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MAKING HEADWAY

BY RICH FARRELLY

You have my full attention, Dear (Credit: Me)

Welcome to issue #12 of Making Headway, a monthly letter to you, with a focus on doing your best leadership work and hopefully, making some tweaks to your life. I love that you are here. If this was forwarded to you, subscribe here.

Sunday, October 5th , 2025 

Hello Plot-twister,

This is the first anniversary edition of Making Headway. Thank you for being part of a part of it over the last 12 months. I am so glad you are here.

What a month it has been. I sent the last newsletter to you at about 7.45am on Tuesday September 9th. By 9.30am someone had stolen my electric scooter (and lock) which was secured to a pole outside the cafe I was in. What a bummer. 

Talk about letting the air out of my tyres. It was as simple as kicking a little wedge out of the ground where the pole was slotted into, lift the pole out, and off they go. 

Here's the scene of the crime - they left the pole laying haphazardly on the ground. So rude.

  Crime scene (Credit: Me)

(I have only just looked at the art work in the back ground while I write this. It is quite impressive. If you want to see it, go to Little Bourke Street, Melbourne near the corner of Spencer Street.)

I miss the scooter. I miss what it represented more - freedom, fun, joy, thrills. All that good stuff was seemingly taken away in a very brief moment.

It led me to taking my pushbike out of storage, dusting it off, pumping up the tyres and hitting the road. I did not expect that sense of freedom, fun, joy, and thrills would return, but I got all that good stuff.... and then some. Not only that, but in my mind, I am now one peg up the road warrior ladder - just above those electric scooter riders. Maybe the crook was doing me a favour. 

It reminded me how much our expectations colour an experience. I expected the bike to feel like a downgrade but it ended up giving me so much. Expectations can box us in, and sometimes the best outcomes arrive when they are disrupted.

So, let's talk about expectations.

Screenshot from the video in the link at the bottom. Yep, I could have just done a submarine.

When the Captain Stopped Giving Orders

When David Marquet took command of the USS Santa Fe, it was one of the worst-performing submarines in the US Navy. Morale was low. Performance was shaky. And the expectation was clear: the captain gives the orders, the crew follows.

That’s how things had always been done. The culture was dependency.

Early on, Marquet deliberately broke that script. Instead of giving orders, he told his officers, “I intend to…” and had them say the same back to him.

So rather than waiting for direction, a lieutenant might say, “Captain, I intend to submerge the ship to 400 feet.”

Marquet’s job shifted from answer-giver to question-asker: “What do you see? What do you expect to happen? What risks have you considered?”

It was jarring at first. The crew had expected a commanding captain with all the answers. What they got was a leader who put responsibility back on them.

And that disappointment of expectations flipped the culture. People started to think. To own their decisions. To lead.

Within a couple of years, the Santa Fe went from worst to best in the fleet. This wasn't because Marquet had all the answers, but because he changed what was expected of everyone else.

Here's a good little video to explain what he did.

Credit: Done with AI. I didn't have any of my own.

Sitting Forward, Not Sitting Back

When people arrive at one of my programs they are ready to be taught. Day one, 9.00 am, classroom setup. Sitting there with laptops open (I have made peace with them in the room) or notebooks out. Many in the room settle in to be passive for a few days.

The reality is the first five minutes change that. No introductions. Pens down. Fingers off keyboards. A story. A question. A discussion. How much risk they are willing to take during the program. By 9.30, the room has shifted from spectators to authors.

Here is how I keep it there, and it is the same in leadership.

Set the tempo, then keep it.
Think together. Try it. Decide.
By morning tea, they have started understanding themselves. By lunch, they have started understanding their challenges. Before we leave, a next step with a name on it.

One liberating rule.
This is football, not tennis. When I lob a question in, respond to the group, not me. Open it up. Bounce it around. Pass to someone who has not spoken yet.

Use questions like handrails.
“What’s on your mind.”
“And what else.”
“If this is a yes, what do you need to say no to?”
The right question shifts the weight back to the people who will carry it.

Make learning visible.
At each checkpoint I ask, “What’s been the most valuable and useful for you so far?” We harvest that. The learning is named in the room, not assumed.

I don't expect miracles to occur within a program. I leave that for outside the room. We start with a simple build in the mind and finish with a small behaviour. That is how expectations shift. One clear choice. When people make choices they tend to own that choice and carry it with them.

Guest Post x 2

This month I have not one, but two friends contributing. We have our regular, and good friend of this letter, Paul Edwards. We also have Sara Tiefenbrun who I have come to know and admire from the goal-setting group we are in. Let's hear from Sara first.

Sara is a strategic storytelling coach and workshop facilitator. She is highly sought after in the storytelling space. She helped me understand the little bits of gold-dust I had in my stories and how to use them. This is Sara's reflection on expectations.

***

Back in 2016, I had a stint working at a health tech firm in their marketing team. It was a small startup where we all had to multitask and I became responsible for customer insight.

Some customers were disappointed in our product and their negative feedback made me squirm. Naturally, I wanted our product to get rave reviews.

Each month I'd gather the results and report on them to the CEO and senior leaders. 

One day, when I shared the report with the CEO and other leaders, he turned the tables on me. 

His email shot back - "Well, what should we do about it?"

His question took me by surprise.

He was challenging my expectations, by asking me to come up with ideas to improve the product - not only to point out flaws.

It's easy to critique what's not good enough. It's a whole other thing to get your hands dirty trying to find a solution. That’s when you start to understand the true nature of the problem. 

The trouble was, I didn't feel like coming up with solutions.

Partly, I didn't have the knowhow, but the bigger issue was I wasn't invested in the vision of the company. I didn't know where we were heading or why.

All I knew was we were trying to capitalise on the predicted growth of the DNA testing market.

There didn't seem to be a genuine motivation to solve a customer need. And that made me uncomfortable.

Perhaps I was a harsh judge, and there was a purposeful vision – it just needed to be unearthed, clearly articulated and communicated. The leadership needed buy-in. I needed a reason to care.

This is the work that I do today. Senior leaders reach out when they want help articulating a narrative and getting their team on board. 

I offer 1:1 coaching and in person storytelling workshops to facilitate this. 

Stories are a powerful yet under-used tool. Because they hit with an emotional punch, they make your message more memorable.

It’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day urgent demands but so important to make time for this deeper work, because it affects everything else. 

Paul and I are often chatting about 'stuff' and when I told him I wanted to talk about expectations in this letter there was a long pause, followed by "Riiiiiight." Anyway, here's how it went.

PE: I'm quite intrigued by this newsletter’s theme.

RF: Why’s that?

PE: I often hear people talk about unmet expectations. But I think the real issue is unmanaged expectations.

RF: Isn’t that just semantics?

PE: Not really. I go back to Covey’s circles. An unmet expectation feels like it sits in the Circle of Concern. An unmanaged expectation is in your Circle of Influence, maybe even your Circle of Control.

RF: Go on.

PE: Years ago, I worked at a professional services firm delivering IT systems. When bidding for projects, we had to estimate costs carefully. If delivery would cost $200K, we couldn’t be bidding $150K.

RF: Makes sense, but what’s that got to do with expectations?

PE: Each team lead gave estimates. But the professional services manager had a trick: he tracked the gap between what teams said and how long things actually took. Over time, he built multipliers. If Gareth said four weeks, he knew it would really be six.

RF: So he managed his expectations and the sales team’s before they became unmet.

PE: Exactly. I’m sure you’ve had moments like that yourself.

RF: Definitely. A group of us used to go out for dinner. One friend, Steve, was always late, not five minutes but an hour or more. Everyone expected people to arrive close to the booking time.

PE: That would drive me mad.

RF: It did. I used the '6 Brothers Principle'. My six brothers were regularly running late to any event that was organised. I started giving them a start time 30 minutes earlier than the actual time and they were on time. With Steve, we managed it by telling Steve the dinner was an hour earlier. If the booking was 7:30, we told him 6:30. The rest of us arrived on time, and Steve would roll in at 7:40.

PE: A perfect example of turning unmanaged expectations into managed ones.

RF: Exactly.

PE: That reminds me of when I moved into a place with an open fireplace. I pictured cosy winter nights, but the chimney was blocked. The room filled with smoke, and we had to open the windows and let in the freezing air.

RF: An unmet expectation?

PE: More like a smoky one. Let’s just say I had grate expectations.

RF: That was bad.
 

Expecting more?

There is so much more to write on each letter I send, but I appreciate people's attention spans and other commitments. I know you would like more, so get in touch and I am happy to chat. 

I like to think we are all little cheer squads for each other in this world and our default position is that we all want each other to succeed in business and in life, so feedback and ideas are always welcome. I know it is coming from a good place. I am even open to a ‘letter to the editor’, if you are inspired to write.

Thanks for reading this far. 

Write back and let me know what breakthrough you have had after reading this letter. What thoughts you had. Just a sentence (or longer, if you like).

Write to you next month.

Rich

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