for, and let me find the confidence on the other side. John was the first to do that for me, and I think about it every time I am tempted to let someone off the hook too easily, including myself.

A podcast. Shameless self-promo since season six of Ungovernable Women dropped recently, and for this season I’m joined by Jabu Dayton. We are the people behind the scenes that organizations call when something is genuinely broken. We’ve been embedded with leadership teams and inside boardrooms at the highest levels of business. Each episode, we share what actually happens behind closed company doors. You'll get our honest take on what it takes to lead in these turbulent times, why teams succeed and fail, and how professionals can thrive even in the midst of chaos.

Before You Go

It is why I tell leaders now: before you turn a job down, think hard about what it could become. Do not hesitate to reimagine a role into something that serves the business and moves you forward at the same time. John saw that in me before I saw it in myself, and everyone deserves a leader like that. If you have one, listen when they ask why your name is not on the list.

If this reached you at the right moment, forward it to someone standing in front of a job they are about to turn down. That is how this community grows.

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And if you are a CEO trying to figure out where a chief of staff would change everything for you, that is the work I do now. You can reach me at portia@mountcreativeco.com to talk it through. Thirty minutes, no pitch.

Book A Call

I’d love to hear from you at portia@mountcreativeco.com.

With clarity,

Portia

I did the thing that terrified me and made sense at the same time. I started my own business.

I was certain I knew what that business was. I had spent years as a corporate Chief Marketing Officer, so becoming a fractional CMO looked like the obvious next step. The same work I knew cold, more freedom, my own clients. I was confident I had it figured out.

I did not.

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From The Front Lines

Here is what actually happened. My clients kept pulling me past marketing. They wanted help structuring their leadership teams. They asked me to be a thinking partner on strategy. They pulled me into the room with their boards. The marketing work was good, and I was glad to do it, but the work that lit me up was everything around it, the harder questions about how the whole company was being led.

An entrepreneur friend told me something in those early days that I have never forgotten. How your business starts is not where it will end. Take all kinds of assignments until you figure out what you love and what you don’t. So I said yes to more than I planned to, and I paid attention to which work I could not wait to start and which I was relieved to hand off.

The answer surprised me. As much as I liked marketing, I loved helping CEOs and their leadership teams think clearly, make hard calls, and lead the whole organization rather than one corner of it. And it turned out I was good at it. That was not luck. Earlier in my career I had served as a chief of staff, working shoulder to shoulder with a CEO and directly with a board. I have sat on both sides of that table, as the executive running a function and as the person helping the leader run everything. When my clients pulled me toward that work, they were pulling me back to something I already knew how to do.

For a while I thought this was just my own winding path. It is not. The chief of staff role has grown by nearly 30 percent since 2019, driven largely by smaller companies that suddenly need someone to help the leader hold the whole thing together (Chief of Staff Network). And here is the part that stopped me. People coming out of marketing and other go-to-market roles are one of the fastest-growing feeders into these jobs, because someone who understands markets and customers turns out to understand something essential about company strategy. My clients were not making an exception for me. I was early to a pattern I could not see from inside my own story.

So am I still a marketer? Yes, and I always will be. I still think about markets and customers, about how and why people buy and engage, about what the future will ask of the leaders trying to meet it. That lens never switched off. What changed is the frame around it. I used to think about all of that from the point of view of a single function. Now I think about it from the point of view of the whole organization and the people leading it. That shift, from one seat to the whole table, is the most valuable thing I do. It is my superpower.

So I made a decision. I am going all in as a fractional chief of staff, helping CEOs and their teams turn a smart strategy into a company that can actually run one. I did not plan this path. I followed it. And it is the best work I have ever done.

One Move

If you are in the middle of your own pivot and it looks nothing like the plan you started with, pay attention to the work people keep pulling you toward. The market often sees your value before you do. Make a short list of the assignments you cannot wait to start and the ones you are relieved to pass off. The pattern in that list is usually pointing at something. Mine was.

What I’m Paying Attention To

An Observation: The most useful career advice I ever got was permission to not have it all figured out. Take all kinds of assignments until you know what you love. I would add one thing to it now. Watch what other people trust you with, because they are often reading your strengths more accurately than you are.

What I’m Reading: The Mountain is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage into Self-Mastery by Brianna Weist. I keep coming back to this book and often give it as a gift to coaching clients. If you’ve ever felt like you were in your own way or had difficulty bridging what you say you want and how your actions follow (or don’t), this book is for you.

Quote I’m Pondering: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” — Maya Angelou

Before You Go

If this resonated, forward it to someone who is rethinking their own next chapter. That is how this community grows.

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And if you are a CEO who feels like too much of your company runs through you, that is the work I do now. You can reach me at portia@mountcreativeco.com to talk it through. Thirty minutes, no pitch.

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I’d love to hear from you at portia@mountcreativeco.com.

With clarity,

Portia

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From The Front Lines

Not long ago I stepped into a company where the CEO was, in his own words, drowning. He was in every meeting. Every decision seemed to route back to him. He was brokering disputes between his own executives, settling questions two and three levels below him, signing off on things he had no business touching. He felt like the only adult in the building, and he was running on empty. When we first talked, he told me his problem was ownership. “I don’t know why my team can’t step up,” he said. “They aren’t owners. They don’t want to take responsibility for their decisions, so I have to get involved even when I know I shouldn’t be.”

I spent a month watching, and what I saw was not a team that refused to step up. It was a team that had learned there was no point, because any decision they made or suggestion they offered would be overridden.

I typically see some version of the same pattern underneath. There was no clear strategy and no clear set of priorities, which meant everything was important. When everything is important, every decision becomes a judgment call, and every judgment call travels up the chain until it reaches the one person allowed to make it. That person was him. He had not simply tolerated becoming the bottleneck. He had unintentionally built it, one unclear priority at a time.

There was a second thing feeding it. He was a brilliant founder with a high tolerance for change and almost no patience for letting it settle. He would set a direction, then change it a few weeks later without explaining why. Or he would launch something, lose patience before it had a chance to work, and swap it for the next idea. Each turn felt decisive to him. To the team, it felt like whiplash. After enough of it, people stop committing to any direction at all, because they have learned this one probably will not last either. So they wait, and waiting looks exactly like the lack of ownership he was complaining about.

None of this is a character flaw in his people. It is a design, and he was the designer. That can sound like an indictment, but it was the most hopeful thing I could tell him. A team that lacks ownership by nature is a team that will fall short of your expectations every single time. But here is the good news: a bottleneck you unintentionally built is one you can take apart.

The gap he could not see is the one most leaders cannot. In one study of senior leaders, an overwhelming share said they clearly understood their company’s strategy- 97 percent of them, right up until they were asked to name the priorities and could not (MIT Sloan Management Review). The view from the top says everything is aligned. The view from the meetings says the opposite. That distance is where bottlenecks are born.

That change whiplash has a cost you can measure too. The average employee absorbed ten (you read this correctly) planned company changes in 2022, up from just two in 2016 (Gartner, reported in Harvard Business Review). Direction that keeps shifting does not read as bold to the people enduring it. It reads as indecision and noise, and eventually the team simply stops moving until the noise settles.

One Move

For the next two weeks, keep a running list of every decision that lands on you, and next to each one write why it came to you. Be honest. Some will be genuinely yours, the calls only you can make. Most will be there for a different reason, because no one below you was sure what mattered most, so they sent it up rather than risk guessing wrong. That list is your priority problem, made visible.

Then do the part that actually fixes it. Write down the three priorities that matter most this quarter, in plain language, and repeat them to your team until they can say them back to you without looking. Priorities are not real until your people can name them. Once they know what matters most, most of those decisions stop climbing to your desk, because your team finally has a way to tell what needs you and what does not.

There is one more discipline to add on top of it. The next time you feel the pull to change direction, make yourself name what you are stopping and why, in a sentence you would be willing to say to the whole team. Before you announce it, ask whether you gave the last change enough time to work, whether you have thought through what it will cost the people who have to absorb it, and whether you have walked your key leaders through it so they can point out the blind spots you cannot see from where you sit. If you cannot answer those, the change is probably premature, and the whiplash your team feels is the price they pay for it.

What I’m Paying Attention To

An observation: The most overwhelmed leaders I meet rarely have the weakest teams. They usually have teams that have learned to wait. If every decision is running through you, the question is not why won’t they step up. It might be: what did I do that taught them to do this?

A quote I’m pondering: This one is speaking to me right now in the work I do.
“Life is effort.” So says the body. “Life is blessing.” So says the soul. – Sri Chinmoy.

A book I’m reading: I’m diving into fiction this summer. On my nightstand right now is Patmeena Sabit’s debut novel, Good People. It follows an Afghan family who came to the United States as refugees and built a successful life in their new home. After a devastating loss, their neighbors and friends begin to speculate that all may not have been as it seemed with the Sharaf family. It is gripping.

Before You Go

If this landed for you, forward it to one leader who needs to hear it. That is how this community grows.

Share

And if too much of your company is still running through you, that gap is exactly what I help CEOs close, increasingly as a fractional chief of staff. If you want to think it through with someone, book a Clarity Conversation. Thirty minutes, no pitch, just an honest look at what is getting in the way.

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Want to get in touch another way? I’d love to hear from you: portia@mountcreativeco.com

With clarity,

Portia

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From The Front Lines

Not long ago I watched a board member do something most directors never do. After a meeting, he pulled the CEO aside and told her, plainly, that she was leaving something valuable on the table.

She was a brilliant founder. Her company was scaling fast and she was carrying most of it herself. The board, in her mind, was governance. A group to update, a set of approvals to collect, a meeting to get through so she could return to the actual work. She ran it like a chore.

What the director helped her see is that she had assembled, almost without realizing it, a room full of people with deep networks, hard-won judgment, and pattern recognition she could not buy anywhere else. They were not there only to oversee her. They were there to think with her. Once she started treating the board as strategic counsel rather than a compliance ritual, things changed. With their introductions and their advice, she secured several high-visibility contracts she would not have reached on her own, and she gained counsel on problems she had been wrestling with alone.

This is one of the patterns I watch most closely from the fractional chief of staff seat, because managing the board relationship well is part of the job. Here is what I have come to believe: your board is the most underused strategic asset most CEOs have. You already pay for it in equity, in time, and in the trust you extend to it. Yet it often sits underleveraged, because somewhere along the way you were taught that the board is there to grade you rather than to back you.

The directors themselves see the gap. Research from Board Intelligence found that boards spend only about a third of their meeting time on strategy, with the rest going to performance and governance. In a separate survey of directors and senior executives, more than a third of directors said strategy receives too little board attention. Read that again. The people in the room are telling you they want to be more useful than the agenda is letting them be.

What the room is good for depends on who is in it. A non-profit board often brings funder relationships, community credibility, and people who can vouch for your mission in places you cannot reach yourself. A corporate or investor-backed board tends to bring market access, capital, and operators who have already made the mistakes you are about to make. The truth underneath is the same. You have a brain trust on call, and most of its value never gets used, because the relationship lives entirely inside the formal meeting.

The shift is less about process and more about mindset. It is the difference between sending your board a polished update and bringing them a real problem before you have solved it. The first protects your image. The second puts their judgment to work while there is still time for it to matter. Founders feel this tension most, because the same instinct that built the company- carry it yourself, decide fast, keep moving- is the instinct that keeps the board at arm’s length.

None of this is a failure on your part. It’s just an opportunity you haven’t opened yet. The CEOs who pull ahead are not smarter than their peers. They’ve simply decided that the board is a resource to leverage, not an audience to perform for, and they build the relationships that make that real.

One Move

Before your next board meeting, take ten minutes and map each director against one live problem in your business that their expertise could actually touch. Then pick two of them and ask for a thirty-minute conversation outside the boardroom, not to update them, but to think the problem through with you. Trust me. You aren’t adding a task to your week. You are putting an asset you already have to work.

What I’m Paying Attention To

Podcast: I’m a Trevor Noah super fan. His podcast What Now? withTrevor Noah is smart, vulnerable, and incredibly funny. Listen to this episode with José Andrés, renowned Michelin-starred chef and founder of World Central Kitchen. Chef Andrés revolutionized disaster relief, and along the way he has challenged conventional models of leadership. He’s one of my personal heroes.

An Observation: The leaders who ask for help early tend to be the ones who need rescuing least. The ones who wait until they are certain have usually waited too long. Move accordingly.

If this landed for you, forward it to one leader who needs to see this message. That is how this community grows.

Share

And if your board feels more like an obligation than an asset, or if too much of the company is still running through you, that gap is exactly what I help CEOs close, increasingly as a fractional chief of staff. If you want to think it through with someone, book a Clarity Conversation. Thirty minutes, no pitch, just an honest look at what is getting in the way.

Book A Call

Want to get in touch another way? I’d love to hear from you: portia@mountcreativeco.com

With clarity,

Portia

“I’m exhausted.”

That was the first thing a CEO told me when I asked how things were going. One of the first things I look at in a new engagement is the calendar, because where a leader spends their time tells you more than what they say about it. He told the whole story. He was running a rapidly-scaling company on twelve to eighteen-hour days, pulled into everything from operational decisions to staff disputes. His leadership team, he said, was AWOL. On the rare occasions they did meet, the meetings fell apart into finger-pointing and moody silence.

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The week we spoke, he had reached his limit. One of his leaders had dropped an important contract that was due Monday, so he spent the entire weekend finishing it himself and got it out the door. He told me this like it was a story about his own stamina. But it was really a story about his team.

I see a version of this constantly, especially with new CEOs. And here is the truth most CEOs do not want to hear. You do not have a leadership team. You have a set of direct reports. Those aren’t the same thing, and the gap between them is costing you more than you think.

We all know this: a group of direct reports is a reporting structure. Each person runs their function, brings you their updates, and waits for direction. But a real leadership team does something different. It does the work that no single member could do alone: setting direction together, deciding where the company’s money and attention go, owning the culture, and holding each other to account. Peter Drucker put it simply decades ago when he wrote that thinking is the executive’s specific work. That thinking is collective, and it is the part where I’ve seen most teams struggle.

So here is a test you can run. Imagine you cancelled every one of your leadership team meetings for the next quarter. What important work would actually stop?

For most companies, the honest answer is nothing. Status would still get reported over email. Each leader would keep running their own area. Nothing essential would break, because the meetings were never where the real work happened. They were a status ritual. If that is your answer, you do not have a team problem you can fix by trying harder. You have a team you never actually built.

The symptoms are easy to spot once you know what you are looking at. Decisions route through you instead of getting made by the team. Your leaders ask you to settle calls they are fully equipped to make themselves, because they have never built the muscle of deciding together. Nobody can name the team’s top three priorities, because the team is task-driven rather than priority-driven. Somewhere along the way, someone started saying that getting the full team in a room is a waste of time.

And they aren’t wrong. The meeting is a waste, but not because team meetings are pointless. It is a waste because the team owns no shared work and shows up only to represent its own functions, with little visibility into how the company runs as a whole. When that is true, information stops flowing across the business, and that quietly becomes a problem everyone else in the company ends up feeling.

The data shows how common this is. In Leadership IQ’s Executive Team Health Survey, only 13 percent of senior executives strongly agreed that their team meetings were an effective use of everyone’s time, and only 10 percent said their meetings reliably ended with clear to-dos, deadlines, and owners. Just 17 percent strongly agreed that their executive team holds its members accountable to one another. These are the teams running our companies, and most of them are not yet doing the collective work the role requires.

None of this means your people are the problem. It usually means two things never got built.

The first is the team’s operating system. A real team needs a cadence designed for debate and decisions, not report-outs. That means meetings where you put the hard, cross-functional calls on the table and make them together, where disagreement is expected rather than smoothed over, and where the team leaves owning the outcome jointly. If your meetings are a series of solo updates with you reacting to each one, you have built a hub and spoke, not a team. And here’s a tough piece of advice for CEOs: you have to let your team struggle to find their footing. If they aren’t used to doing collaborative, strategic work, discussing and debating it will feel uncomfortable at first. Don’t jump in and save them. Set the expectation for what you want to see, then get out of the way.

The second is development, and this is where even good CEOs underinvest. You recruited talented leaders. Now they need to be stretched, including in front of your board. Most companies never get there. Heidrick & Struggles found that only 22 percent of companies have succession plans even two levels below the CEO’s direct reports, while 92 percent of executives said the kind of development and exposure deeper plans create would make them more likely to stay. Putting your leaders in front of the board does double duty. It develops them, and it shows your directors the depth of the bench you have built.

Your success as a CEO is not measured by how many decisions you can make. It is measured by how few have to run through you at all. A team that owns its collective work and shares accountability is what makes that possible. The job is to build it on purpose.

One Move

This week, run the cancellation test on your own calendar. Look at your standing leadership team meetings and ask one question: if these stopped for the next quarter, what important work would actually stop with them? If you cannot name something real, your next meeting should not be another round of updates. Pick one genuine cross-functional decision, put it on the table, and have the team decide it together while you hold back. That is the muscle you are trying to build.

What I’m Paying Attention To

Podcast: As an athlete, sports mom, and fan, I love learning about sports greats. I just finished listening to an episode of Simon Sinek’s podcast A Bit of Optimism, The Leadership Advice Nobody Follows (But Everyone Should) with Top Leadership Expert Don Yaeger. This is a good one.

Book I’m Thinking About: I’m deep into my summer reading now. I just wrapped the Audible version of Burn Book: A Tech Love Story by Kara Swisher. It’s one part memoir and one part insider’s view on the history of Silicon Valley. It’s a wild romp, thanks to Swisher’s sharp wit and fearless writing.

Quote I’m Thinking About: “Good teams become great ones when the members trust each other enough to surrender the ‘Me’ for the ‘We.’” - Phil Jackson, Sacred Hoops (1995)

Thanks for reading Epic Work. If this landed for you, forward it to one leader who needs it. That is how we grow this community.

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If you ran the cancellation test and did not like your answer, that is exactly what the Clarity Conversation is for. Thirty minutes, no pitch, just an honest look at whether you have a team or a reporting structure and what it would take to close the gap.

Book A Call

I’d love to hear from you at portia@mountcreativeco.com.

With clarity,

Portia

Recently, I released the C-Suite Political Intelligence Scorecard, and the response told me something I already suspected: most leaders know they need to be more politically savvy, but almost nobody talks about it openly. It feels like a dirty word. Like admitting you need political intelligence is the same as admitting you play games.

It’s not. And pretending otherwise is one of the most expensive mistakes I see new C-suite leaders make.

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Let me tell you my own political mishap. I was a SVP of Marketing working in executive education; I was early in my tenure as a member of the executive team. I led a large team of marketers and a contact center. My team was responsible for generating leads to be followed up by the sales team, which reported to the SVP of Sales.

In my enthusiasm to close sales, I constantly brought new ideas to my SVP Sales colleague for how we might close those leads more quickly. I suggested that members of my contact center who had telesales experience could close those smaller leads that the sales team believed were too small and unlikely to convert. My colleague wasn’t interested, but I couldn’t let it go.

So I went to the CEO and pitched my idea to run a pilot sales program where my team would close the smaller leads. To my delight, we closed over $500,000 in business in less than two months. My colleague was furious. He yelled at me for going behind his back and undermining him. At the time, I had few regrets because I believed that I acted in the best interest of the company. But it quickly became clear that I had burned an important peer relationship that would never be the same. And unfortunately for me, this SVP was very powerful and influential in the company.

A favorite saying of mine: when you are right, that’s all you get to be.
Yes, I proved that my team and I could generate revenue, but it came at the cost of an important alliance. While my other executive team colleagues secretly congratulated me for being innovative, publicly, their support was nonexistent. It was a tough political mistake that I never forgot.

That experience taught me that political intelligence isn’t optional at this level. It’s the difference between being effective and being right but isolated.

Political Intelligence is Not Manipulation. It’s Awareness.

What I mean by political intelligence is simply this: understanding how decisions actually get made, who influences whom, and how to move your ideas forward without creating enemies you’ll need as allies later. It’s knowing that you disagree in private and support in public. It’s knowing that your CEO should never hear significant information for the first time in a group setting. It’s knowing that generosity with credit is a power move, not a weakness.

These aren’t soft skills. They’re survival skills at this level.

The Seven Mistakes That Keep Showing Up

In my coaching work, I’ve identified seven predictable mistakes that derail new C-suite leaders: the blindside (surprising your CEO in public), the credit grab, the public criticism, the overshare, the alliance failure, the board fumble, and the trust breach. Most leaders are making at least two of them right now and don’t realize the damage is compounding.

The leaders who survive and thrive at this level aren’t the ones with the best ideas. They’re the ones who learned how to move their ideas through a complex human system without breaking the relationships they need to get anything done.

One Move

Think about your last three leadership team meetings. Was there a moment where someone in the room looked surprised by something you shared? If yes, you may be making Mistake #1 without realizing it. This week, try the pre-meeting protocol: before your next leadership meeting, identify any significant information you plan to share and socialize it one-on-one with your CEO first. No surprises. Ever.

What I’m Paying Attention To

A resource: If the patterns in this issue sound familiar, take the C-Suite Political Intelligence Scorecard. It’s a free diagnostic that takes ten minutes and tells you exactly where you’re exposed.

Podcast: As a sports mom, athlete, and coach, I love all things sports. The Pivot Podcast, starring former NFL greats Ryan Clark, Channing Crowder, and Fred Taylor, is one of my favorite conversations. These guys are real, raw, and talk on a range of topics with depth and honesty. This conversation with movie producer Will Packer delivers. Packer talks about the importance of not chasing validation, how to fabricate momentum, and how to build confidence like a muscle. Let me know what you think, and drop me a line with your favorite podcast.

Quote I’m thinking about: “I do a daily affirmation. I look myself right in the eye and tell myself what I got, how prepared I am for the day, and what I am going to do that’s going to work out today. I do that because it’s going to be the last time I hear it. The world is set up to tear you down, so you need to hear it.” — Will Packer

Thanks for reading Epic Work. If this landed for you, forward it to one leader who needs it. That’s how we grow this community.

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If the gap between the pressure you’re feeling and the progress you’re making is wider than you’d like, that’s exactly what the Clarity Conversation is for. Thirty minutes, no pitch, just an honest look at what’s going on and what closing the gap could look like. Book yours at mountcreativeco.com.

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Want to get in touch another way? I’d love to hear from you: portia@mountcreativeco.com

With clarity,

Portia

This newsletter has been germinating in my mind for a while. Two and a half years ago, I launched my business after my first and only career layoff. I decided to bet on myself. Every two weeks, I’ll bring you one idea from the front lines of my work: the patterns I see across industries, the friction points that keep showing up, and the moves that actually close the gap between the pressure you feel and the progress you’re making. I’ll also bring you food for thought on what I’m reading, listening to, and paying attention to.

Let’s get into it.

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From The Front Lines

A CEO I worked with recently told me his biggest challenge was “accountability.” His team wasn’t delivering on goals. People were missing deadlines. He felt like he was the only one driving the work forward. This is one of the biggest pain points I hear from the CEOs I work with.

Sound familiar? If you’re a senior leader, I’d bet real money you’ve said some version of this in the last six months.

Here’s what I’ve learned: when a leader says “we have an accountability problem,” that’s almost never the actual problem. It’s a symptom. The real problems are usually hiding underneath in a few predictable places.

1. The Goals Are Hazy

When I sat down with this CEO and looked at his team’s goals, they were disconnected from the business strategy. They were aspirational statements dressed up as objectives. His team wasn’t failing to execute; they literally didn’t know what a good outcome looked like. We rewrote the goals together, connected each one to a strategic priority, and sent an example back to the team with a clear message: this is the standard.

If your people can’t explain what success looks like for their biggest priority in two sentences, you don’t have an accountability problem. You have a clarity problem.

The fix: Rewrite goals so they connect directly to strategic priorities. Make the definition of “done” so clear that a new team member could read it and know exactly what to deliver.

2. The Leadership Team is Siloed

One of the most common issues I see is siloed leadership teams. Yes, the leaders are meeting, but they focus on report-outs rather than strategic conversations. They focus on their own area of responsibility but don’t think about how their decisions impact the rest of the organization. Every leader is optimizing their functional area while inadvertently suboptimizing the organization.

It looks like this: an IT leader decides to implement a major data retention policy but doesn’t consult his major stakeholders, resulting in confusion and anger from leaders in other functions. Multiply that across every function, and you get a leadership team that’s technically meeting but not actually leading together.

The fix: Build a dashboard that spells out your company’s major initiatives, deadlines, interdependencies, and links to organizational strategy. Ensure the leadership team meets regularly to have truly strategic conversations (not just information sharing) where they are making decisions, troubleshooting, and ensuring alignment.

3. There is Too Much Change in The System, and The Team Can’t Keep Up

You are running at a million miles per hour. Everyone is. You’re a visionary CEO who keeps throwing new projects at your team but does not ask how the new projects impact the current work. Or you’re the leadership team member, and it’s impossible to talk to your CEO and colleagues about what should be deprioritized. It’s not clear what’s really important when your team tries to do everything. Worse, it’s magical thinking because your team knows it’s not achievable, but nobody has the language or the permission to say so.

The fix: Ruthlessly look at progress toward the goal during monthly business reviews. Have a dashboard of your organizational goals and regularly update it with progress: green, yellow, red. The purpose of the MBR is to help your team see where you’re making progress and where you’re getting stuck. Spend the most time on yellow and red items and discuss countermeasures (no blaming or finger pointing). Yellow and red items stay on your weekly leadership team agenda until the situation is resolved.

One Move

This week, look at your team’s three most important goals. For each one, ask yourself: Could a new team member read this goal and know exactly what “done” looks like? Have we resourced this correctly so that it’s achievable? Is there something we need to deprioritize so we can execute better?

If the answer is no, the goal needs rewriting before any conversation about accountability is worth having. Clarity comes first. Ownership follows.

What I’m Paying Attention To

Podcast: I’m a huge fan of tech journalist Kara Swisher and her podcast On With Kara Swisher. She is a fearless writer and cultural critic. In this episode, she talks to the writer and director of The Devil Wears Prada, which became a massive hit and cultural touchstone. They discuss the sequel, the evolving image of powerful women, and the state of media and Hollywood today. A great listen.

Quote I’m thinking about:
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — James Baldwin

Book I’m reading: Dr. Sunita Sah’s Defy: How to Speak Up When It Matters. Every now and then, a book rewires my brain. If you are a chronic people pleaser, this book will challenge everything you know about compliance and defiance.

Thanks for reading the first issue of Epic Work. If this landed for you, forward it to one leader who needs it. That’s how we grow this community.

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If the gap between the pressure you’re feeling and the progress you’re making is wider than you’d like, that’s exactly what the Clarity Conversation is for. Thirty minutes, no pitch, just an honest look at what’s going on and what closing the gap could look like.

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Want to get in touch another way? I’d love to hear from you: portia@mountcreativeco.com

With clarity,

Portia