June 3, 2025
Breaking Free from the Performance Rut: How Leaders Can Overcome Complacency
Send us a text Episode 138: Are you giving your absolute best, or just enough to get by? That comfortable routine might actually be your biggest career threat. The silent killer of professional excellence is complacency – that subtle shift from passionate engagement to simply going through the motions. As we explore in this episode, complacency doesn't arrive with fanfare, but rather creeps in through routine tasks and diminishing challenges, eventually leading to laziness, sloppiness, and m...
Episode 138: Are you giving your absolute best, or just enough to get by? That comfortable routine might actually be your biggest career threat.
The silent killer of professional excellence is complacency – that subtle shift from passionate engagement to simply going through the motions. As we explore in this episode, complacency doesn't arrive with fanfare, but rather creeps in through routine tasks and diminishing challenges, eventually leading to laziness, sloppiness, and missed opportunities.
For leaders, the stakes are particularly high. Your team mirrors your standards and approach. When you become complacent, they follow suit, creating a downward spiral of diminishing performance. The organization faces increased risks as market signals are missed and important details overlooked. Meanwhile, your own growth stagnates, limiting future opportunities.
Episode outline:
- What are the signs of job performance complacency?
- Improvement starts with us, as leaders,
- Coach your team to better performance.
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Chapters
00:00 - Recognizing Performance Ruts
01:30 - The Risks of Workplace Complacency
04:00 - Signs of Job Performance Complacency
06:50 - Leadership Starts with Self-Improvement
08:40 - Coaching Your Team to Excellence
10:10 - Action Steps to Overcome Complacency
Transcript
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Have you ever been in a performance rut before? Did you ever find yourself only making the most minimal effort with your work products and even in your leadership? We have all at some point found ourselves just doing enough so our boss will leave us alone. It might be fatigue or a lack of passion. So how do we get out of this phase of complacency with anything? It comes down to our mindset, our habits and what is influencing us, good or bad, let's restart that high performance passion again by overcoming our complacency. Please enjoy the episode. Welcome to the finance leader podcast where leadership is bigger than the numbers. I am your host. Stephen McLain, this is the podcast for developing leaders in finance and accounting. Please consider following me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. My usernames and the links are in this episode's show notes. You can also follow finance leader Academy on LinkedIn. Thank you. This is episode number 138, and I'll be sharing a few tips on how to recognize and overcome complacency so our work effort and our leadership improves. And I'll highlight the following topics. Number one, what are the signs of job performance complacency? Number two, improvement starts with us as leaders. And three, coach your team to better performance.
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Legendary coach and team executive Pat Riley said, when a great team loses through complacency, it will constantly search for new and more intricate explanations to explain away defeat. Complacency can get any one of us at any time. It's when we are going through the motion of routine tasks and assignments.
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Complacency often leads to laziness, which leads to sloppy work and a lack of attention to detail. You will miss important details or significant data signals once you become complacent, also our team influence across the organization will become stagnant and ineffective. We also no longer feel challenged, but it is our job as leaders to challenge ourselves and our team so we feel refreshed in our job, so we grow and so we don't get bored. For when we are bored, we are not giving 100% and that means we could miss something when we don't do our jobs, we put the organization at risk. We could lose market share to a competitor. We could miss a sign for a major future economic problem, and we could miss out on opportunities that could drive more growth. Now those are organizational risks. We also have personal risks, like losing our job for failing to act properly. We also risk personal growth, which means we could not be as skilled or as prepared for a future role, our own leadership development is now at risk. I do hope you enjoyed my two previous episodes, which were some amazing interviews.
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And episode 136 I interviewed Matt Lemo, the CEO of Concord worldwide, and they provide amazing contract management services. And in Episode 137 I interviewed the co founders of service physics, Brian Reese and Steve Crowley. They provide consulting services around organizational efficiency and transformation. If you have not listened to these interviews yet, I highly recommend it. They provide some amazing leadership and financial management advice as leaders, I recommend conducting an ongoing SWOT analysis within the scope of the responsibilities for yourself and your team. This will help you to become focused on what is important so the work becomes fresh and relevant to the organization and for decision makers, please pay attention to how your team members respond in the weekly one on one sessions.
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Also, are you even doing these meetings anymore? If you stop doing them? Please, let's get started again. The one on one sessions are valuable to align priorities and resources, and they are very helpful to get feedback from your team members.
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You can learn a lot by meeting with your team individually. I have talked about complacency before on this podcast. It's a real threat to high performance.
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Complacency can dominate your team. Once you get into a groove of performing your everyday tasks, you can get underwhelmed by what you do. I want to always find that fire for excellence.
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What helps you to look for ways to improve yourself and your team, and how do you prioritize the effort and sure you also align with your boss? That's a great place to start to become focused again on what's important your boss's priorities should become your priorities.
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Goals. If you have a supportive Boss, don't fear asking for feedback and help in where you might be struggling. I want to encourage you to keep working on your goals. Now. Keep it up.
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Don't quit, even though many things are competing with your attention, carve out time each day to make some progress. We have to pay attention if we are settling into a routine within our work, even though we might like a routine because it is predictable, a routine usually means average or mediocre performance, and that means we may have trouble accomplishing our goals. It really means that we are in a professional and a performance rut, or even a downward spiral, you can't improve if you settle into a routine. How can you get out of a performance destroying routine?
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Number two, improvement starts with us as leaders. Now we need Now let's talk about overcoming complacency. Number one, what to be watchful, because we are the standard bearers for the are the signs of job performance complacency? It's when you welcome or surround yourself with a routine. Have you become organization. Our people are watching us as we accomplish our happy with accomplishing the minimum? A routine means you are not generating any new ideas that you are doing the minimum duties. If we step off the gas, so to speak, they will too. We to get by each day. Do you rationalize mediocrity? Have you must continually assess ourselves, defeat the status examined anything new lately?
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Are you trying to uncover new insights. Do you have any fresh information for decision makers?
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quo. Always look for improvement, challenge Have you stopped taking the initiative? When we become mediocrity, challenge all the accepted assumptions. So you complacent, we stop taking the right risks? In time, more will refresh everything. I worked previously for a company unmitigated risk will evolve in your areas of responsibility.
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that was making money hand over fist, and that can be dangerous This is the danger of not being more proactive in your duties, and unmitigated risk continues to grow. It can threaten the for our mindset, because no one wanted to change anything.
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overall existence of the organization.
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Making money easy can lull you into complacency. In the present, you have outstanding results. But will this trend continue over the next five or even 10 years? What if something changes in the market or in the economy, but you don't adapt.
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What if your customers change their habits? Does your product or service have substitutes?
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There are so many factors to consider, but when we become lazy in our thinking and in our leadership, we can miss the signs of change. We can overlook the assumptions in our business model. This is a great example coming from Apple. Now, in the 80s, they developed an amazing Apple to E product, and that became a cash cow for them. It was being sold everywhere. Apple ended up relying on the Apple two sales to drive most of their growth. Now that growth was going to have an end at some point, and they were having trouble innovating. The leadership really wanted to focus on continuing to grow the apple 2e but Steve Jobs, who was a co founder of Apple, wanted to innovate and find new ways of growth. But that was a challenge for the senior Apple leadership number three coach your team to better performance. You must get back to leadership fundamentals.
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Begin with yourself. Know your tasks and projects, meet the deadlines and exceed expectations, set the team's priorities and review everyone's tasks, meetings and projects, to get everyone working in the same direction. Again, protect the team from unwanted distractions, push back on the work of your team until it meets a high standard of performance. As leaders, we should always be coaching our team to better performance by challenging results, assumptions and the methodology. Challenging the status quo gets us out of the professional rut. Schedule your weekly one on ones with each team member. Again, these are very valuable in getting feedback and for aligning your team with your priorities.
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Additionally, ensure you conduct an effective weekly team meeting. This is where you can see where your team can best collaborate on a problem in order to help each other. Your team will follow your lead no matter what level you are at, even if you are CEO and you become complacent, your senior executives will also you will risk losing key leaders who don't want to work in an environment of stagnation.
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Leaders set the tone for accomplishment. They set the tone for achieving the impossible. If you quit, they.
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Quit. If you set away for overcoming the toughest of obstacles, then they will follow.
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Now for action today, are you and your team stuck in a routine? If yes, it will take leadership to get out of it. You must start with your own approach to work. I want you to ask yourself a few questions to help you get back on track. Has your boss stopped coming to you for help, or stopped assigning tough projects to you? Take this as a sign that others are seeing what is happening the next. Have you or your team missed important deadlines?
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Accountability begins with yourself. Start setting the right example, beginning today.
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And then ask yourself, what new idea project or key data finding can you focus on to help decision makers? And finally, what should the priorities of your team be? Set them and start holding yourself and your team accountable to get back on track to higher performance, you need to change in mindset, Outlook and priorities. Challenge the status quo, challenge yourself and your team, hold everyone accountable and find new ways to be impactful to the organization.
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Today, I talked about overcoming complacency, and I highlighted the following points. Number one, what are the signs of job performance complacency? Number two, improvement starts with us as leaders. And three, coach your team to better performance.
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I like to remind myself that I should not become complacent in all aspects of my life, not just work. Every area of my life needs attention so that I grow as a person in my most important relationships, complacency can slowly seep into every aspect of our life if we let it stay on fire for life and focus on what's important so you don't let complacency overtake you.
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I hope you enjoyed the finance leader podcast. You can find this episode wherever you listen to podcasts, if this episode helps you today, please share with a colleague until next time, you can check out more resources at financing your academy.com and sign up for my weekly updates so you don't miss an episode of the podcast. And now go leave your team and I'll see you next time. Thank you.
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