The Question That Saved Ford, and the One I Had to Ask Myself First
Face reality
A little over two years ago, I stopped running.
Not because of an injury or a crisis. I moved back to the Toronto area and just stopped. A few half-hearted restarts. Nothing that stuck. Meanwhile, the 10K I had completed before the move sat in my memory as something I was proud of, and the half marathon I had planned to run a few months later sat there too, as the thing I never got around to.
Recently I hit a wall. Frustrated with a health plateau that wasn't moving, frustrated that I had let the momentum go, frustrated with the gap between where I was and where I had intended to be. I decided I was going to train for a half marathon. That was the goal. That was what was going to get me moving again.
And then I had to face reality.
I couldn't just pick a race two months out and expect my body to be ready. I couldn't skip the miles I hadn't run. I couldn't pretend the two-year gap wasn't there. I had to honestly assess where I was, research what was actually possible at my age and stage of life, find a race at least six months out, and build a training plan that could get me there without injury; scaling up gradually rather than jumping milestones I had no business jumping.
The ambition was real. But the ambition couldn't do anything until I was honest about the starting point.
That is the principle behind everything we do at Leadership In Focus.
The gap
The gap between what your organization knows and what it will say out loud is where every stall begins.
In September 2006, Alan Mulally walked into Ford Motor Company as its new CEO. The company was preparing to report a $12.6 billion net loss. And yet, in his first weekly leadership review, every single leader presented dashboards that showed green.
Mulally looked around the room and said: "We're going to lose billions of dollars this year. Is there anything that isn't going well?"
Nobody moved.
Eventually, after several weeks of this, Mark Fields, who led Ford of the Americas, showed a red. A significant product launch was at risk. He later admitted he fully expected to be fired for it. Things were so bad, he figured he had nothing left to lose.
Mulally started to clap. He knew he had finally broken through.
Within weeks, red and yellow flags began appearing across every review. The organization had learned that surfacing a problem was safer than hiding one. That cultural shift is where the Ford turnaround began. Mark Fields went on to succeed Mulally as CEO in 2014.
The person willing to say the true thing, in the moment when honesty felt most costly, turned out to be exactly the kind of leader the organization needed most.
I have seen this play out in my own leadership career too.
When I returned to Canada after several years on international assignments and took over a newly formed national key accounts team, my first weeks were entirely about listening. Individual conversations, early group meetings, watching what got discussed openly and what got handled carefully. What surfaced was different from the official narrative. Unresolved tensions. Challenges that had never made it into a leadership meeting. Opportunities that had been quietly set aside.
Only after that listening phase did I start making decisions. What had started as a year of decline turned into meaningful growth. Not because of a brilliant strategy. Because the strategy was built on what was actually true.
That is the only kind of foundation that holds.
Three things you can do this week.
If there’s an elephant in your organization, you know it. And the best way to manage it is to call it out, and no time like the present. Here are three things you can start this week.
Run a skip-level conversation. Talk to someone two levels below you. Ask: "What do you think leadership doesn't fully understand about what's happening on the ground?" Take notes. Don't defend.
Audit your last three leadership meetings. What topics appear consistently? What never appears, but probably should? That gap is your honesty gap.
Name one elephant. Identify one problem your organization has been avoiding. Name it in your next meeting: not to solve it, but to make it discussable. Watch what happens. Then do it again.
No more pretending
Facing reality is not the turnaround. It is the foundation for one.
I am not going to run a half marathon by pretending I am in better shape than I am. And you are not going to turn your organization around by pretending the dashboard is greener than it is.
The starting point is the starting point. The sooner you name it honestly, the sooner you can actually move.
If your organization is carrying conversations it hasn't been willing to have yet, we should talk.
Leadership In Focus works with leadership teams to surface what's true and build the systems that turn that truth into forward momentum.
