Leadership teams rarely stall because they lack strategy or talent. They stall in the way the team operates day to day, where meetings stay polite, priorities multiply and the work stays stuck with the same few people at the top. Bedford Square Publishers hit this point three years into building an independent publishing house, with eight people carrying a list of projects longer than any of them wanted.
Jamie Hodder Williams co-founded the business after leaving a large publishing group, and he started working with PerfX in September. In this conversation with David Malkinson he talks through what nine months has changed, what the feedback data showed the founders about themselves, and where the programme needed reshaping to suit a business of their size.
Busy, and not moving fast enough
Bedford Square Publishers started three years ago when three colleagues left a large publishing group to set up on their own in crime fiction, general fiction and a little non-fiction. There are eight people in the business, supported by a wide network of freelancers and partner publishers including Faber in the UK and HarperCollins in Australia, so the leadership team has no spare capacity to waste on work going nowhere.
We had been incredibly head down in the business trying to drive the books forward, working on a lot of different projects at the same time. We came into the process feeling incredibly busy, and also feeling like we were not pushing forward our key strategies as fast as we wanted.
This is the pattern PerfX is built to break. Across more than 1,600 teams analysed, 79% of a team’s performance comes down to how the team operates as a system, which is why effort alone rarely closes the gap between a plan and its delivery.
What the feedback showed the founders about themselves
The programme opens by measuring how the team works, so every member of the leadership team completed a 360 and the founders gathered feedback from their people and from external partners. Little of it shocked them, and Jamie is clear the value came from seeing familiar problems set out with enough clarity to act on.
It is not so much there were surprises, as it was very clear as to the things we needed to work on making a big difference.
Three constraints came through. The founders had all been a bit too polite with each other, holding back on what needed saying because everyone looked busy and nobody wanted to add to another person’s load. The team, meanwhile, wanted more of the work coming from the leadership, and the founders had underestimated both the capacity and the appetite sitting there. Behind both sat a planning habit: projects were scoped in too little detail for the smaller parts to be handed on, so they stayed with the people least able to absorb them.
Adapting the programme to an eight-person business
Not everything landed first time. Parts of the material read as corporate to an independent publisher, and Jamie says so plainly.
It was partly the language, which felt like it was written in the form of a business book we had all read 20 years ago. We felt like we were having to decipher it a bit, which was frankly a bit boring.
They reshaped it. The team changed the type of sessions they ran, kept the diagnostic data as background, and turned the sessions into direct conversations about the work in front of them. Stripping out the corporate framing took them to the real issues faster, and the tailoring is what made the programme fit both the size of the business and the stage it had reached.
What nine months has changed
The most visible shift is speed of correction. The leadership team moved meetings around and introduced new ways of communicating, and when one of the changes was not working the team said so within weeks and dropped it, which is a faster way of amending behaviour than most businesses manage.
It feels now like we are more focused on fewer priorities with more people involved in taking them to the conclusion. We are trying to work on less, and trying to do it better and faster.
Two further changes have stuck. The team sets firmer deadlines and firmer criteria for calling something finished, in place of projects drifting on without a defined end. And the conversations are franker, with more challenge in them, so asking for help or flagging slow progress happens early rather than at the point where it costs money.
The six-week rhythm, and the results
PerfX runs in short cycles rather than as a single event, and Jamie points to the six-week sprint as the mechanism keeping the team honest.
It gives you a very tangible check-in every six weeks. At four weeks we were all looking at each other going, we have two weeks to go on this and we have not moved it forward enough.
Against the goals the founders set in September, split between strategic targets and behavioural ones, the behavioural improvement has been marked. The strategic side moved through subtraction rather than addition, which felt uncomfortable at the time and paid off in delivery.
We have achieved more by setting ourselves less to do, which probably seems counterintuitive. The biggest project for us was getting set up in America with a big partner company, getting all our books printed and shipped over there. Our books are now on sale in America, and this week for the first time we are beginning to see revenue come through.
Jamie stops short of claiming the goal would have been missed without the programme, and he is specific about the contribution: the process helped the founders focus on it, break it into sections, and spread the work across more of the team than would have happened otherwise.
Where the value sat
Asked what he would tell another leader considering it, Jamie separates the structure from the human work inside it.
The best part of it is the coaching and the human impact. Working directly with the coach who used the data we gathered as background, then challenged us on our ways of working, felt hugely productive. It was the human part resonating most strongly with my team.
His summary of the benefit for a small business runs to three things: better communication across the leadership team, visibility of the working habits nobody had named, and a sprint structure making significant progress possible on limited resource in a sensible time frame.
Five things to take from Bedford Square Publishers
- Politeness is a performance constraint. When a leadership team holds back to protect each other’s workload, problems surface late and cost more to fix.
- Your team likely wants more of the work. Test the assumption before you conclude there is no capacity below you.
- Projects planned in detail are projects you are able to delegate. Vague scoping keeps work at the top of the organisation.
- Define what finished looks like. Without a completion criterion, projects run on and occupy attention long after their value has been banked.
- Cutting the list moves the list. Fewer priorities with more people behind them beat a long backlog worked on in parallel.
Frequently asked questions
What is PerfX?
PerfX is a team performance programme from TPC Leadership, powered by Meta Team. A short team diagnostic identifies the constraints holding a leadership team back, workouts remove those constraints inside the team’s real work, and new rhythms hold the uplift in place. See how PerfX works.
Does PerfX work for small businesses?
Yes. Bedford Square Publishers runs with eight people and a network of freelancers and partners, and the programme was tailored to suit the size of the business and the stage it had reached. Teams from startup through scale-up to established organisations use the same find, remove and embed sequence.
How long does PerfX take to show results?
The programme runs in six-week sprints, so each cycle produces a visible checkpoint. Across PerfX engagements, teams see a trackable performance uplift of 10 to 40% within six months, with an average uplift of 23%.
What does the PerfX diagnostic measure?
It measures how the team operates as a system, covering areas such as communication, focus, decision speed, delegation and mutual accountability, then benchmarks the team against industry peers so the biggest constraint is obvious.
Is PerfX a coaching programme or a structured process?
Both. The data and the sprint structure set the direction and the pace, and the coaching turns the findings into changed behaviour inside the team. Clients including Bedford Square Publishers point to the coaching as the element with the strongest effect.
Find out where your team is losing performance
Most teams run 20 to 30% below their potential, and the constraint is rarely the one people expect. An eight-minute team diagnostic shows you which constraint costs you most, and where the fastest uplift sits. Talk to us about a diagnostic, or read more in Insights.
