About the Episode
In this episode of Corralling the Chaos, Angela Alea sits down with two leaders in the middle of rewriting how their companies operate. Steve Tanruther, Vice President of Rock The House Entertainment Group in Cleveland, is rebuilding his operational playbook after switching rental systems and moving into a new building at the same time. Jason Spencer, Vice President of Event Operations and Strategy at Webb Production, is tearing into every workflow across every department, breaking down silos that used to be somebody else’s problem. Neither change is small, and neither one is finished.
What they get into isn’t a software conversation. It’s what happens after you decide: how you tell your team, what the pushback actually means, where listening stops being leadership and starts being an excuse, and what it costs to hold still while the industry moves. Both of them answer the question almost nobody asks out loud — what happens if you don’t make the change.
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Takeaways
Takeaway 1: Before you decide it’s a people problem, check whether it’s a you problem. Both leaders started in the same place, and it wasn’t the org chart. Steve made himself sit with an uncomfortable question: “Why is this team failing?” Then a harder one. “What haven’t I done to enable their success?” He works down the list from there — are the expectations unreasonable, do they have the tools, do they know how to use them, has anyone asked them what they think. Jason did the same thing before touching headcount. “I personally don’t think we have a people problem, or at least right now I’m not addressing the people problem. I’m 100% re-looking at our workflows.” His read is that accountability was never possible in the first place, because the process wasn’t documented enough to hold anyone to.
Takeaway 2: Not all pushback means the same thing, and one kind is a gift. Steve sorts resistance into buckets. There are habitual resistors, who push back because that’s who they are, and who he says he owes both compassion and firmness. Then there’s intellectual resistance. “My gosh, bring it. Tell me all the reasons why this isn’t gonna work.” His point is that the people doing the work know things you don’t, no matter how long you’ve watched them do it. Jason’s experience is that the real pushback shows up late, not early. “You have those initial conversations, everyone’s like, yep, that’s good, we need change. But then you start actually changing and people are like, wait, hold on, this is gonna affect me.” What sits underneath it, most of the time, is overwhelm, fear of the unknown, and trust that hasn’t been built yet.
Takeaway 3: You can’t listen your way to a result. Jason thinks the industry has overcorrected. Thirty years ago bosses mandated everything; now the pendulum has swung the other way. “I think the pendulum swung a little too far…we’re not taking enough action.” He points out that most leadership work is invisible from a few levels down, so a team can go months without seeing anything change and reasonably conclude nothing did. Steve’s fix is mechanical: never leave a conversation without action items and owners. Sometimes the assignment is to go find evidence the idea is bad. “But we can’t talk it to death. So I need you to go do the work.” As Angela puts it, sitting in the uncertainty doesn’t move anything along.
Takeaway 4: Waiting is a decision you already made. Angela lays out the divide she sees across the thousands of event companies LASSO talks to each year — the leaders who stay curious, ask their peers and their own teams what’s coming, and then have the courage to act, versus the ones waiting for something to happen so they can react to it. Jason doesn’t hedge. “You’re either moving forward or you’re falling behind. There is no just standing still. Inaction is action in and of itself.” He’d rather have the problems that come with growing than the ones that come with holding: less revenue, fewer people, less of everything. “If you wait, you turn into a firefighter and you’re gonna lose that battle.” Steve’s version is blunter. “Standing still or thinking about doing a thing isn’t the absence of a decision. That’s a decision.” And the world doesn’t wait with you. “Your customers aren’t, technology isn’t, your competitors aren’t, your employees’ expectations aren’t.”
Takeaway 5: With AI, the leader who doesn’t have the answers is at an advantage. Neither of them is selling AI as a fix. “It’s not gonna solve all of our problems, it’s just a tool,” Jason says, and his read on jobs is specific: AI replaces tasks, not people. Steve won’t predict how big it gets, but he’ll name what it does today. “It is going to free up grinding time and make space for thinking time.” What’s more useful is how they’re teaching it, which is to say they aren’t. Jason runs a monthly AI lunch anyone can drop into and an internal AI council setting guardrails, and most of what moves is people showing each other what they built. Steve’s advice for anyone frozen at the starting line is to stop researching and start typing. “Say, hey, I have this problem. And just listen.” Angela’s take: leaders get paralyzed thinking they have to go find all the answers before they can bring the change to their team, when the faster version is learning it together.
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