Marina Bleahen is the founder and CEO of the BusinessWorks team. Marina is dedicated to working with business leaders across a range of industries to deliver success through getting their team fully aligned to the key results within their business as well as creating a culture of positive accountability to execute on strategy.
Interview Transcript
Q: “If you’re a leader or a CEO and you’re feeling stuck, which I feel a lot of people are right now in these uncertain times, what are the first steps to sort of get out of the rut that you’re in and start to explore more employee engagement or more culture within your organisation?”
A: “And that’s a great question Rory and I get that all the time actually when I’m talking to business owners leaders managers and at the moment. Very often, and there’s, they’re a bit stuck. And it’s very hard to say that it’s hard to say, you know, I’m not quite sure how to move forward here. And very often as the most senior person, you feel you can’ show that vulnerability.
So it’s great to be able to have a conversation with us at the business works team because we help them move from a place and we use a model, it’s called above and below the line.
And we, we hope to move from being stuck from being wait and see. And we actually happen to recognise that it’s, it’s their role to build their own leadership strength and power to step up and lead the team to give the direction to create the alignment, we identify the key results.
So we break it down into step by step that makes it safe saying well let’s get the key results identified for these three months and get a communication plan out there, so that in the model of the above and below the line, we move them up to take an ownership responsibility, you know, to see it on itself and do it.
But in order to get there. We have them sometimes do the blamestorming game. And it kind of deflects but it’s there so we can very much move on. We get the business owner from the kind of saying, God, I’m confused, tell me what to do. I’m really stuck here, I think I’ll wait and see.
We explore that it is a threat to the whole business by standing back and waiting to see, and the huge impact that it has on their employees and their engagement and alignment to the key purpose because what we find is a common saying “oh the team was having to work really hard”. They’re all really busy.
My question, my one question is, but are they achieving the key results? I say if I was to ask your leadership team, what are the key 5 results, what would they be? And I hear what silence. Would you all say the same thing, because honestly, that’s like setting yourself up for failure?
That’s chaos, it’s a huge waste of resources, it’s a huge waste of effort, energy, and the passion that you had, and you want to new people. So we help them to realign and get the key results clarified and move above the line to take the ownership and stop that wait and see I’m confused game, tell me what to do because that’s a disaster.”
