First Principles
It’s not a precipice. It’s a slow fade.
Yianni Ellis, Chief of Staff at Finastra, on the love-is-blind paradox that lets small missed deliverables slide, the toll that sustained pace takes on the leaders who are best at absorbing it, and why he expects a dip before agents make anyone more productive.
Yianni Ellis
Chief of Staff, Finastra
What this conversation is about
Asked what he notices before delivery slips, Yianni Ellis says the failure is never a cliff. It is a slow fade — rumblings of small missed deliverables, minor tasks, nothing that would justify escalating. Then he names why those get let go, and it is not negligence. He calls it a love-is-blind paradox at work. We are empathetic, and we know how busy we are ourselves, so when someone drops something small we supply the excuse on their behalf. Each individual pass is reasonable. Together they compound into the milestone.
His closing answer is about something he can only see too late, and he does not describe a delay. He describes capacity. A team run too hard for too long, which he pictures as an engine held at high RPM with the needles in the red — fine for a while, and damaging if it stays there. He is specific about who this happens to. Not the people who are struggling. The leaders running hundreds of people, who hold those roles precisely because they are strategic and know how to delegate, and who accumulate a toll from leading something that never stops changing. Two years on, in his words, they give up and move to another role.
What he wants is to see it earlier — and he is clear that the obstacle is not measurement but disclosure. He wants people to be able to say it upward, to their leader and their leader’s leader, and be met with support rather than judgment. Which puts the two halves of this conversation in an interesting relationship. Empathy aimed at the missed deliverable closes the question: we forgive it and never ask what produced it. Empathy aimed at the person opens one. Same instinct, opposite effect, depending entirely on what it lands on.
Three things to take from this
1.
Forgiving the small miss is how the signal gets deleted.
Letting a minor slip go feels like the decent thing, and it usually is. But the excuse you supply on someone’s behalf is also the moment the inquiry stops. You can be generous about the deliverable and still ask what made it hard this time. Those are separable, and most of us collapse them.
2.
The toll lands on the people who are good at this.
The pattern Yianni describes is not about anyone underperforming. It is about senior people who delegate well, absorb constant change, and stay effective the entire time — which is exactly what makes it invisible. Capable people compensate, and compensation is indistinguishable from being fine until it stops.
3.
Expect the dip before the gain.
As agents take on more of the building, developers become reviewers of agent output, which needs a different and more suspicious kind of attention. Yianni expects productivity to flatten or fall while people learn that, then rise. Planning for a straight line up is how a normal learning curve gets mistaken for a people problem.
“There is a toll that comes from leading an organization that is constantly changing and the pace is so fast.”
— Yianni Ellis
Host’s note — Dharma Ramasamy
Yianni reached for an engine at high RPM, and the analogy is closer to literal than he probably meant it. Sustained demand without recovery is not neutral for a body. The systems that carry you through a hard week are designed to be switched on and then off, and holding them on has a cumulative cost that accrues quietly while performance stays intact. There is no gauge on the dashboard for it. That is the whole problem.
He is right about who it happens to, and this is the part most organisations get backwards. The toll concentrates in capable senior people, not struggling ones, because capable people compensate. They work the extra hours, absorb the churn, hold the thing together, and produce output that looks indistinguishable from someone who is fine. Compensation is what capacity buys you, and it is also what conceals its own depletion. Which is why the visible event, when it arrives, is not a decline in work. It is a resignation, arriving two years after the cause, attributed to a better offer.
The part I would underline is his diagnosis of the obstacle. He did not say he lacked a metric. He said he wants people to be able to tell their leader, and their leader’s leader, and be met well. That is an accurate read: this information is not missing, it is withheld, and it is withheld because saying I am running in the red exposes exactly what you most need to protect when you are. Which means the answer cannot be a better survey. Asking harder in an environment where disclosure is costly does not retrieve the truth. It retrieves the safe version.
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Yianni wants to see the toll on his strongest people before it becomes a resignation — and he is right that the barrier is disclosure, not measurement. Reading that state from how work actually moves, without asking anyone to admit something costly, is the work I do.
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