My Biggest Takeaway from "The Five Day Turnaround"
My buddy Jeff Hilimire just came out with his first book “The Five Day Turnaround.” As an avid reader of his blog and sponge of his work/life insights the last few years, I knew I had to read it.
Knowing Jeff is an entrepreneur and mostly writes about entrepreneurship on his blog, I fully expected his first book to be dedicated on how to best start a company. Literally judging the book by it’s cover, I fully expected the story line to be about a startup that had five days to make some huge breakthrough or go under. This wasn’t that story.
What surprised me was how much the story and lessons in the book were geared toward intrapreneurs. Without giving away much of the book, most of the lessons are geared towards a large legacy company trying to make changes. He applies an entrepreneur way of thinking to someone inside the walls of a corporation.
The plot has two lanes. One is a legacy company. The other is a startup agency addressing its own set of challenges. There were a lot of takeaways from both story lines but one truth seemed to resonate with me throughout the book:
Trust Is Everything
Culture is 100% built on a foundation of trust. It’s not built by ping pong tables, bean bags or a keg in the office. While those things may be part of creating the office atmosphere you want to create, trust is the underlying theme below everything.
Does your company have flexible work location arrangements? Loose office hours? It’s part of the culture but it’s because they trust you to do the right thing by them and your teammates.
Do you have a loose meeting schedule? It’s because your team trusts that you’re out there working and getting your stuff done.
Trust assumes the best intent of those you’re working with. It’s absolutely something earned with time but the book taught me that it’s the common thread of all attributes of a healthy company culture.
What a lack of trust creates
Both companies in the book hit some roadblocks. When all the details were stripped away, both groups realized that the negative behaviors that had creeped in slowly over time were due to an erosion of trust - even if it wasn’t realized or intentional.
Jeff’s book does a great job of showing the ramifications of a lack of trust within teams. He also outlines, very tactically, how both teams worked to rebuild that trust culture that helped them succeed. When the large legacy company made significant work-style changes, the employees had to trust that leader that he was doing the right thing by them. That leader’s peers had to trust that he was doing the right thing by the company.
A lack of trust can be a massive productivity killer. A lack of trust creates things like:
More meetings. If you have more status meetings than time to work, there may be a trust issue under the surface where everyone needs a meeting to make sure people are doing their job
Micromanagement: if a leader becomes micromanage-y (or if you feel like you have to be as a leader), it’s because there’s no trust in the people hired to get the work done correctly. If you don’t trust your team as a leader, why did you hire them?
Losing a team-first mindset: if trust erodes, people may not feel like they can depend on their team. When that happens, an organization could be filled with more people out to take care of themselves…because they are the only person they can trust.
An erosion of trust can be a silent but rapid culture killer.
Other takeaways
I’ve never read a book written in a narrative format that had so many tactical takeaways. There were several principals in the first chapters of the book that were applicable to me…and I could start implementing today. While there is a workbook in the back for teams, the narrative approach made the points Jeff was trying to make really come to life in my mind. The lessons became less abstract and way more real.
I learned that there’s no time like the present to make change. In the book, changes are recommended but there’s no incubation period to see if it’s right. All the changes made at Titan (the legacy company in the book) are made immediately. Thinking through big decisions is always positive but the book points out the dangers of analysis paralysis.
I think it’s a book that’s great for groups to work through together. I also think it’s one (for me) to pick up and re-read at least once a year. A refresher on the lessons Jeff provides probably wouldn’t hurt.
Interested in reading it yourself? Check it out here.