What the first three weeks in a struggling company reveal

In a company that is doing badly, the leader always has an explanation. The market turned, a competitor is cutting prices, the ERP never worked properly, one team isn't keeping up. The explanation is sincere, and it is almost always incomplete.

For a simple reason: a leader sees the business from one vantage point only, their own. The information that reaches them has been filtered, rounded off, sometimes tidied up, not out of bad faith, but because nobody wants to escalate a problem they cannot solve. The tighter things get, the thicker the filter.

What you find when you listen elsewhere

The first three weeks are not there to make decisions. They are there to reconstruct how the company actually runs, the version nobody has written down. Three things come up almost every time.

• The gap between the process as described and the process as performed. What teams actually do is rarely what the procedure says, and there is usually a good reason for it.
• Decisions taken long ago and never revisited. A customer kept at a loss, a product line maintained out of habit, an organisation sized for a company that no longer exists.
• People two or three levels below the leader already know. Someone identified the problem months ago. Nobody ever asked them.

How to go about it

A few simple rules are enough, and what they mostly cost is listening time.

• Interview at least two levels down, never the leadership team alone.
• Spend time where the work happens: the shop floor, the warehouse, customer service, a day out with a sales rep.
• Ask three different people for the same figure. Three different answers tell you more than an audit does.
• Separate the symptom from its cause every single time, and resist the first plausible explanation: it is the most visible one, rarely the most decisive.

Then decide. Past a month, listening turns into hedging, and hedging costs more than a wrong call.