Best label to worst, in three weeks.

There's a story I don't often tell in public because it's uncomfortable and because it involves people I still like. I'm going to tell it here because it's the clearest version of a lesson I keep coming back to, which is what actually holds a team together when the ground moves under it.

Around 2015, my remit at Sony expanded. I picked up the Spotify relationship at a moment when the whole company, and specifically the commercial side, was reshaping the way it worked with the platforms. There was a lot of good work being done. There was also a period, maybe three or four weeks, when I got a call from the person at the top of Spotify's UK operation who said, more or less directly, "you've gone from the best label to work with to the worst." Not by degrees. In three weeks.

I remember the exact moment because it landed physically. I was in the office. I put the phone down and I sat there for a while. My first instinct was to defend the work my team had been doing, because the work had been good. The second was to make a list of the specific decisions that had led to this, because there was a list. The third, which took longer to arrive, was to notice that the person on the other end of the phone was not wrong.

What was actually happening.

We had, without meaning to, made three decisions in short succession that had all landed on Spotify's desk at once. Each of them, in isolation, was defensible. One of them was arguably right. The other two were the kind of thing that reads as commercially rational internally and reads as "this label is difficult to work with" externally.

The version I want to tell you is not about which decisions those were. That doesn't matter for the point. What matters is that the accumulated effect of three commercially-rational internal decisions had made a strategic partner conclude, in aggregate, that we were now the worst label to work with. In a market where the platform was the customer, in every sense that mattered, "worst label to work with" was not a comms problem. It was a P&L problem, six to twelve months out.

What I did next was less impressive than I want to remember it as.

The instinct in that moment, when you're an operator with a team and a problem, is to fix the problem. I went into fix mode. I set up meetings. I mapped the three decisions, ranked which ones we could unwind, worked out what we could re-negotiate without setting fire to a different set of things internally, and started running the plays.

That was necessary. That was also incomplete. Because while I was doing all of that, my team was watching me. My team was smart. My team could see that something was wrong. The work rate had gone up. The internal meetings had gone up. My tone in meetings had shifted from "we're moving forward" to something more like "we're recovering." They could feel the recovery energy. What they didn't have was the specific story about what had happened and what we were doing about it.

I had not told them. I had been operating on the assumption, common in my career at that point, that senior leaders shielded their teams from the stuff their teams didn't need to know. I thought I was protecting them. I was, in fact, letting them read the situation for themselves in a fog of anxiety, without the actual facts to anchor to.

The turning point was a conversation with one of my direct reports.

She came to my office, closed the door, and said something close to "we can tell something's wrong, and we can't tell if we're the problem." That sentence has stayed with me because it's the exact failure mode of the leader-shielding-the-team playbook. The team wasn't reassured that I was carrying the weight. The team was assuming the weight was their fault.

I told her the whole story. Then I called a team meeting and told the rest of them the whole story too. Not the confidential-to-the-board version. The version that answered the question they were actually asking, which was, is this us, and what are we doing about it. I named the three decisions. I named what we were doing to unwind two of them. I named the third, which we weren't going to unwind because I still thought it was right, and I explained why.

Two things happened after that meeting that I hadn't predicted.

The first is that the anxiety dropped in the room. Immediately. You could feel it. Not because the situation had changed but because the situation had become nameable. People stopped running fear-driven decisions and started running the actual situation.

The second is that three of the people in that meeting came back to me over the following week with specific, workable ideas about how to rebuild the relationship faster than I'd planned to. One of them had a relationship inside Spotify I didn't know about and used it. Another proposed a change in how we structured a particular category of release that I would not have thought of, that turned out to be one of the moves that closed the gap.

By the time we got the next quarterly review call with Spotify, we hadn't gone back to being "the best label to work with." We had gone to a place where the head of the relationship on their side said, in an in-passing comment that landed harder than any formal review, "you're actually a good partner to have on the difficult problems now." Which is a different, and I think ultimately better, position to be in than "easy to work with when nothing is hard."

What I learned, that I now bring to this work.

Two things, mostly.

One. A team's anxiety in a moment of pressure comes from the absence of a shared narrative, not from the presence of the pressure. If the pressure is nameable, and the team is inside the story with you, the pressure metabolises. If the pressure is diffuse, and the team is left to guess, the pressure metastasises. This is true if you're running a commercial team at a label. It's also true if you're a founder running a company through a scaling shift. It's true anywhere a group of people are trying to work together through something that isn't going to plan.

Two. The reflex to shield your team is a very senior-manager instinct and it is, in most situations that require the team to actually solve the thing with you, wrong. Not always, and not entirely, but wrong more often than the reflex admits. The senior leaders I've worked with who carry teams through structural shifts best are the ones who overshare in the specific moments where the team most needs the story.

There's a third thing that I've only clocked more recently, having sat in my own version of the same fog after the letter came for me in 2024. When you're the leader trying to hold a team through a shift, some of the pressure you're carrying is the pressure that would land on the team if you weren't there to metabolise it. That work is real. The people who do it well are doing something important that the P&L doesn't measure. If you're doing it right now, and it feels like nobody is seeing it, I promise you it's being seen by the people who matter. It's just quiet work by its nature.

Why any of this matters if you're reading it.

If you're a senior person carrying a team through structural pressure right now, you don't need me to tell you it's hard. You need someone to help you see the situation more clearly than you can see it from inside it, and to help you decide what the specific next moves are. That's the work I do.

If you're a founder scaling a company through the wall where instinct stops running the room, the specific version of this problem you're facing is that you can't be both the person running the shift and the person absorbing the anxiety of running it. That layer, of someone building the structure that lets the team decide without you and lets you carry only the calls that actually need you, is the work I now do in a founder seat too.

If you're a senior person who left in a restructure and you're rebuilding, you're doing the same job you did when you held teams together, except the team is you now, and the ground moving under you is your own next move. That's the read I run.

Either way. The offer at the end of every post I write is the same and it's honest.