How does your team stay focused on what’s most important when you’re not in the room?
The nightmare scenario: A team spends weeks or months developing a new idea before presenting it to you for review. You send it back to start over because it’s completely misaligned with the vision and the strategy.
— They are frustrated about their effort being wasted by your seemingly “arbitrary and unpredictable” decision.
— You are frustrated because they wasted their time on something that was a bad idea from the start, but nobody recognized that.
When working with this scenario with one of my clients, I asked him to articulate _why_ he thought it was a bad idea. He realized that while their proposal would create profit and user engagement (which were the criteria the team thought they were being measured on), it wouldn’t align with the overall vision of the company, and that’s why he had a visceral reaction.
In other words, he was making an implicit tradeoff. When building something, you can’t satisfy all constraints, so you have to choose what’s most important. The team had been optimizing for profit and engagement, which makes sense because they are clearly important and easily measurable. And, yes, he wanted them to optimize for those, but within the bounds of the company vision – the company vision came first.
After our session, he realized he had to make that tradeoff explicit. He went out with a new message: yes, profit, yes, engagement, but first and most important, company vision. He started repeating that message in every forum, from 1:1s to all-hands to emails. He painted the picture with stories of how the vision showed up in their products and features.
This is how you scale your leadership beyond what you can do yourself. You create a clear compelling message that helps everybody in the company align to a common set of values, so that they make the same tradeoffs you would make if you were involved. That’s how you move beyond micromanagement where you supervise every decision and/or do the work yourself, to creating an organization that thinks and acts in an aligned way.
P.S. Broadcasting principled tradeoffs is one of the tactics I share in my Maven course, Scale Your Leadership with the Executive Mindset, which is on sale this week as part of their Fast Track promotion. Click this link to register for 25% off: https://lnkd.in/g5G8gkqN