Normal is Your Biggest Enemy

I've been thinking a lot about change management lately.

One of the conclusions I’ve reached is this….the biggest impediment to change is thinking “THIS” is normal.

I said that on a call today while we were talking about managers who spend all day in back-to-back meetings, manage their inbox, go to sleep exhausted, and call it a good job.

From their perspective, they did what a manager does.

They handled the problems. They answered the messages. They'll get up tomorrow and do it again.

I keep thinking about this as “organizational inflammation”. You live with the same irritation long enough and eventually assume that's how the job feels.

I first learned this a very, very long time ago when I was coaching CrossFit and teaching people to not eat so much sugar. They just assumed that everybody got really tired in the afternoon and that love handles were normal as you aged, and so they didn't always feel the acute pain required to make a big lifestyle shift.

Now I see the same thing with “inflamed” managers and leaders.

Of course the owner gets calls on weekends. Of course the head of sales is buried in customer problems. Of course a senior manager takes two hours to answer a message because they're in meetings all day.

Everybody's busy. Everybody's trying. And the same problems keep happening.

Then somebody shows you another way to run the business.

“I know a roofer who's 10 times bigger than you who never gets calls on the weekends.”

Imagine hearing that after years of assuming weekend calls come with the territory.

You'd want to know how the hell that works.

Until that moment, you'd been trying to get better at handling the calls. Now you'd start investigating why you get them at all.

That outside comparison matters because you can get very good at managing around a problem. You learn which messages need your attention, which meetings you have to attend, and whose work you need to check personally.

After a while, all of that becomes your job description.

I used an intentionally aggressive example on the same call. A head of sales should be so focused on coaching and auditing that they barely even know individual customers' names.

Take that literally or argue with me about it. Fine.

But look at where their day goes. If they're personally handling every customer situation, when do they make the salespeople better? When do they inspect the work? When do they fix the thing that keeps producing the same intervention?

There's a HIGHER level of performance available with less inflammation. You have to believe that before you'll go looking for it.

And yes, sometimes you need to sprint.

Give me a week of hard work to get something from A to B. Maybe a month. Tell me what we're trying to accomplish, why the extra effort is necessary, and what will be different when we're done.

I understand that.

What concerns me is the manager who's been sprinting for six months because somebody else keeps dropping the ball. Every week requires another rescue. Every Friday ends with the same exhaustion.

At some point, we need to make a STRUCTURAL change. Mixing my analogies here, stop taking so much pepto bismol, and quit eating pizza for lunch.

The wrong person could be in the seat. Responsibilities may need to move. Or we've made a senior person responsible for catching work that should arrive correctly in the first place.

“I'll take a look” doesn't get us to a long term higher level of performance!

We need to decide what changes and then make it happen.

When a capable person keeps rescuing things (especially if you do it or its a capable manager who works for you) , it's tempting to be grateful and move on. They handled it. Great. I've got 50 other things to do.

BUT THEN I've helped make the rescue routine.

This week, pick one recurring aggravation you've accepted as part of running your business. Weekend calls. An inbox you can never leave. A manager who spends the entire day in meetings.

Find an operator running a bigger business and ask them how they handle that exact situation. Get specific. Who owns it? When does it reach them? What had to change before they could step away?

Use that conversation to decide what you're going to change in yours.

Yallah Habibi,

Jon

Sagan is welcoming Gabby Wong, former CEO of FranConnect, to our advisory board.

At FranConnect, she grew revenue fivefold and led three acquisitions, building the software business serving nearly 1,500 franchise and multi-location brands worldwide.

Before FranConnect, Gabby held global leadership roles at enterprise software companies including Primavera Systems (now Oracle), Verint, and Clarabridge (now Qualtrics).

She began her career at PwC and Deloitte, helping Fortune 1000 companies improve operations and grow revenue.

She brings that experience to Sagan as we help business owners build global teams & AI Agents in order to scale their companies.