How To See What’s REALLY Happening Below You

Episode #368 How To See What’s REALLY Happening Below You

LEADING THROUGH MULTIPLE LAYERS IS COMPLEX

We see it every day. CEOs, boards of directors, and even middle managers are blindsided by things that happen below them that they either didn’t know about or failed to anticipate.

We got a great question from one of the leaders in our inner circle, Daniel May, who’s a Leadership Beyond the Theory alumnus and a driving force in our No Bullsh!t Leaders Club.

Dan asked, “How does a leader get the real truth of what’s going on in their team? The trusted advisor only gets you so far, but what about the truth within the teams on the floor?“

For those of you who are leaders of leaders, you know the hazards of having multiple layers to traverse. When information comes up to you from below, every leader at every level between the original information source and you sanitises it to make it more appealing.

Often by the time you uncover the real story, it’s too late. Surely there has to be a way to find out what’s actually going on?!

In this newsletter, I explore some of the complexities of leading teams with multiple layers; I take a look at a powerful calibration technique that’s going to help you to work out what’s going on; and I give you my comprehensive checklist for how to not get blindsided from below.

THE DILUTION EFFECT

Every level you go down in an organisation, the message becomes a little fuzzier. I call this the dilution effect.

Things just aren’t quite as clear… the rationale isn’t quite as compelling… and what you need to do isn’t quite as obvious.

Imagine trying to communicate the company’s strategy to everyone in the business. Let’s just suspend our disbelief and assume that the strategy has been developed effectively, to the point where it can be followed.

What does “following the strategy” really mean?

It means aligning the work program to ensure that every resource in the company is directed towards executing that strategy. But that’s almost never the case in any reasonable size of business. What actually happens in practice?

Let’s start with the CEO. The CEO understands the strategy the best. Why? Because that’s his day job. He’s the one who works with his executive team to analyse the data, to explore the risks and opportunities, and to formulate the big picture objectives.

The CEO is the one who ultimately makes the decisions about strategic intent and direction, and he’s the one who convinces the board to adopt the chosen strategy.

Let’s be real… in the vast majority of businesses, management drives the strategy, and then they sell it to the board at their annual strategy retreat.

Anyhow, when the CEO talks about the strategy, he can do so in a really compelling way. He can answer any question confidently, whether it comes from the chairman, a stock analyst, a customer or a frontline employee.

He knows precisely why certain strategic choices were made, and what they were intended to achieve.

But just think about the next level down. How about the Chief Revenue Officer? The CRO might understand the strategy in principle, but she can’t explain it quite as crisply. She isn’t quite as confident when faced with a barrage of questions. It’s not quite as clear in her head what’s required from her team.

So, you can just imagine the lack of clarity by the time you get to the front line, and a supervisor is trying to explain to a team of individual contributors what they need to do to deliver on the corporate strategy. All they really have to go on is the glossy brochures that the marketing team has produced – and, more than anything else, that just sounds like management bullsh!t to most of those people.

Each layer produces a natural dilution effect, which is incredibly difficult to overcome. That’s why, in many companies, any correlation between the strategy and the work that’s actually being done on a daily basis is purely coincidental.

THE SANITISATION EFFECT

Information that flows upward through the layers suffers from the same problems as the downward flows, but instead of the messages being diluted, they are sanitised.

Let’s assume that the people below you are actually operating with the right intent. They’re not deliberately hiding information or trying to mislead you. Even then, it’s difficult to get accurate information that gives you a true picture of what’s going on.

Let’s say, for example, you have three layers of people below you. When someone is reporting progress from the bottom layer, they obviously can’t tell you everything. They have to choose what to report, so they summarise what they think are the most significant pieces.

But here’s the rub. They naturally try to couch it in a way that casts their performance in the best possible light. So they might leave out some of the self-inflicted wounds they visited upon themselves, and instead focus on some of the external factors that were outside of their control.

They’re not trying to mislead you. They’re just trying to put their best foot forward, and their prognosis of what to expect in the future is always going to be a lot more optimistic than the facts would actually support.

Then, their boss gets hold of it… and does exactly the same thing. He adds his own commentary and spin before it goes up to the next level.

By the time it gets to you, it’s been sanitised to within an inch of its life; which is why your confidence in the accuracy of the information should be appropriately low.

As you ascend to higher leadership positions, you’re going to experience an increasing lack of control and visibility, which is why knowing how to work out what’s going on – without dipping down into your people’s work – is a vital skill.

CALIBRATING YOUR BULLSH!T DETECTOR

How do you get greater visibility and test the information that’s coming up to you? I’ll get to a more comprehensive answer shortly, but there’s just one thing I want to emphasise: the importance of not becoming insular, and talking to people through every level of your team.

“But Marty, isn’t that dipping down?” I hear you ask.

Well, not if you do it the right way… and there is definitely a right and a wrong way to do this.

The objective is to have casual conversations with people right throughout your organisation. This is about having informal discussions, where you can just understand their focus, their perspective and their challenges, all driven by simple, innocuous, open-ended questions.

This is sometimes called management by walking around, and it’s incredibly powerful.

You can ask any number of non-threatening questions:

• How’s everything going with you?
• What are you working on?
• What’s the most important thing in your team right now?
• What’s holding you back from performing at your best?
• What keeps you up at night?

Just a few simple questions can garner a wealth of information.

But you have to be mindful of the context. There may be two, three, even five leaders between you and the person you’re talking to, so you’ve got to make sure you don’t disempower the leaders in between.

If someone does decide to take the opportunity to complain about something, your first response should be to ask the question: “Have you spoken to your manager about that yet?”

No matter what the conversation is about, there are two golden rules.

1. Don’t give them any direction, or make any sort of commitment on the spot: you’re only hearing one side of the story;
2. Always discount the information you get based on the context in which it’s being provided: think about how little access to information the person has, and how that might limit their perspective.

If you do this, it’s going to enable you to gather information from all corners of your team and start to put a picture together of what’s really going on.

It also enables you to home in on which of your direct reports is giving you the most accurate information, and which may be, let’s say, a little less forthcoming.

This is how you build an exceptional, finely-tuned bullsh!t detector.

THE 4-POINT CHECKLIST

It’s not easy to work out what’s really going on below you. It requires a complex playbook of frameworks and disciplines, and there’s no silver bullet for this.

If you’re really serious about learning how to lead better through multiple layers, you need to join us for our Leadership Beyond the Theory Program. Doors are open now for our last global cohort of 2025, which kicks off at the end of this month.

In the meantime, though, I’m going to give you a comprehensive checklist of the things that are going to enable you to see what’s really going on below you. It’s broken up into four distinct, but related areas:

1. Value
2. Process
3. Leadership
4. Culture

To make this easier to deploy, we’ve produced a free downloadable PDF with a checklist of things that you need to put in place to make this work effectively.

1. Value.

Do you have a really strong focus on value? Have you created a work program where the objectives are clear and the deliverables are simple to understand, to measure and to report on? Do you hold people to account for achieving their results?

If you do these three things, you’ll have a much better chance of seeing what’s really happening below you. Here’s your value checklist:

1. Define exactly what the highest value things are that your team should be working on;
2. Rank them in order of value, and make this list available to your whole team;
3. Remove any initiatives from the work program that you are not fully resourced to deliver;
4. Stop everything else – eliminate any activity that isn’t directly needed to deliver your value-ranked work program; and
5. Defend the work program vigorously from any lower-value work that tries to creep in

It’s your ability to focus on value, and not overwhelm your people with inane activity that sets the foundation for gaining greater visibility.

You’ll eliminate the opportunities for your people to say, “But Marty, I couldn’t deliver this because I was asked to do something else.” Your job as a leader is to get rid of the “something else.”

2. Process.

Once you know what your team’s trying to deliver, you need to implement fit-for-purpose processes to ensure that the outputs are tracked and monitored rigorously. These processes are going to determine how effectively you can interrogate your direct reports and find any problems before they escalate.

My process checklist is simple, but powerful:

1. Create clear milestones to track progress within a project or initiative. You’ve got to be able to see on the way through whether the work is on track or not – the level of granularity is really important;
2. Set individual KPIs that focus your people on the most critical, high-value deliverables that they’re accountable for. This will dominate their attention and provide you with a clear focal point;
3. Create a rhythm of frequent one-on-one meetings for your direct reports. This is where you drill into the issues and risks, where you question their capability, and look at the shifting assumptions. You’d be surprised what these meetings uncover if you build a relationship where the conversations can flow freely;
4. Set aside time for management by walking around. Even though you want it to seem random, unplanned and informal, you need to make it a habit, and make it part of your process for calibrating information throughout the team; and
5. Hold periodic public reviews to critically assess what was delivered, compared to what was promised. Quarterly Business Reviews are a great way to do this, and they can also provide a prognosis for what’s going to be delivered in the coming period.

Your people may not like the scrutiny that this level of process brings, but it’s essential if you want to gain real clarity on what’s happening below you.

3. Leadership.

This is where the rubber meets the road. It relies on a few simple things, which you can easily incorporate into your leadership checklist.

Just be careful here, though. I said simple, not easy.

A lot of leaders fail because they don’t have the strength of character to lead this way. I could put 50 things on this leadership checklist, but to be true to our simplicity and focus principle, I’d like you to just concentrate on three things:

1. Stay at your level. You may be tempted to dip down to try to get more visibility, but the minute you do that, you weaken individual accountability, and people are going to feel even less inclined to tell you when something isn’t going to plan;
2. Don’t accept excuses. I realise that I might just be getting a little old and grumpy, but by the end of my corporate executive career, every excuse sounded the same to me: “The dog ate my homework.” Don’t take it…
3. Set a minimum acceptable standard for performance, and guard it as if your life depended on it. If your people aren’t lifting to meet that standard, they simply can’t be part of the team.

If you do these three things, the likelihood that your people are going to be open and honest with you increases exponentially.

4. Culture.

Every team has a culture and, in my experience, the greatest determinant of that culture is the leader.

This is why you can have wildly different cultures in two teams that work right next to each other in the same company.

Once you understand that the culture is up to you, then you have to set the expectations. What are the behavioural norms? How do we do things around here?

Here are the four elements of culture that are going to help you to ensure you don’t get any surprises from below:

1. Accountability is everything. Single-point accountability gives people a completely different energy, a much stronger ownership of the outcomes, and it encourages them to speak and act when issues arise.
2. No passengers. Your contribution isn’t just accepted. It’s expected. The more people you have who are willing to speak up and put their views on the table, the less likely it is that problems and challenges will be swept under the carpet.
3. No blame, no excuses. People need to feel confident that they won’t be hung out to dry if they get something wrong. By the same token, they have to feel the weight of ownership. That gives them confidence to not make excuses and to accept responsibility for their actions.
4. Welcome the bad news (don’t shoot the messenger). I used to lead by the mantra that my all-time favorite COO, Mark Albertson gave to me: Bad news by rocket. Good news by rickshaw.

GREATER VISIBILITY = LOWER RISK OF CATASTROPHE

As you can see, getting to the bottom of what’s going on isn’t as simple as it sounds. You need to attack the problem from several different angles, each of which requires strong, confident leadership.

Let’s face it, your current organisational culture may not be conducive to putting some of these disciplines in place… and the white blood cells will swarm around to try to stop you.

But the more you can deploy this checklist, the more likely it is that you’ll get a proper picture of what’s happening below you. Without it, you’ll be flying blind, and you won’t see the inevitable crash until you wake up in the middle of the wreckage.