Transcript

Jason Randall [00:01]

At Questco, many of our clients are experiencing rapid growth, or they are about to. As a consequence, we're often called upon to help these clients grow to the scale of their ambitions. Over the years, we've noticed some patterns to this growth, and our perspective has generated some helpful, practical takeaways for you. So we wanted to share some key learnings in a multi-part series that unpacks what breaks first when a business starts to grow fast.

Jason Randall [00:38]

Our expert guide on this journey is Kim Diorio. Kim is Questco's Chief Product Officer, and in this role she has a lot of responsibilities inside the organization. How it all ladders up is that Kim helps our clients build the systems, the clarity, and the people infrastructure that allow their businesses to grow without becoming more fragile. Kim, welcome to the conversation.

Kim Diorio [00:53]

Thank you, Jason. I'm very happy to be here.

Jason Randall [00:55]

We have a great talk scheduled for today. Most leaders think the first thing that breaks in a fast-growing company is operations, or hiring, or execution. But we've observed that something else usually breaks first.

Kim Diorio [01:11]

To me, the better answer is clarity. Before the customer experience starts to slip, or companies start to see cultural implications, or anything shows up on the balance sheet, we tend to lose a shared understanding of what matters most: who we serve, what problems we solve for them, and what good looks like. And equally important, what not to do.

Jason Randall [01:34]

Absolutely. And we should note that clarity fits into a framework we're calling the three C's: clarity, customer experience, and culture. Then there are the business consequences that follow when each one breaks. That's also three C's: chaos, costs, and churn. So our focus today is clarity, and why confusion often looks exactly like growth until it becomes too expensive to ignore. So Kim, when people hear the word clarity, maybe they're picturing a mission statement, something academic, a value slide. What do we actually mean by clarity in this context?

Kim Diorio [02:09]

In this case, it's definitely not poster language. It's market clarity, in terms of your go-to-market and again who you serve and what problem you solve, as well as operating clarity.

Jason Randall [02:20]

So if a company has clarity, what does that look like? We've used an example sometimes: you can ask several people in the company, at all different levels, even customers, the same thing, and they answer the same way. So how does this actually break down in practice?

Kim Diorio [02:37]

This is harder than it sounds. If you ask somebody in sales, somebody on your service team, one of your senior leaders, and perhaps even one of your customers: Who do we serve, and who don't we serve? What do our customers value? What actual results do we deliver to them? And how do we know we're winning, or what's the measure of success? Clarity is getting the same answer from each of those stakeholders.

Jason Randall [03:06]

And that's very, very challenging to do.

Kim Diorio [03:09]

Indeed. And then when everybody's on the same page, it shows up in the day-to-day delivery.

Jason Randall [03:17]

The showing up is something I want to get into a little more. But before that, I want to draw a distinction. A company can be very busy and even seem very aligned outwardly. What's the difference between a company that's busy and an organization that has actually achieved clarity within that busyness?

Kim Diorio [03:37]

One of the first signals is high activity. It's not a lack of effort, but it tends to be fewer outcomes. So it's a great deal of activity, or busyness, without the results you're anticipating or desiring.

Jason Randall [03:55]

So I can feel really busy, I can even think I'm aligned, but because I haven't stopped and slowed down first, I can in fact not be aligned, and I can be eroding clarity rather than enhancing it.

Kim Diorio [04:08]

Right, because the direction isn't shared. Everybody's not rowing in the right direction, trying to achieve the same thing.

Jason Randall [04:14]

And I suspect a lot of our listeners are thinking, you know what, on some level, Kim, I resemble that remark. Something you're saying sounds a little familiar. What's a little elusive is why. Why is this something that breaks first as growth occurs? Let's dig a little deeper. Why is this the first thing to focus on, and why does it happen so early?

Kim Diorio [04:36]

I love this question, because when you're growing, more choices come about. When things are going well, different opportunities arise. You have the ability to work with different partners. You have sales coming in, potentially from customers who aren't your ideal customer profile, who you're not ideally suited to serve. You also want to get better and better at what you do, and start creating priorities around operating more effectively and efficiently. So those choices actually dilute clarity.

Jason Randall [05:10]

You said something a moment ago that's really interesting, and I think it's worthy of a little more depth: growth creating optionality. There are choices that get created, and that feels like opportunity. But this creates some danger, I would think, for a leadership team.

Kim Diorio [05:25]

It does. Just as everything in business and in life, everything has an opportunity cost. When you choose to do something, you're making a choice not to do other things, and you're fragmenting focus in a way. So being very intentional about what's most important to do, and even more important, saying no to the things that aren't the best bets, tends to have better results.

Jason Randall [05:52]

That saying-no part sounds really challenging. It could even be the DNA. It could be why growth happened, saying yes to all sorts of things. And then it's almost like growing up: my gosh, now I can't just nibble on everything that comes along. I have to be more focused to grow from where I am to where I want to be.

Kim Diorio [06:10]

Yes, and it makes the choices that much harder, because you feel you're missing out on something, or missing out on the opportunity.

Jason Randall [06:16]

It's not just different behaviors, it's different muscles. If you grew because you were highly flexible, or just made a bunch of exceptions, suddenly that erodes the clarity we're trying to provide, the team gets confused, and we can't grow anymore. Speaking from my own experience, running growth for Questco and having general management responsibilities for so long, sales is one of the places where this can manifest first and most prominently. You're getting into opportunities, and opportunities are pushing the organization. Is this a common place for organizations to see clarity drift first?

Kim Diorio [06:58]

It is absolutely one of those places. You tend to see sales wanting to say yes, for good reason. They want to solve the client's problem. They want the deal, but they also want to help. They come from the right intent. And the service team starts to get worried. In my experience, they share the same intent. They both want to do right by the customer. But sales understands the problem and wants to deliver a solution, and the delivery team knows what it takes, and they start to worry that sales is promising things that can't actually be delivered at scale.

Jason Randall [07:36]

Sure. And it's not uniquely a sales challenge. In operations, in a service business, we're often asked to redefine the offering. Clients push us a little harder. Are there some things on the opposite side that you look to as a similar phenomenon?

Kim Diorio [07:51]

Yes, absolutely. In my mind it's two sides of the same coin. You have the team that really wants to do the right thing, and they know exactly what it will take to deliver, and they start to get worried. Their focus shifts from delivering what they've committed to every day, with quality, to handling exceptions coming in. They have a hard time meeting those and giving everybody the same experience and results you've committed to.

Jason Randall [08:29]

So we've talked about what this is, and why it might be one of the first things you see as you grow. But let's help people resemble that remark a little more. What are the earlier signs that clarity is breaking, before anybody's even acknowledged or realized it? What are some hallmarks that clarity is breaking down?

Kim Diorio [08:50]

One, as we mentioned earlier, is that activity tends to be high but outcomes become rarer. When the leadership team is sitting around the table reflecting on the quarter, they start to say, well, we've had many projects running, but what have we actually delivered? What have we shipped? What have we completed? And it becomes hard to point to the thing we actually finished. The other thing that typically happens is the list of priorities grows. Rather than going to the team and saying, here are the top one, two, or three priorities, the list grows to five, ten, or more. That's another hallmark that clarity is slipping.

Jason Randall [09:36]

So I could say, well, my list is getting bigger, but why shouldn't it get bigger? My company's bigger, it's more complex, I want to do more things. And what you're saying is that's a force to be contextualized, and in some cases resisted. Is that a fair way to phrase it?

Kim Diorio [09:52]

It is. And it's not to say never do the things you want to do, but prioritize them. Pick what's most important now. Allow the team to focus on the one thing, or three things, that are most important, deliver them well, and then move to the next. That goes back to the muscle of saying no, which feels unnatural, but it brings a level of effectiveness, and I've seen relief for the team. Because when you come out of a leadership meeting with ten to twenty priorities, and you're very excited and you share it with the team, their first reaction is, how are we going to manage to do this?

Jason Randall [10:33]

How do we get it done? Right. And I've heard you refer to this as a quiet chaos. Why is that such a good term for what this experience feels like?

Kim Diorio [10:43]

To me it's a good term because, when you have active chaos or loud chaos, you can see the problem. You know there's a problem, you intervene, you fix it. This is much more insidious. You don't realize it's happening within the business until it's really a problem. The team is trying to do their best, quietly taking on what's given to them, out of good intent, but they're starting to feel overwhelmed. They're a little confused, people are crossing wires, and everybody's not rowing in the same direction. That shows up in very tangible, meaningful ways, but often not until you've had a meaningful fracture in clarity.

Jason Randall [11:32]

So a logical consequence is that I no longer know exactly where to prioritize, because everything is coming across as a priority. That feels chaotic. Could you put some more paint on the canvas about other ways this shows up in real-world businesses, whether it's a meeting, a pipeline review, or something across a team? What else are you seeing that's a hallmark of clarity eroding?

Kim Diorio [12:01]

I'll phrase it in terms of what great looks like. What it looks like first, when you have clarity, is trust and direction. Everybody understands who you serve, what you're trying to accomplish for them, how you're going to do it, and how you're not. Everyone understands the priorities, they're rowing in the same direction, decision-making becomes easier, and the team doesn't hedge. They understand what they need to do in order to move, and they're able to move without worry. There's relief in that. How it shows up practically is you have meetings that are very crisp and focused. You have that short list of priorities with clear outcomes attached, people know how to measure success, and you can track progress against it. You have people pulling in the right stakeholders to make decisions on the spot, and making those decisions. The flip side, when you have a lack of clarity, is that meetings tend to grow in number. You start to have many more coordination meetings and standing meetings. You have more people in meetings, so meetings go from three, four, or five people to ten, twenty, and perhaps more, because everybody needs to get and stay on the same page all the time. It becomes an effectiveness cost.

Jason Randall [13:40]

We've heard adages for years, like we can't be everything to everyone. Part of what we're describing is that, as we grow, that gravitational pull has to be met with some intentionality, or you drift into a lack of clarity. That's the default state if you don't take proactive action like you're discussing.

Kim Diorio [14:02]

Exactly. And this is true when people are growing fast, and it's also true when growth has stalled. Often growth stalls because you've experienced this. When leaders take a step back and really crystallize, sharpen the pencil, answer these questions, and get the team aligned, it tends to help performance in a pretty immediate fashion.

Jason Randall [14:27]

This is a really important point: it's an inflection-point issue. It doesn't mean it's a management failing. It means the underlying conditions that will enable future success are changing. That can happen in a deceleration, or just a difference. It's helpful to point out that it's not just aggressive growth. It certainly does take place in aggressive growth, but not exclusively. So we've talked about what this is, how to recognize it, and a little about the consequences, but not enough. In a word, how would you describe the consequence of a lack of clarity?

Kim Diorio [15:05]

I'd say there's a short-term consequence and a longer-term consequence, and they both tie to value creation in my mind. The short-term consequence is that the chaos becomes very costly. You're expending many more resources to get the same amount of work done. We talked about it in terms of more meetings and more people in meetings. You're using the time, energy, and capacity of your team to make progress. And without clarity, it's difficult to systematize delivery. When you have clarity, and you know exactly what you're trying to achieve, you can build things into systems and make things system resident rather than people resident: knowledge, process, and so on. The longer-term impact is that the business becomes more fragile. If you don't have clarity, you don't have the systems, and you can't transfer the company or the leadership to other people and other entities, because you have everything in people's heads, with a few individuals really carrying the weight of pushing the company in the right direction, rather than everybody understanding where we're going, what we need to do, and how we're going to do it.

Jason Randall [16:31]

This concept of everything being in someone's head is a really interesting and powerful one. How often, even in popular business literature and press, do we talk about visionary founders and things like that? There's a lot of value that can be created there, but you're pointing out something fundamental: that's not sufficient, because we accomplish results through a team, through other people. So we have to be more specific, is what I'm hearing.

Kim Diorio [17:01]

Yes. And often the founder is closest to the customer. They built the business from the ground up. They started with, what problem are we solving, and for whom? They were often out pounding the pavement with prospects, who are also customers, just prospective ones, understanding what it takes and what the secret sauce is for that particular company. Institutionalizing and systematizing that is really what clarity is the first piece of: taking it out of the founder's head and putting it on paper, in a way that everybody can understand and repeat and replicate, how to serve that customer.

Jason Randall [17:53]

Like turning a notion into a system, so that someone who has never met the person where the information resides can go ahead and act on it, and do it in an aligned way. I think that's really the nirvana we're seeking here.

Kim Diorio [18:05]

Exactly. And you don't want to lose what made the company great in the first place. That's one of the big risks with high growth. Sure, you can make things more scalable and more process-centric, but if you lose what made it great in the first place, the growth over time is going to stall. You'll lose the customer experience that created the company and those growth opportunities in the first place. You'll lose the culture. We'll talk about those in subsequent sessions. But that's where market clarity, and turning it into operational clarity, is the key.

Jason Randall [18:52]

Referring back to our framework, clarity in turn enhances culture, which then enables the desired customer experience. But it all starts with knowing which direction we're rowing. It's also important to point out that the example of the founder is very common, but it's not unique to literally a founder. It can be a department head. It could even be an individual contributor who's key to the business, who has driven a lot of progress. It doesn't literally mean the person who started or runs the company.

Kim Diorio [19:25]

Yes. And to that point, Jason, you talked about inflection points earlier. This is applicable when a new leader comes in. The first, most valuable thing they can do is create clarity for their team. The team wants to know what's important. They want to know what the direction is. They don't necessarily want to be told how to do things, but having clarity around why and what is critical to high performance.

Jason Randall [19:55]

So it's an opportunity and an obligation at the same time when a new leader comes in. Whether we're talking about the senior-most leader of a company or a department head, any leader has to have clarity of mission as a defining first activity. And in the absence of that, if we don't do it, what happens to trust?

Kim Diorio [20:18]

Trust erodes, and I believe it erodes very quickly. And that shows up quietly, again. The team starts to make decisions on their own, using the best information they have, but they may not be aligned with expectations. They tend to work in a more insular, siloed, or functionalized way. When you have clarity that's shared across the entire company, cross-functional collaboration becomes easier, because people know the leadership team is aligned. We all agree on the mission and what we need to do. They have more freedom to make decisions, work across lines, and work as a team, rather than moving into self-protection mode.

Jason Randall [21:11]

So what I'm taking away is that this topic is not optional. You can choose to ignore it, and then the circumstances happen by default, and luck plays a role. But business changes happen as a natural force within an organization. When they do, prioritizing clarity helps with the adaptive muscle in the organization. It enables whether it's accelerated growth, or just hanging in there amid a negative event. To avoid clarity is to shirk the fundamental responsibility of a leader encountering change. That's a really helpful tentpole for me to have.

Kim Diorio [21:58]

Yes. And when you look at the senior-most leadership team, that shared clarity is critical.

Jason Randall [22:06]

We've talked about what this is. I trust a lot of people, I certainly do, resemble it: my gosh, I've dealt with this many times without articulating it. I didn't have a framework. Maybe you haven't had a framework either, so you built one. I'm wondering how you can help us. Since we've identified this as something a leader will face, how do we face it? How can you arm me with some cognitive tools, some behaviors, that will help me lead my team?

Kim Diorio [22:39]

In my mind, there are a number of practical things that can be done. One is anchoring every initiative or product to a testable outcome. In my experience, one of the hardest questions to answer, for a team or a leader, is what are we trying to achieve? It's typically very easy to say what we're trying to do, in terms of the activity. But articulating the result, the result that matters and what the measure is, is harder. So it's taking a step back, looking at the activity that's instinctual, and asking, what result are we really looking for? Does this result matter? And how do I make it clear to the team that that's how we win, having it measurable and testable? That's one: what is the outcome? Another, we talked about it, is saying no, or ruthlessly narrowing priorities. It's hard, because at any of these inflection points you're either facing many great opportunities, or you're trying to solve big problems, growth is stalled, and it feels like many things will help move the needle. Or you're a new leader with a team and many stakeholders coming with suggestions and opportunities. But picking, for a particular quarter, what are the top one to three, making that clear, and letting your team know they have the air cover to say no, in my mind is critical.

Jason Randall [24:25]

All of these things are challenging. But going a little deeper on testable outcomes: a lot of leaders don't think of their role in terms of testing both sides of a question to come up with the right answer. They want to pick one, maximize it, and go. So how do you encourage someone to slow down and actually run a test, where you know the outcome might be bad, and you'll lose some time, but there's a higher reason to do it, a larger benefit than the lost time of experimentation?

Kim Diorio [24:57]

There is, and it is very difficult to slow down and test something, especially when you think it's a no-brainer, that it's absolutely going to work. But when you choose to do things, again, you're choosing not to do other things. And if you invest in implementing any solution without testing it, you run the risk of investing a tremendous amount of time, resources, and often dollars, in something that may not have the results you're hoping to achieve.

Jason Randall [25:30]

It's almost a risk-management question. You can go all in on one idea, the one you think is your best, but if you're wrong, you actually lose more time and money than if you'd done a more measured test up front and driven to a clarity-filled outcome.

Kim Diorio [25:44]

Exactly. And you may be missing the solution entirely. You may be left with the same problem, not having solved it, and having spent a good deal of time.

Jason Randall [25:57]

Good point. Likewise, the idea of ruthlessly prioritizing. The ruthless part can be really hard, especially if you've grown up doing the exact opposite: approving things, tinkering, trying things out. So how does an organization build the muscle for ruthless narrowing? What we're really talking about is that clarity is fostered by discipline. How do I build that discipline when I don't already have it?

Kim Diorio [26:30]

We're talking about small businesses, which often have limited resources. So capacity alone is a constraint, and that's a forcing function. I'd say lean into it. Recognize that our capacity is limited, we can only make a few choices, and getting the leadership aligned on which problems are most important to solve is the first step after you've identified what you're trying to achieve, what your goal is. What are the problems that are most important to solve, and in what order? You and I went through this exercise very recently, looking at our go-to-market process. We said, okay, we want to move faster for our clients, we want to help them make better decisions faster. So what's in the way, or what are our opportunities? We stack-ranked them and picked the top one or two. Then we made that clear to the team: here are the two we're going to solve this quarter, or in the next six months. Then bring the team around, set up the project team to go solve those. And regularly look at the list. Anytime something new comes in, have a trade-off conversation. We picked these two. This other item has come in. Does it displace one, or does it go into the backlog? So it's actually setting up a rhythm, an operational rhythm, to make the choices, review the choices, and make trade-off decisions when new opportunities come in. Inevitably, they will come in outside of the planning cycles.

Jason Randall [28:18]

Inevitably. Yeah.

Kim Diorio [28:22]

And sometimes daily, sometimes weekly. But having that as part of the leadership muscle, to say we need to look at our choices, and understand that any change we make is probably going to be cross-functional. So have a list, look at it together as part of the leadership operating rhythm, and build that muscle with each choice that comes about.

Jason Randall [28:43]

As someone who experienced this, I thought initially, well, this is going to feel terrible, because we're saying no, we're casting off things, things we might have felt were very important. But we're narrowing and focusing. And the way it actually lands is really quite different. It's energizing, because we're focusing on the highest-impact things, that value-creation lever you mentioned. It does the opposite of what I feared. It gets the team to say, okay, we know what's expected of us, we know what good looks like, and we can devote our limited energy and resources to the things that matter most. A lot of those other things that felt like spinning a lot of plates, we can set down. We can focus and get more done, not less. And what we get done is more impactful. Your perspective has been really key to our organization, and to others as well.

Kim Diorio [29:44]

That last point is key. It feels good to focus. It feels good to have clarity and know here's what I need to do today. It also feels great to win, and this enables the team to win. You pick a thing, you allow them to do it, do it well, move it to the left, and go to the next thing. When you have a list of ten or twenty priorities, it becomes very difficult for the team to win, and very difficult for the company to win, versus incremental wins and progress along the way.

Jason Randall [30:21]

One of the things that's a real delight about this conversation is that you're not just content to speak about this in abstract terms, or to give general advice. You've actually built a tool, free of charge to our audience, to really help them through this issue. I was hoping you could talk a little about our Clarity Self-Assessment, and how we access it.

Kim Diorio [30:42]

I'd be happy to. It's essentially a way, in five minutes, to do an assessment of your own company and team, and see whether you're in a state where clarity isn't as crisp as it could be, or where you're lacking some clarity. Then it helps you figure out what to do: picking one thing, again making choices, but one thing in the next quarter to help you get more clarity within your company or your individual team.

Jason Randall [31:15]

I just want to point out, this is again free of charge, very limited in time, but a real, practical instrument that can help you through some of the fundamental concepts we talked about, applying clarity to your own situation in a way that's time-efficient and resonant, and that works for your own circumstances.

Kim Diorio [31:36]

Exactly.

Jason Randall [31:38]

Well, good stuff, Kim. I really enjoyed this. And again, this is part one of three, so I'm really looking forward to the rest of these topics, as we talk about how clarity leads to building out culture, and then the customer experience, and how it all hangs together in something that really helps propel a growing business forward. Thank you for your contribution. Very exciting stuff, and much more to come.

Kim Diorio [32:04]

Thank you.

Jason Randall [32:06]

And to our listeners, thank you for tuning in to this episode of Up In Your Business. If this conversation helps you better contextualize clarity, and how it can help you reach your growth plans or contend with shifting circumstances, please share it with another leader who is navigating a very similar tension right now. You can find the Clarity Self-Assessment and additional resources in our show notes. Next time, we'll move from what breaks first on the inside to where customers start to feel it on the outside: customer experience. Until then, be well. We'll talk soon.