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I can't get out the weeds
John Drysdale
March 04, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
,
I’m sure you’ve heard this one before
Your direct reports are struggling to hit their goals.
They tell you their people are letting them down.
When you ask them “what’s happening”
They tell you.
Some of my people keep saying:
“ I can’t get out of the weeds”
Your direct reports then question themselves:
“Am I asking too much of my team?”
“Am I pushing them too hard?”
or
“Are my people just not up to it?”
“Less is more”
This is a guiding principle of my coaching.
It’s about leaders creating the conditions for their teams to deliver excellence by prioritising those activities that have the biggest impact on results.
Clients who have consistently applied this principle have achieved:
Higher Productivity
Faster growth
Higher engagement and better work/life balance
This means focusing on:
Your Teams
Your Boss and Senior Stakeholders
Your Personal Effectiveness
This is Part 1 of a 3 part Leadership Guide to achieving exceptional results using this approach.
Part 1 - Your Teams
Your aim is to build highly motivated, capable teams and create the conditions for them to sustain high performance.
That means attracting and developing talented people to realise their potential by playing to their strengths, both individually and collectively.
When one of your direct reports tells you that their teams are saying “I can’t get out the weeds”, how can you best respond to this cry for help?
This was exactly the problem faced recently by one of my clients. Here’s how I worked with him to help his teams get back on the track to high performance.
Mark is a Business Unit Leader in a Financial Services Company. One of his direct reports, Diane, led their New Business Sales Team. Diane had been struggling to achieve budgeted performance. She complained that she : couldn't get out of the weeds”
Getting back on track
Here’s how I coached Mark to guide Diane to get her team back on the track to high performance by using two powerful and very practical tools: the Delegation Map and the Skill/Will Matrix.
The Delegation Map was developed by Harvard Management Experts, Bob Tannenbaum and Warren Schmidt. It outlines a range of management styles - from highly directive ( Hands On) to full delegation ( Hands Off). It helps managers assess and choose how much control to retain versus how much to hand over to their team members. By evaluating team member competence, task complexity, time constraints, for example, you can adjust your level of direct involvement to maximise both efficiency and team member development & growth.
You can see above, when working with Mark, Diane mapped how much she was currently delegating to her team members and where she wanted to move them to.
At first glance, it’s obvious that Diane is very “hands on” with four out of five of her team, so no surprise she couldn’t get out the weeds. Even with Chris, her most experienced manager, she was still holding the reins quite tightly. In conversations with Mark, it was her fear of failure and need for control that was overloading her and frustrating her team.
Her concerns about Aneta, David, Laura and Sylvie varied. These were related to a combination of things like lack of experience, newness to the company and past performance issues.
It was a big leap of faith for her to just place the green arrows to the right. Her confidence grew as Mark offered his support and guidance by helping her shape an approach, tailored to each of her managers.
To help Diane do this, Mark guided her in using the Skill/Will Matrix to shape how best to delegate and develop her managers.
The Skill-Will Matrix, developed by Max Landsberg, is a tool that helps managers assess their team members based on two key factors:
Skill - Ability, knowledge and experience in a specific role
Will - Motivation, confidence and willingness to perform the role
Team members typically fall into one of these four categories:
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Here’s how Diane mapped her managers on the Matrix. Laura was the least experienced but keen to learn, whereas Aneta had developed a habit of delegating up at times. Sylvie was by far, the most capable but was new to the company. Whereas Chris had potential to grow his responsibility and David needed to become more confident . |  |
There’s a description here of how a manager can adapt their style to meet each of their people’s needs. The good news for Diane is that all her managers are “High Will. So for her it was a case of either “Guiding” Laura and Aneta or “Empowering” David, Chris and Sylvie. With in-depth knowledge and experience, adopting the “guiding “ role wasn’t too challenging. “Empowering” was more difficult for her. |  |
“Empowering” her direct reports, meant letting go of control and that was very uncomfortable. It helped that her own manager, Mark, was able to role model that style and provide a framework, where she was asking more questions , offering support whilst leaving her direct reports the space to take ownership and decide for themselves.
Diane’s commitment to her own and her team’s development delivered results. Her business had been facing very tough conditions in a turbulent financial market. Their core business had been under threat as customers switched to alternative solutions. As her own team took more ownership, this freed her up to spend more time working with Mark and other senior stakeholders to reshape their value proposition. They repositioned the business and as a result stemmed customer churn and by the end of the financial year had started to regain lost market share.
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Key Learnings
1.Language is important
Pay attention to the language e.g metaphors people use to describe their problems. The more colourful the language, the richer the metaphor e.g. “ stuck in the weeds”, the more likely that it reflects a problem that needs to be addressed
2.Tools and Frameworks are necessary but not sufficient
If your colleagues’ descriptions of their challenges are emotionally charged, it will take more than a rational, practical solution . Diane used the Delegation Map and Skill-Will Matrix to clarify the problem and identify solutions. But the breakthrough came when she realised that her own need for control caused her to have less control as she became overwhelmed by workload that should have been done by her team.
3.Leaders can be most effective when they coach.
Mark enabled Diane to make a breakthrough with her team by:
Encouraging her to stand back and explore the real cause of her frustrations.
Acting as a resource, providing her with tools to diagnose and solve the problem
Building trust to enable her to acknowledge how within herself, she had been resisting the changes she needed to make.
What about you?
This was Part 1 of “ How leaders can create the conditions to achieve exceptional results”. The focus here was on “Your Teams”
I hope you found it useful.
Part 2 is about focusing on your “Boss and Senior Stakeholders”. Watch out for that in your inbox.
If you have examples from your personal experience around leading your team or strengthening relationships with senior stakeholders , I would love to hear from you
IIn the meantime, if you have colleagues or associates who would beneft from the ideas I have been sharing here, please forward this Newsletter to them
‘Til next time.
John