The Catalyst is a Group 18 publication. I'm Kevin Noble. I run a business transformation consultancy and write practical frameworks for leaders who want more from themselves and their teams. If someone forwarded this to you, you can subscribe at https://catalyst.group18.co/.
Just a few days after you read this, Group 18 will have its first full time employee. Anna was the first person to dance with me last year. We’ve been hitting our OKRs, and now the business is now in a position to extend her an offer to join full time. I’m honored, excited, and humbled to have her join me full time.
What’s been exciting is the team working on a client without me. For a business I started, where I’ve had to do everything since the beginning, it’s been amazing to have people working on a client where I’m not involved at all. What’s even better is that they’re crushing it. I love seeing excited and positive messages flying around in Slack. It’s a good example of this turning into a “real” business, which is the main Objective for the year.
A few weeks ago I woke up at like 5AM in a cold sweat; my brain decided to start thinking “all of this revenue could go away.” 😨 So, I proceeded to catastrophize and ruminate instead of sleep. Before too long, I came to my senses, and remembered that that kind of unproductive thinking gets me nowhere. I reminded myself that I’m capable of surviving whatever comes, and the cure for fear is to take action. I resolved to wake up and spend a portion of my work day taking action on sales.
I listed out the various things I could do to drive sales in a new brainstorming page in Obsidian. Then I got to work, checking off the tasks over the next several days.
What’s funny is I think literally everything I did had zero impact. Nothing came of it! 🤣
BUT, within one week of that brainstorming page, we closed two deals, and I entered six new leads into our CRM (that’s a lot for us). I find it really funny that my active work had no impact, but somehow the universe decided to reward my efforts anyway. I’ll take it.
AND this is all before we start working with a marketing person and new sales person. There are two new relationships forming, but they haven’t come online yet. If they do, and if they work, I’m going to have a real capacity problem to solve. It’s already a little tight.
Our business is still so small that these swings are likely going to be normal for a while. There will be periods where I’m worried about revenue not being high enough for our capacity, and others where our capacity can’t handle our revenue potential. Every time I solve one it creates the other. Running a small business continues to be fascinating.
How are your goals going? I’d be interested to know if you’re dealing with any interesting struggles. Tell me about it at kevin@catalyst.group18.co.
Kevin
“
But the truth is that many companies, especially large complex companies, don’t really have strategies. At the core, strategy is about focus, and most complex organizations don’t focus their resources. Instead, they pursue multiple goals at once, not concentrating enough resources to achieve a breakthrough in any of them.”
— Richard Rumelt in "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy"
Deep Dive on Mood
Back in 2010, the company I worked for went out of business. My first child was only six weeks old. So I hit the job market and took a role as a shipping clerk in a company I felt I could grow within.
On my first day, my new team dumped a slightly dusty box of electronics on my desk. It was the job everyone hated - flashing hardware devices with new firmware. You had to do the same boring thing over and over again, dozens and dozens of times, for hours. So they waited until the new guy showed up and handed it to me.
I could've taken their clue that this was a crappy job and subsequently had a crappy day.
Little did they know - I’mmotivated by process and metrics!
So I took those dusty devices and I sat down and started writing out the flashing procedure. I rearranged the steps to make it more efficient as I got more familiar. I timed myself: started here, finished here, so my velocity is this. Then, ooooh, I saw I could parallelize it! There was time I'd be waiting on one device where I could start the next one.
In the end I had pages of notes, an SOP where there was none, a spreadsheet log of serial numbers and dates, and metrics on throughput we could use to assign this task in the future.
I had a great day.
I could have moaned about doing the work. I could have gone to the break room and commiserated about the shitty job, then waited until the next new guy showed up so I could dump the box on his desk. That’s what everyone prior had done. But that’s not what I did, because I found something inside the work that lit me up.
The same dusty box drove two completely different days. The difference between mine and everyone prior was the mood I brought to it.
Mood decides which possibilities you can even see
Your mood often feels like a reaction to circumstance; this situation stinks, so I’m in a bad mood - or this situation is great, so I’m in a good mood. That’s because those are the easiest reactions your mood can take, but mood is a choice, and the choice you make influences what you see.
Moods open and close different possibilities for action. In a positive mood, you invent and create. In a negative mood, you defend and protect. The same situation creates different possibilities depending on the mood.
When a team member shows resistance to change, when they say “we already tried that and it didn’t work,” that’s usually not a fact about the work. It’s a mood pretending to be a fact. In the prior statement the mood is resignation. Resignation generates a “we’re going to lose” feeling, so the person also thinks, “why try?” If you asked the person, they’d say they’re sharing an assessment of reality, but it’s just a mood operating subconsciously and calling itself effective judgment.
Why should you care as a founder? Because your team’s mood isn’t just a vibe (although it certainly is one of those - anyone who walks into your company or meets your team immediately senses the mood). The mood is also a business input that affects your outcomes.
A demoralized team can’t see the opportunity you hired them to find
I started working with a founder whose team had no fire in the belly. I’d bring problems we should go solve, and they’d shoot them down on contact.
"We already tried that." "That won’t work here." "That’s not a big deal."
Or, we’d go looking for problems, like asking how different processes were performing. And they’d tell us everything was fine. 🤔
It’s not a mood I’m used to. Everything was very status quo according to the team.
But then I’d look at the issues I saw myself, or I’d reference my discovery notes from talking with the team, or I’d think about why the founder asked to work with us in the first place, and wonder - how can everything be fine, or not worth solving?
That mood was contagious, too!
I felt it. My team felt it. The clients felt it.
I love solving problems, and even I started getting down in the dumps. My team noticed it. Some clients had even stopped having meetings with their team because they felt it - mood is a churn risk!
What’s interesting is that the same opportunities that I saw were hidden to the team.
I’d observe the broken systems and processes and other problems and tell the leader how much opportunity we had. Not my most mature word choice in Slack, but I wrote that I was “salivating” at how much we could improve things. It really was that exciting!
Everyone else could see the same “facts,” but the mood literally affected what people saw. I saw opportunity, others saw nothing, or saw the same problems as evidence of a crappy place to work.
My mood let me see the upside, their mood created blind spots.
Any mood is contagious.
The weather goes up, too
You’ve probably heard that leaders bring the weather. It’s true. The mood at the top sets the climate for everyone below.
But that’s not a unique characteristic of being a leader. Moods travel to humans in ALL directions. Moods affect your peers on your first team. We already saw how they affect clients. And a team’s mood can affect the mood of their leader, too.
My client hadn’t been struggling because he’s a weak leader, he was just running a team that had quietly and slowly gone resigned. And a resigned team will infect the founder who’s supposed to be infecting them. No wonder he was feeling down - he’d already caught it! Thankfully the founder had enough of a spark left to say, “No. I’m going to fix this.”
The wrong move here is to assume the fix is more discipline, more grit, more positivity squeezed out of the leader. That diagnosis is backwards. The climate he was living in was being generated below him and rising up.
What changed for the leader wasn’t me hiring his problems away or giving him a pep talk. It was me bringing a team that likes to work into the equation. We ran organized meetings. We took problems off his plate instead of handing them up with a “look how broken this is” attached. We created movement. Things got done. We had fun.
He told me more than once that the meetings now give him energy instead of draining it (this is not a humble brag, just pointing out the pivot - you can work on problems in a way that creates energy or drains energy - it’s a choice based on your mood).
We didn’t even reduce the number of problems! There was more to talk about once we started uncovering everything. But we changed the mood in the room, and the mood went up.
Weather (mood) travels in every direction.
What this means for you as a leader
If mood is a business input that flows up into you, here’s what to actually do about it.
Read mood as a leading indicator - it tells you where performance is heading before the metrics do. When sports teams go resigned, the effort to make the big play just disappears; nobody’s diving for the ball. Same in your company. So watch for the readings: the reflexive “we tried that,” the team that says it’s slammed while the work doesn’t get done, the client who stops taking the meeting, people showing up late, not being engaged, etc.
Hire for it. Hire for characteristics and attitude, not just the hard skills. But watch out for creating learned helplessness! You can hire people with the right characteristics, but then get on their case enough times for doing something wrong that they stop trying. Don’t punish the initiative out of good people and then wonder where the fire went. You own both factors: select for the orientation, but then don’t build a system that teaches people to stop offering!
Protect your own mood settings, because you’re not immune. You influence the climate, but you’re just one person; a founder steeped in a resigned team will absorb it. Treat your own mood as a business asset and be conscious about engineering for it. Part of why I started my own business was so I could choose who I work with. I don’t want to spend my days with Debbie Downers, because I’m old enough to know exactly what their mood does to mine. You should do the same.
Mood feels like a soft, unserious part of running a company - or it feels like a byproduct - the thing that lags everything else. And like I said in the beginning, sometimes it is - it’s easy to be in a good mood when the stock price is high, and it’s easy to be in a bad mood when things get stuck.
But mood is a very important factor in outcomes, and it’s something you have agency over. You can look at a problem and choose to say “it’ll never change.” Or you could look at the same problem and choose instead to say, “I can’t wait to figure this out!”
With enough work, enough practice, and enough experience, you won’t even have to work as hard to engineer your good mood - it'll be part of your natural orientation.
Call to Action
This week, read the mood in your next team meeting before you read the agenda. When someone shoots down an idea, ask yourself - is that a real constraint, or is that resignation talking? When the team says it’s slammed but the work isn’t moving, treat it as a data point on mood, not a capacity report. You don’t have to fix anything yet. Just start seeing the mood that’s running under the surface.
And if you’ve got a story about mood flowing between people - or a dusty box you turned into a good day - I’d love to hear it. Email me at kevin@catalyst.group18.co.
Kevin ⚡
If this kind of thinking is useful, it's what I do professionally. Group 18 works with business owners and leaders of growing companies on the operational and leadership challenges that limit performance. If that's relevant to what you're working on, I'd like to hear about it.