Who Is Running the Company?

 

Payroll was due within five days.

It was the first leadership meeting of the new year, and the CEO wanted a simple answer. Had the payroll been reviewed? Was there enough cash to pay it? Who had checked the numbers? Who was responsible for assuring him everything was under control?

No one could answer clearly.

The finance arrangements had been discussed. Meetings had been scheduled. Reporting routines had been proposed. Yet the leadership team could not confirm whether the payroll had been reviewed properly or whether sufficient cash was available.

The CEO’s frustration was immediate.

“Who is running this company?”

It was not a rhetorical question.

The business was a growing export manufacturer in Vietnam. It operated from two production sites, employed approximately 250 factory workers and 30 office staff, and had an eight-person leadership group. Customers wanted to place more orders and the commercial opportunity was genuine.

But growth had exposed weaknesses in the way the company was managed.

Delivery problems recurred. Quality issues reached customers. Cash-flow information arrived late or incomplete. Responsibilities overlapped. Managers sometimes waited for direction rather than resolving problems themselves. Important issues were discussed repeatedly, yet the same subjects returned meeting after meeting.

The founder had recruited experienced managers because he wanted to spend less time solving operational problems and more time with customers, product development and growth. Yet he remained the person connecting functions, identifying risks and driving action whenever momentum slowed.

The payroll discussion crystallised the issue.

The company had managers, meetings and reporting lines. It was far less clear whether it had an effective management system.

Looking beyond a single meeting

One meeting can be misleading.

An unusual crisis may dominate discussion. A key manager may be absent. Participants may arrive poorly prepared. A difficult issue may produce an emotional exchange that says little about normal behaviour.

For that reason, isolated examples were not enough.

Instead, we observed ten leadership meetings over approximately four months and treated them as one continuous body of evidence rather than ten separate events.

The review looked for patterns that appeared repeatedly. Did the same issues return? Were decisions converted into action? Did ownership become clearer? Did the team’s behaviour evolve over time? It also searched for evidence that challenged the emerging conclusions.

That distinction mattered.

One missed action could be an accident. A repeated failure to define ownership was a management pattern.

One forceful intervention by the CEO could be appropriate. Repeated intervention across different functions suggested something deeper about how the company operated.

One quiet manager revealed little. A consistent pattern of managers directing comments upward rather than working through issues with each other revealed much more.

The objective was not to judge whether meetings appeared orderly. It was to understand how the company discussed work, made decisions, allocated responsibility and converted management attention into completed results.

Two reports from the same evidence

The review produced two different reports.

The first was written for the client. It focused on the practical effectiveness of the leadership meetings: preparation, agenda discipline, use of information, decision quality, ownership, deadlines, follow-up and completion of agreed actions.

Its purpose was immediate improvement. It showed how the meeting process could become more reliable and how discussion could be converted into action.

The second report was for the consultants.

Using the same evidence, it asked more difficult questions.

How did the CEO lead the management process? What effect did his behaviour have on individual managers? Did the group operate as an integrated leadership team or as separate functions reporting upward? Which participants demonstrated judgement, ownership and systems thinking? Where did the organisation depend upon the founder? Which apparent capability problems were actually symptoms of unclear roles, authority or management processes?

The first report described what needed to improve.

The second helped explain why those weaknesses existed.

That distinction proved critical because the underlying problems were not simply procedural. They reflected the way leadership operated across the company.

Discussion was not the same as execution

The meetings were not short of ideas.

Participants identified genuine risks. They discussed cash flow, production planning, procurement, quality, customer payments, recruitment, new business structures and brand development. The CEO asked direct, commercially relevant questions, and managers often contributed useful analysis.

Decisions were also made.

The weakness appeared afterwards.

Actions were not consistently translated into a single accountable owner, a clear completion date and evidence that the required outcome had been achieved. Responsibility often remained shared across several people. Deadlines were sometimes implied rather than explicit. Later meetings did not always establish whether an action had been completed, delayed or simply forgotten.

The result was a gap between management discussion and operational completion.

A subject could receive significant attention without producing a dependable outcome. A decision could feel complete because everyone appeared to understand it, yet later evidence showed the organisation had not converted that understanding into coordinated action.

The payroll discussion illustrated the point. Cash-flow reporting and financial oversight had already been discussed. Meetings had been planned and responsibilities considered. Yet when assurance was required, the leadership team could not provide it.

The company’s problem was not a lack of management activity.

It was the absence of a dependable mechanism that carried an issue from discussion to verified completion.

A group of managers, but not yet a management team

The consultants’ review revealed another pattern.

Leadership meetings often became a series of conversations between the CEO and individual managers. Someone raised an issue. The CEO questioned it, interpreted it and often decided what should happen. Another manager then received an instruction.

What occurred less consistently was sustained problem-solving between the managers themselves.

Many of the company’s challenges crossed functional boundaries. Production affected quality. Quality affected customer payment. Procurement influenced cash flow. HR affected production capacity. Finance depended upon information originating in sales, purchasing and operations.

Yet the leadership group did not consistently operate as a collective unit responsible for the whole system.

Problems travelled upward before moving sideways.

The CEO became the route through which departments communicated, priorities were reconciled and actions coordinated. Managers could be capable within their own functions while still relying on the founder to connect their work to the rest of the business.

This highlighted an important distinction.

The company had experienced managers. It had not yet developed an integrated leadership team.

An integrated team would challenge one another, coordinate across functions and resolve issues collectively, escalating only those decisions that genuinely required the CEO.

Instead, many discussions still revolved around what the CEO wanted, what he had previously said or what he should now decide.

The founder wanted managers to take greater responsibility, but the team’s operating habits continued to direct responsibility back towards him.

When capable people operate inside an unclear system

The consultants’ review also challenged the assumption that disappointing performance necessarily reflected weak people.

Several participants demonstrated sound judgement, practical experience and the ability to identify risks. But their effectiveness was shaped by the environment around them.

Roles overlapped. Authority was not always clear. Reporting relationships continued to evolve. Managers were expected to take ownership without always having explicit decision rights. As new problems emerged, priorities shifted and responsibilities blurred.

Under those conditions, individual capability became difficult to judge.

A manager who repeatedly escalated issues might lack judgement—or simply lack authority.

A manager who appeared passive might lack initiative—or have learned that independent decisions would later be overturned.

A manager who failed to complete an action might be disorganised—or dependent on several other functions whose responsibilities had never been clearly defined.

The onboarding of a new procurement manager illustrated the point.

Procurement had been identified as a critical weakness and the company recruited someone with relevant experience. Yet her role, handover and priorities quickly became confused. Different managers held different expectations about what she should assume and how quickly she should take responsibility. She resigned during probation.

Some viewed this as another recruitment failure.

Others believed the outcome had been predictable because the role itself had never been properly established.

The evidence supported the latter explanation.

A capable person placed into an unclear system may fail, not because they lack ability, but because the organisation has not created the conditions in which that ability can succeed.

The founder as the company’s operating system

The most significant finding concerned the CEO.

The founder brought considerable strengths. He understood customers, products and operations. He recognised risks quickly, asked direct questions and moved rapidly from incomplete information to practical decisions.

When the management system failed to connect information, he made the connection.

When ownership was unclear, he assigned it.

When managers overlooked a problem, he identified it.

When actions stalled, he pushed them forward.

These interventions frequently protected the business.

His experience and judgement had allowed the company to grow beyond the capability of its formal management systems.

But those same strengths created a dependency.

Because the CEO repeatedly connected functions and resolved ambiguity, managers had less need to develop mechanisms for doing so themselves. Cross-functional problems often remained unresolved until he became involved.

A self-reinforcing cycle emerged.

Weak management systems increased the need for CEO intervention. His intervention prevented immediate failure. Because failure was avoided, pressure to strengthen the management system diminished. Managers gained fewer opportunities to exercise collective judgement, creating even greater dependence on the CEO.

The founder was therefore neither simply the solution nor simply the problem.

He was both.

His leadership had enabled the company’s growth. But the same operating pattern was beginning to constrain its next stage of development.

The contradiction at the centre of the company

By March, the CEO had made his expectations clear.

He no longer wanted routine operational issues brought to him. He wanted managers working together, owning outcomes, delivering against clear goals and allowing him to focus on customers, strategy and business development.

The management team understood that expectation.

The meetings also showed why achieving it would be difficult.

The CEO had repeatedly seen managers fail to anticipate problems, coordinate across functions or complete agreed actions. From his perspective, stepping back carried genuine commercial risk.

At the same time, managers operated in an environment where the CEO possessed the deepest knowledge of the business, frequently entered operational detail and often provided the final interpretation of what needed to be done.

The CEO wanted greater independence from the team.

The company still depended upon his intervention.

Managers were expected to take ownership, but ownership remained difficult while decision rights and cross-functional responsibilities were still evolving.

Both sides of the contradiction were supported by the evidence.

The CEO was right that managers needed to assume greater responsibility.

The managers were also working inside a system that continued to direct responsibility back towards the CEO.

Where the meeting analysis ended

The client report identified practical improvements to meeting structure, decision-making, ownership and action tracking.

The consultants’ report reached a more difficult conclusion.

The company’s next stage of growth depended upon reducing its reliance on the founder. Yet his judgement, urgency and intervention remained an important safeguard against weaknesses in the management system.

Removing that protection too quickly could expose the business.

Leaving it unchanged would preserve the dependency.

The central challenge was no longer how to improve meetings.

It was how to help a successful founder reshape a system that had grown around his own strengths.

That led to an even more sensitive question.

How could this be discussed with the CEO in a way that recognised the value he created, acknowledged the genuine failures that caused him to intervene, and still confronted the reality that his intervention was helping preserve the dependency he wanted to remove?

The ten meetings provided a high-confidence understanding of the company’s leadership system.

They also demonstrated that diagnosis was only the beginning.

The harder task would be deciding what to do with the truth.

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