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February 14, 2021

Could a large toy elephant transform your business?

You’ve guessed it, Ellie is ‘the elephant in the room’, and she’s available for action if you want to call out something in a leadership team meeting. When you pick her up, the rest of the team know that you need to get something off your chest and it may ruffle a few feathers.

One of the most powerful ways I’ve seen Ellie used was at a planning session when the CEO revealed that a co-owner hadn’t been doing their job for many months. The CEO grabbed Ellie, hugged her tight and talked about the co-owner’s poor performance. She even dived deeper into an underlying issue around the co-owner’s values misaligning with the organisation.

It was uncomfortable at times, but the Ellie-led intervention began a transformation that saw the co-owner dropped from the leadership team within six weeks, and they were out of the business within four months.

The moral of the story? If you tackle the elephants in the room, you will make sure the business doesn’t end up as a white elephant.

If you’re planning to grow your business in 2021, send me a message, and I’ll happily send you a copy of my book, Scaling Your Business in Unpredictable Times.

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