Riviera Group Consulting

ARTICLE 06  /  RIDE THE WAVE

What Is Slowing Us Down?

When a team misses a milestone, the first question is often, “Who did not follow through?” Accountability matters, but that question alone may miss the real issue.
Perhaps the owner was never clear. Perhaps three departments needed to approve the same step. Perhaps the team was asked to deliver five priorities with capacity for two. These conditions create friction, and friction compounds.

One useful exercise is to map a delayed decision from start to finish. Who requested it? Who had authority? What information was needed? Where did it wait? What happened when the answer finally arrived?
Look for patterns rather than isolated frustrations. If every initiative stalls at the same handoff, the handoff may need redesign. If leaders regularly escalate routine choices, decision rights may be unclear. If the same issue appears in every meeting, the group may be discussing it without assigning ownership.

The solution is not always another tool or another policy. Sometimes it is a direct conversation about priorities. Sometimes it is removing an approval step. Sometimes it is deciding what the organization will stop doing so the most important work can move.
For boards, this is especially important. Oversight should help leadership see risks and results, not create unnecessary operational bottlenecks. Ask for the information that supports governance decisions, and agree on a reporting rhythm that staff can sustain.

Before asking people to work harder, examine whether the organization has made the work harder than it needs to be.

REFLECTION  If your team could remove one recurring bottleneck this quarter, what would it be?
Cover of book "High-Courage Conversations"
About the Book
You cannot control every wave. You can decide how you meet it. That lesson started in the ocean at a young age, when Lauren Sweeney's father taught her to stand to the side of an incoming wave and let it move through her instead of trying to fight it or turning her back on it, and it never really left her. In High-Courage Conversations, Sweeney, SHRM-CP, B.S., draws on two decades of leadership, from being a Retail Pharmacy Manager to building a sales team of hundreds to sitting in the C-suite, to make one central argument: courage is not the absence of fear; it is what happens when clarity meets capacity.

Across thirteen chapters, Sweeney tackles the conversations most leaders quietly avoid. The feedback that feels too risky to give. The values conflict that looks like a personality clash. The burnout hiding behind a full calendar and a fuller sense of obligation. The identity crisis that shows up when a title changes, or disappears, faster than your sense of self can catch up. She writes about chasing a credential to feel like enough, and about learning to stay present in hard conversations with her husband instead of freezing and disappearing behind her own eyes. This is not a book of tidy frameworks handed down from a distance. It is a field guide written from inside the moment right before you say the hard thing, by someone who has stood in that moment as a store manager, a Vice President, a co-founder, a board chair, a wife, and a mother, and who has learned, sometimes the hard way, what actually helps.

Readers will find practical tools alongside the stories: a way to name what's really draining you before you try to fix it, a script for the conversation before the conversation, three questions to ask in any transition. But mostly they will find permission to feel the racing heart and go anyway, to ask for clarity before demanding courage of themselves, and to trust that meeting the wave well matters more than controlling it ever could.
Buy on Amazon Please leave me a review!