The 4 Biggest Mistakes Leadership Teams Make
Watch/Listen here or on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts“I believe as the leadership team goes, so goes the rest of the company. So if you don't have that consistent and significant sustainable growth, you've got some work to do.” — Mike Goldman
Based on over 20 years of experience working with leadership teams, this episode identifies four critical mistakes that hinder team success.
Mistake #1: Lack of Clear Success Measures
Many organizations fail to define and communicate clear measures of success at company, team, and individual levels.
Common pitfalls:
Profit and loss (P&L) data shared incompletely or not at all.
Lack of meaningful metrics for non-sales functions like marketing, finance, and HR.
Recommendations:
Establish specific, measurable goals for all roles and functions.
Align metrics with the company’s mission and evaluate performance regularly.
Use role-focused questions (e.g., "What would lead to promotion or firing in this role?") to set clear expectations.
Mistake #2: Too Many Priorities
Leadership teams often juggle excessive priorities, diluting focus and effectiveness.
Key insights:
Limit top priorities to 2–5, ensuring alignment with organizational goals.
Differentiate company-wide priorities ("rocks") from functional team priorities.
Prioritize outcome-driven goals over task-driven goals for measurable impact.
Mistake #3: Neglecting Talent Development
Talent development is often deprioritized, especially during challenging times.
Observations:
Investing disproportionately in low performers instead of high performers leads to mediocrity.
Annual performance reviews are ineffective; adopt regular one-on-one meetings for real-time feedback and coaching.
Actionable steps:
Focus primarily on high performers, offering recognition, challenges, and growth opportunities.
Implement bi-weekly feedback and coaching meetings to ensure continuous development.
Address difficult conversations and decisions promptly to maintain team morale and productivity.
Mistake #4: Thinking Too Small
Incremental thinking (e.g., 2X growth) limits innovation and opportunities.
Insights:
A "10X mindset" fosters creativity, bold strategies, and breakthroughs.
Leaders should consider transformative actions such as acquisitions or strategic hires to achieve ambitious goals.
Example:
Transitioning from cautious planning to bold initiatives like acquiring a smaller company or hiring top industry talent.
Conclusion
Avoiding these four mistakes—unclear success measures, too many priorities, neglecting talent, and small thinking—strengthens leadership teams and organizations.
Benefits include greater impact, reduced stress, improved fulfillment, and stronger company performance.
Thanks for listening!
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Over the last 20 years, I've worked with hundreds of leadership teams and I've seen every problem in the book, but there are four that man, if you can just solve those four, everything else seems to come together. So let me take you through those four. And what I want you thinking about is not, oh yeah, we do that or, oh, we don't make that mistake, but I want you to think of the level at which you're executing, this is not black and white.
You don't either do it wrong or do it right. If you're doing it right, how could you do it better? If you're doing it wrong, how could you fix it? So don't automatically judge whether this is a mistake you're making or not. [00:01:00] Reflect on how you're doing and how you can improve. So let me dive right in and talk about what I believe are the four biggest mistakes I see leadership teams make over and over again.
And what I mean by biggest mistakes is number one that I see it being Very often and number two, that when I see it, it has a major impact on top and bottom line growth. It has a major impact on your ability to create a growing, fulfilling environment. It has a major impact on your ability to have impact.
So let's dive into number one and number one is not defining clear measures of success for the company, for each [00:02:00] team and for the members of the leadership team. And then that mistake tends to cascade down through the organization when you don't have clear measures of success. Now, Most companies do have measures of success that they communicate as it relates to the profit and loss statement.
Here's what we want. Top line revenues to look like this year or this quarter or this month. Here's what we want. Bottom line profitability. To look like now, even there, I find, especially in closely held businesses that's not even shared. We might tell the organization what revenues we want to hit, but we don't share anything around margins or profitability.
And what that means is everybody's [00:03:00] focused on bringing in more business, but. don't understand how to focus on how to do it more profitably or why doing it more profitably is important. So I'll start with saying most share, share PNL, but some don't even share that. And that means folks are flying blind, but let's go beyond PNL because I, my sense is for most of you, you are sharing revenue.
Cost of goods sold, gross margin, net income, EBITDA, whatever those measures are. My guess is for most of you, you're sharing it, but what about understanding for the marketing team or for your head of marketing? What does success look like? What about for the finance team? Or the human resources team.
What does success look like? That's easy enough to do when it comes to the sales team. That's the [00:04:00] easy one. What does success look like? We need X, dollars in more revenue. We need this many more clients. Therefore, you need to have this many meetings from a sales standpoint, most organizations get that because it's such a measurable function.
But how do we measure marketing? Are you successful at marketing if the new website looks great? if the whole lot of people clicked on your last email marketing campaign, if the logo has a lot of cool colors, if you have a lot of followers on Instagram, is that how you measure success of marketing or should a measure of success of marketing be?
How many marketing qualified leads, closeable leads, [00:05:00] success, marketing, identifies and processes to pass on to the sales team. See how you measure marketing is going to tell you a marketing team where they ought to focus. And if you're focusing them on making sure the new website is delivered on time and on budget, that's what they will do.
But is it going to drive any marketing qualified leads that are closeable for the sales team? I don't know. What about finance? If all finance is focused on is making sure the financial reporting is done two weeks before the end of the month. And that's what they're going to focus on. They're going to focus on a very tactical outcome.
Most think finance is [00:06:00] accountable for net profit. But they're not finance reports on net profit, but they're not bringing in the revenue. They're not hiring and firing everybody. They're not working on productivity within the operations team. They're not solely accountable for net profit. But what about making them accountable for net cash flow for optimizing cash?
Based on the net profit that comes in again, that will drive very different activities. What about human resources? How are you measuring that human resources is successful. If you're measuring how quickly they're filling jobs, then they will do just that. They will fill jobs quickly. They will push leaders and line managers to hire quickly.[00:07:00]
Is that really what you want them to do? Or do you want them accountable? Do you want them to measure success? By the talent level. What I call the talent density within the organization. How many high performers do we have? How many low performers do we have? If you're measuring what I call the talent density indicator, which is percent high performers, minus percent low performers, you're going to motivate them.
You're going to incent them to bringing on the right people to putting coaching and development processes in place that will develop, build, strengthen the talent that you have. They will put in place. processes to make sure you're retaining the best talent, that you're making the tough [00:08:00] decisions on your low performers.
So if you're struggling for a function, what the right measures of success are, here are some questions that may help you identify how to measure success. First, when you think of a role, Even if you're the CEO, your role as CEO, when you think of a role, what's the mission of that role? And how does the role contribute to the mission of your company?
How do you know if you're succeeding or failing in that mission? What would have to happen for a person leading that role to deserve a promotion? And again, as you're answering these questions, think about specific measurable ways to answer these questions. Lastly, what would have to [00:09:00] happen for you to want to fire a person in that role?
The answers to those questions can help drive you to something that's more measurable than the websites delivered on time or more meaningful than the websites delivered on time or our new logo looks really good. So the first mistake is not defining clear, specific measures of success. Let's go to mistake number two.
Mistake number two is having too many priorities. Very often when I speak to leaders and I say, what's most important for the next year? Or what's most important for the next 90 days? First thing is they need to think about it, which doesn't sound so bad, but if they need to think about it, that means it's probably [00:10:00] not clear and it probably hasn't been communicated to the company, to their teams because they're trying to come up with it on the spot.
Second thing that happens is when I asked that question, what's most important, what are your top priorities? For the next year or the next quarter is they will rattle off eight or nine or 12 or 15 things. Well, if everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. I believe you should have three or so top priorities.
And when I say three, it might be one or two. At most it might be four or five, but Three or so top priorities that focuses the organization. Normally when I do it with my clients, when we talk about quarterly priorities and we call those rocks, I actually break it down into what are [00:11:00] called company rocks.
And functional rocks. So for the company, there are two or three or four most important top priorities that are top priorities for everyone to align around, move towards. These are the priorities. If you're working on something else. Why ? Everything you do should be aligned with those priorities, but then there may be for,and not maybe in, in most of the time for each of the functions, sales, marketing, finance, operations, legal, HR, etcetera, IT. There are typically two or three or four priorities within those functions that I call functional.
Rocks
the best place for those functional rocks to come from [00:12:00] is something that you can do within IT or within finance or in marketing that aligns with one of the top two, three or four company rocks. So we need to make sure that the CEO can get in front of the company and say, we are super excited about the next year.
And to achieve what we want to achieve to move this company forward into the future, there are three things we need to have relentless focus on. Those are your three top priorities. When the COO is in front of the operations team, that COO needs to reiterate the three most important things for the company are one, two, three.
And in order to align around that as an operations team, here are the three things that are most important. We do to make that [00:13:00] happen for the company. So we need to make sure we don't have too many priorities. We also need to make sure that those priorities are specific and measurable. And I like to make sure they're outcome driven.
What do I mean by specific, measurable, outcome driven? Well, saying we're going to work on a leadership development program over the next 90 days is not specific and measurable. What does we're going to work on a leadership development program mean? Now, let's make it more specific and measurable. What if we said over the next 90 days, we are going to design and be ready to implement a new leadership development program that we will use for our 40 [00:14:00] people in leadership positions?
Well, that's specific and measurable, but it's not outcome driven. The reason I focus on it being outcome driven or value driven is it's possible that you can get all that done. You can create this leadership development program and it adds no value. You create a program that's never implemented. You create a program that's implemented, but it's not taken seriously.
You create a program that's not very good, so it doesn't add the value. Well, the fact that we designed and we're ready to implement the program, or even that we've implemented the program, is that helping the company move forward? Not necessarily. Outcome driven says, we're not gonna focus on getting the tasks done, we're gonna focus on what the outcome is.
from those tasks. So instead of saying we're implementing a new [00:15:00] leadership development program, we're designing and getting ready to implement a new leadership development program. What if we said we're going to improve our talent density in 90 days by 15 percent that's outcome driven. Now, you may very well implement a leadership development program to support you doing that, but it may not be the only thing you do.
And when you're doing it, you're doing it with a specific outcome in mind and you are not successful until you achieve that outcome. So number one mistake was not defining measures of success. Number two was having too many priorities. Let's move on to number three.
Number three is not making talent development.
Your number one priority. One of the things where we tend to decrease our investment when [00:16:00] times are tough is talent development. The last thing we think about very often. Is talent development. We'd much rather talk about strategy. What new market should we penetrate? What new products should we develop?
All that's important, but unless you've got great people, it's not happening. You can have a great strategy with mediocre people. You will fail every time. You can have a mediocre strategy with great people and those great people will figure out a way. The number one driver of profit growth is people growth.
We need to make people growth. Number one, people growth is not discussed and debated enough. Maybe when it comes time to annual performance reviews and God, I hate those processes. [00:17:00] I think annual performance reviews are the worst invention ever created in business. And if you're saying, wow, I know that's why we do it quarterly.
So you're doing a crappy process four times a year.
We need to be debating, challenging, discussing talent within our organizations, within my process. And it's, I talk about it in my book, breakthrough leadership team. It will be in strength of talent when that comes out, depending on when you're listening to this strength of talent may already be out. But I talk about something called the QTAM, QTAM, the quarterly talent assessment meeting, and that's where you as a leadership team get together.
And assess the productivity and culture fit of all of your direct reports, your CEO. If you're the CEO, you should be doing that quarterly for your leadership team as well for your direct reports where you're discussing and debating [00:18:00] how they're doing and talking about actions related to how they're doing.
So talent development isn't discussed or debated enough. We also don't focus enough. on the right actions to take and kind of a mistake within a mistake. The mistake I see most often within talent development is most leaders over invest in their low performers and under invest in their high performers.
Talent development is not all about taking your lowest performers and bringing them up and just letting your high performers do their thing. What's going to happen is you may bring up some of your low performers, but your high performers are going to come down, and you're going to wind up with mediocre.
We need to focus, number one, on your highest performers. What are you doing to challenge them? What are you doing to [00:19:00] recognize them, to reward them, to give them exposure, to increase their responsibilities, to promote them, to re recruit them?
So we need to focus actions mostly on our high performers. Of course we need to focus actions on our low performers and figure out whether we're coaching up or coaching out. And of course we need to work with our medium performing folks and do everything we can to improve their productivity and or improve their culture fit to help them become high performing members of the team.
We also need to make sure as a replacement for the dreaded annual performance review that we're having the right one on one discussions with our direct reports, if not weekly, no less frequently than every other week. [00:20:00] And those one on one meetings are not just times to get together and say, what do you want to talk about?
I believe there are two specific focuses, actually two types of one on one meetings that I recommend. One happens even weeks, one happens odd weeks. One type, it's called the feedback and accountability meeting. Feedback and accountability, that meeting, that one on one meeting, the agenda is set by the leader.
The leader is setting an agenda focused on what they want to hold their direct report accountable for. What projects, what KPIs do they want to talk about? What feedback do they want to give them based on things they've done well or things they need to work on? So every other week is the feedback and accountability meeting.
And [00:21:00] if you do that right, there's no reason to wait to the end of the quarter or the end of the year to do an annual performance review. And of course this doesn't, this is no substitute for giving people feedback in the moment. But one meeting every other week, feedback and accountability meeting.
Second type of meeting is the coaching meeting. In the coaching meeting, the agenda is set. by the person being coached. If you're the leader, it's set by your direct report. And that meeting is focused on wherever they need help. They come to that meeting saying, Hey, I could really use some coaching on how to build a stronger relationship with the head of customer service.
I could really use some coaching on how to,better,ensure that this project is completed on time on budget. I could use some coaching on how to take the next step in my career and what I need to do next. So one on one meetings are a critical [00:22:00] part of talent development. Having difficult discussions is another critical part.
Most leaders put off those critical discussions until things have gotten so bad things explode. We need to put our big boy pants on or a big boy, big girl pants on and have the difficult discussions. That's a major part of talent development. Difficult discussions and maybe difficult decisions. So first big mistake.
is not defining clear measures of success. Second is having too many priorities. Third is not making talent development priority.
Number one and the fourth is thinking small. There's a book out there called two X is easier than 10 X by, I think it's Darren Hardy [00:23:00] and Dan Sullivan. Now, by the way, I don't really recommend the book because there are certain books that should have been 30 page pamphlets, but it needed to be a book.
So they say the same thing over and over again. And I apologize to Darren or Dan or any big fans of theirs listening that may take that as an insult. But while The book is pretty repetitive. The idea behind the book is so powerful. Ten X is easier than Two X. Most leaders and leadership teams think small, think incrementally.
That's the 2 X when we need to think bigger. We need to think about new and exciting and,reinventing ourselves or reinventing our teams or reinventing our companies. And that's the 10 X. And now why is 10 X easier than two X? And I hope I said that right a minute ago. It's 10 X is [00:24:00] easier than 2 X.
It sounds counterintuitive, but if you're focused on the 2 X, if you're focused on incremental change. If you're focused on improving by 10%, there are a thousand ways to do that. And 990 of them may not work very well. And even if they do, you're improving by 10 percent and so is everybody else. So you're pretty much staying with the pack.
So improving by 2x incremental change is not easy. It's actually hard. There are a lot of decisions to make and they may or may not work. the reason why improving by 10 X is easier is because to get 10 X better there are not a thousand different ways to get you there. There might be one or two or three [00:25:00] that are more likely to get you there that are exciting that the organization could get behind that people are going to be passionate about I was recently working with a client and they're a service company.
They wanted to get into a brand new service area that they had never done before, but it was consistent with their overall purpose. And there was incredible opportunity in that new line of service. Well, they immediately thought about it incrementally or kind of a two X mindset and thought, well.
You know, we haven't done it before. You know, we're going to need to go out and prospect and that's going to take some time. We've got to build this service and that's going to take some time. We've got to build our expertise and that's going to take some time. So their number for the first year was very low and not very exciting.
[00:26:00] But when I asked them to put their 10 X hat on to think bigger, what if instead of it. Being a small business the first year. What if in the first year you created a big business that was a significant chunk of your overall revenue? What if that was your goal? How would you make that happen? And there weren't a thousand different ways to make that happen.
There were two major ways they came up with to make that happen. One, is to buy a smaller company. Buy another company that's already doing that. And the second was to hire someone who was leading that function in a different company, steal them away and get a headstart on building that business.
Thinking incrementally, you don't think about those things. Thinking 10 X thinking big and exciting. You think of those [00:27:00] things. And by the way, Buying a company that does it or hiring away the expert that's the best around at doing it is a whole lot easier than building it incrementally.
So that fourth mistake is as a leadership team thinking too small, thinking two X instead of 10 X and 10 X is easier.
Then two X. So again, just summarizing those four mistakes. Number one is not defining clear measures of success. Number two is having too many priorities. Number three is not making talent development.
Number one and number four mistake is thinking too small.
There are a thousand things you can do to improve your leadership team, but if you focus on not making those mistakes. And improving [00:28:00] those four things, I promise you, your team will be stronger, your company will be stronger. You will have greater impact on your clients, less stress, less frustration, less overwhelm, more fulfillment.
I always say, if you want a great company, you need a great leadership team. I hope I got you there or at least closer there today. See you next time. Yeah.