Eighteen months of knowing
Happy Q3. It’s hard to believe how fast this year is speeding by. But, here we are one week in and the issues we try to ignore are showing up to haunt us.
One client illustrated this just last week when she said to me, “I know who the problem is on my team. I’ve known for eighteen months. And I’m still going to give her another quarter.”
She said it casually, the way you’d describe a non-issue. Resigned, not angry. I asked her why. She thought for a long minute before she answered.
“Because if I’m wrong about her, I’m wrong about my judgment. And right now I can’t afford to be wrong about my judgment.”
I held the silence.
She was telling me something true that most CEOs don’t say out loud. The bottleneck on her senior team wasn’t a capability problem. It was the wrong person in a position and it was crystal clear. She could see it. She could name it. She’d named it to her board chair, off the record, six months ago. She wasn’t moving on it because moving on it required her to admit that she’d been wrong about a person she’d hired with conviction. And in this market, with her board already nervous, being wrong about an exec was a price she didn’t think she could pay. Plus, in all honesty, she was embarrassed.
Her logic was actually right. The market is unstable. Bringing in a new exec right now is risky. Maybe the person would turn around. The cost of being wrong is real. But the cost of NOT being wrong is also real, and it’s quieter, and it lands entirely on her plate. Every quarter she carries this person is a quarter she carries the gap that person creates. The high performers on her team are absorbing it. They’ve noticed. They’re starting to wonder what the standard actually is.
I know none of this is news to you. I’m sure you’ve got at least one person on your team that shouldn’t be there. You’ve probably thought about it for as long as my client has been thinking about it. The names rotate, the rationalizations evolve, but the list is real, and you can name everyone on it without looking.
The thing nobody tells you is that the list itself is the cost. Not the person on it. The list. The mental weight of carrying it. The way every decision you make ripples through the names you haven’t moved on. The way the team builds compensating structures around the gaps you’re tolerating.
A version of waiting is healthy. Patience is real. Some people grow into roles. Some situations need time. But somewhere on your list is at least one name where the waiting isn’t patience anymore. It’s the cost of being right about your own judgment. And the team is paying it.
If something in today’s newsletter described a pattern you’ve suspected but couldn’t name, that’s exactly what Executive Triage is built for. One conversation. One pattern named with enough precision that you can’t unknow it. $3,500. cynthiacorsetti.com/executive-triage
This week’s read: The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. He writes about firing senior people with the kind of honesty most CEOs reserve for late-night calls with old friends. The chapter on demoting a loyal exec is the one I’d start with. Find it here.
The longest quarter isn’t the one after you make the decision. It’s the one where you keep telling yourself you’ll make it next month.