End Your Team’s Slump Now: The Dirty Word Every Executive Must Use
Look, when you and your team are failing, there is only one thing you can do about it; it's a dirty word.
When you and your team are stuck in the mud, like you're late on your deliverables or you're missing quotas or morale sucks, there's honestly…truly, truly only one thing you can do about it, and most leaders hate the word. You ready?
The dirty word is process.
Performance problems stop being a mystery; they start becoming a math problem you can finally solve.
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I'm an executive and business coach and a fractional exec over at BoltonCo.net. I've spent two decades helping growth-minded leaders turn chaos into clarity, and so today we're tackling why "process", the thing you've been avoiding, is the fastest route from underperformance to momentum.
Olympic Sprinter: Coaching vs Micromanagement
Okay, here's the metaphor. Picture an Olympic sprinter. Between races, she isn't guessing how to get faster. Her coach breaks everything down. They're looking at high-speed video. They're measuring stride length. And they're counting things like ground contact milliseconds, and they tweak one little variable at a time. Note: The athlete does not call that "micromanagement", she calls it "coaching".
Businesses should work the same way, but there's a ton of leadership teams that treat, like, documentation like dental work, which my wife would not like because she's a dental hygienist. They put off the process until it hurts.
So you end up tolerating missed goals as long as people are busy. Instead of saying, "Hey, what exactly did we try? What changed? What did we learn?”
Recording Is Feedback, Not Surveillance
I've been a Chief Revenue Officer multiple times. And I see this with sales leaders and sales professionals a lot. Let me make it plain for you.
● Recording isn't surveillance; it's feedback.
Athletes watch film. Sales teams should be reviewing their call transcripts or the calls themselves.
Documentation isn't bureaucracy; it's memory. If you can't remember what you did last Tuesday, what that experiment was, you're not going to be able to iterate on it.
And iteration isn't optional.
In fact, most boards and CEOs will forgive a bad quarter if they see a credible path to better. "Process" is that path. James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, says “You do not rise to the level of your goals; you fall to the level of your systems.”
Your process is the floor your team stands on when the pressure mounts, and if that floor is shaky, or if it does not exist, no amount of rah-rah speeches or carrot-stick initiatives are going to hold the weight on that.
The S-A-N-E Framework
So let's talk about what we do to fix this.
How do you instill a process without drowning everyone at the same time? I'm going to give you a S-A-N-E framework: four moves that take less time than your Monday stand-up huddle.
Select the moment that matters
Select the moment that matters. Identify one choke point. Is it a customer handoff? Is it sprint planning? Is it a morning huddle? Commit to observing it this week. You got to observe it.
2. Assess with a single metric
Pick one number that tells the story. For a handoff, it might be a proposal sent in less than twenty-four hours after a discovery call. You have to pick a metric. And you have to be able to assess it.
3. Note the reality
Record what actually happens: screen share, video snippet, timestamp, Slack thread, whatever you need so that you have objective evidence, not memory.
When you are failing, you usually don't know why you are failing or you would have fixed it by now. When someone says what's going wrong, you don't have the answer, and if you don't have tape to review, you're not going to be able to fix it.
4. Experiment and iterate
Change one variable. Run it for a cycle. Review it together. Decide: keep it, tweak it, or toss it.
If you're underperforming, communicate what you're doing in this four-move process to your leadership team in your next L10 or your weekly leadership meeting. They need to know that you know that it's non-performance and that you've got a path forward. It will instill confidence, and because you're focused, you're clear, and you're concise, it's going to give you some momentum.
You need a win too; you need to know how to take that process from left to right and start to see improvements and start to impact outcomes.
Watch the Cultural Shift
If you do this twice a month, watch the cultural shift. All of a sudden, mistakes aren't personal; they're data.
Meetings go from blame to design. Underperformance becomes tolerable because, not forever, but it becomes tolerable because everyone can see that it's temporary and it's trackable.
Skip the Pep Talk. Run the S-A-N-E Loop.
If your team feels stuck, don't schedule another pep talk. Do not go to AI for a motivational emoji-filled Slack message. Instead, film it and run the SANE loop and let me know how it goes. Schedule some time with me if you want to chat about this further.
Embrace Process & Progress Becomes Inevitable
Remember, the dirty word that saves teams and the one most leaders ignore is process! With process, progress stops being optional; it becomes inevitable.
