Corporate spring clean: Time to clean up your leadership act

Spring is in the air, and it’s not just your closets that need a clear out. Leadership teams – especially in tech – often accumulate a load of business clutter over time. Think outdated workflows nobody questions, bloated tool stacks, pet projects on life support, and “we’ve always done it this way” routines. Well, guess what? It’s corporate spring clean season. 

Grab the metaphorical mop and let’s scrub out the crap that’s holding your company back. It’s time to ask the uncomfortable questions: What’s actually working? What’s a total waste of time? Where are things getting stuck? 

It’s time to ditch those inefficient processes, evaluate the ROI of all those fancy tools, and make sure your shiny new year plan still makes sense now that the year isn’t so “new” anymore. 

Shake out the cobwebs in your processes

Every organisation has them – the legacy processes, the zombie projects, the recurring meetings that should have died after six months but refused to go quietly. They clutter your week and sap your team’s will to live. Why are you still doing things that don’t make sense? 

As management legend Peter Drucker famously put it: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” In other words, stop polishing turds and start flushing them. This is where your spring clean begins: identify the workflows and activities that long ago outlived their ROI and bin them.

Take a hard look at your team’s weekly rituals. That two-hour all-hands update call where everyone zones out? Chuck it on the bonfire of vanities. I recently spoke with Keith Ferrazzi – a collaboration guru who’s coached Fortune 500 teams – and he drove home how “traditional meeting-centric collaboration is inefficient”. In an era of asynchronous tools, do you really need daily check-in meetings, or are they just a habit? Ferrazzi suggests embracing agile sprints and updating shared documents to make decision-making faster and more inclusive. Fewer soul-sucking meetings = more time to get actual work done. Imagine that!

Stay flexible and learn to change

And it’s not just meetings. What about approvals and red tape? If your workflows resemble a Rube Goldberg machine, it’s time to simplify. Kevin Dutton, an Oxford psychologist who’s studied elite decision-makers, talked to me about cognitive flexibility – basically the ability to adapt and change your mind – as a key to success. Apply that here: be flexible enough to change how things get done. Just because some process was sacred last year doesn’t mean it deserves a place this year. Challenge every step: “Does this add value or just delay things?” If it’s the latter, you know what to do – kill it with fire.

Remember, even high performers clean house. James Kerr shared with me the All Blacks rugby team’s mantra: “Sweep the sheds.” Translation: never be too big to do the small things. After every game, these world champions literally clean their own locker room. It’s about humility and ownership – no one is above the basics. In business, “sweeping the shed” means leaders should roll up their sleeves and fix the little inefficient things everyone else has learned to ignore. Go find the small things that need to be done in your company – the clunky form, the outdated checklist, the report that no one reads – and either do them properly or eliminate them. Lead by example in purging process grime. Your team will thank you (once they get over the shock).

Stop worshipping tools

Tech companies love their shiny tools and platforms. But here’s a harsh truth: if your tools don’t earn their keep, they’re just expensive clutter. How many software subscriptions, SaaS platforms, or fancy dashboards are you feeding cash to every month without a second thought? It’s time to do an app audit. Modernise your toolkit – or streamline it. If a tool isn’t clearly making your team faster, smarter, or richer, then why the hell are you still paying for it?

If you’ve got a pricey platform that promised a Ferrari but delivered a moped, it’s time to ask for ROI evidence. Make vendors prove their value or show them the door. This isn’t about being stingy; it’s about being smart. Free up that budget for things that actually make a difference to your bottom line.

When it comes to the tools you do keep – make sure people actually know how to use them! A tool that’s underutilised is as bad as one not used at all. Train your team, simplify the tech stack, and ditch the duplicate systems. Efficiency is about doing more with less, not more with more. As the All Blacks would say, “Go for the gap – when you’re on top of your game, change your game.” Continuous improvement and adaptation lifted their win rate from great to legendary. Likewise, even if your current tool stack and workflows are “okay,” always be looking for that gap – the next tweak or trim that makes things even better. Complacency is the enemy of growth.

Reality-check your plans: April (or anytime) adjustments

So, you swaggered into the new year with a grand plan. Fast-forward a few months: how’s that working out? Spring is nature’s reminder to re-evaluate. Don’t wait until December to discover that your plan went off the rails in March. Take a hard look now. Are the goals you set in January still relevant and realistic? The market may have shifted, a competitor pivoted, or you’ve learned new info that renders some assumptions false. It’s not failure to change the plan; it’s failure not to.

In fact, Jim Collins (of Good to Great fame) urges leaders to use a “stop doing” list as much as a to-do list. That means having the discipline to drop projects and strategies that aren’t panning out. Collins observed that great companies aren’t afraid to pull the plug on things that don’t fit or no longer make sense. He calls it “the discipline to discard what does not fit — to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort”. Read that again and let it sting. We all have pet initiatives we’ve sunk time or money into. But if it’s a turkey now, it’s not turning into an eagle later. Be brave enough to say, “We tried this, it didn’t work, time to move on.” Your balance sheet will heave a sigh of relief, and your team will be free to focus on stuff that matters.

Maybe you’re seeing some early wins this year – great! Celebrate, but don’t get complacent. Early success can mask underlying issues. Conversely, if you’re noticing red flags – ahem, that big client project that’s slipping or Q1 sales that fell short – don’t you dare sweep it under the rug. Now is the time to confront it. 

So gather your leadership team and do a spring strategy retro. Ask yourselves honestly:

• What’s working that we should double down on? (Identify the processes, products, or habits that are clearly yielding results – and make them standard practice.)
• What’s not working that we need to dump or fix? (Pinpoint initiatives or tactics that are consistently underperforming – and decide whether to pivot or can them outright.)
• Where are our biggest bottlenecks? (Find the spots where work is slowing to a crawl. Is it a person, a policy, a piece of tech? Diagnose it, and then deal with it. No sacred cows, remember?)

The answers might bruise some egos (maybe your favorite project is on the chopping block). But it’s better to face reality now than to cling to a fantasy plan. As Mike Tyson noted, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Consider spring the friendly jab that tells you what’s working and what’s not, so you can adjust before it’s a knockout punch to your business.

Get your team involved (No one gets a free pass)

A corporate spring clean isn’t a solo activity for the CEO or founders – your whole leadership team needs to buy in and participate. In fact, involve all levels where it makes sense. Often the best insights about broken processes come from the people dealing with them every day. Encourage a bit of honesty (even if it stings to hear that your brilliant idea from last year is now seen as a time-waster on the front lines). Create a culture where it’s not only OK but expected to call out inefficiencies and suggest killing stupid rules. At every company I’ve worked at since Rackspace, I’ve given new joiners a little black book and ask them to write down the stupid processes that made no sense to them. Over the years, this has helped to get rid of so many crap ways of doing things.

And don’t forget to include your own habits in this clean-up. Leadership sets the tone. Are you hoarding decisions that you should delegate? Are you a bottleneck because everything needs your sign-off? Time to change that. It’s amazing how inefficiency melts away when decisions are made faster and closer to the action. As I learned from Keith Ferrazzi, moving toward “teamship” – a model of shared accountability instead of top-down hierarchy – can dramatically increase agility and ownership. In practical terms: let folks who own a problem own the solution, without a million hoops. Trust them a bit more, and see how much crap you no longer have to clean up next time.

Don’t just spring clean – keep it clean

The best companies build continuous improvement into their DNA. They don’t wait for things to grow barnacles; they course-correct constantly. So set up a recurring rhythm. Maybe each quarter, do a mini “spring clean” review. Hold each other accountable: What did we eliminate or improve last quarter? What are we tackling next? Celebrate the stuff you’ve cleaned (hey, if nobody misses that report you stopped producing, that’s a win). By keeping the pressure on, you avoid the pile-up of nonsense that necessitated this deep clean in the first place.

This is your chance to reset. The year is well underway – you can either coast on autopilot and hope for the best, or you can get proactive and make sure your ship is running a tight course. Spring cleaning your company is about intentional leadership: focusing on what truly matters and having the guts to ditch what doesn’t. It takes a bit of humility, a bit of courage, and yes, a bit of swearing under your breath as you confront the mess. But the result? A fresher, leaner, more focused organisation ready for the rest of the year.

So stop procrastinating. Roll up your sleeves, rally your team, and start tossing the trash. Clean out the workflows, purge the tools, fix the broken plans, and knock down those bottlenecks. Your business will run better, your people will feel the difference, and you’ll free yourselves up to actually innovate and grow rather than wading through muck. 

Corporate Spring Clean: it’s cheaper than a real spring break, but trust me, it’ll feel just as refreshing. Happy cleaning!

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Written by business coach and leadership coaching expert Dominic Monkhouse. Contact him to schedule a call here. You can order your free copy of his book, Mind Your F**king Business here.