Rolling up our sleeves only goes so far.
There has been an inflection point in the discussion where leaders realize that they simply cannot do it all. Virtual work has pushed us into a corner in two ways: first collaborative work is less efficient. Secondly, more time in the home office has led to more individuals working unsustainable hours.
I’ve been privileged to have multiple conversations with key business, financial and project leaders over the past few weeks, and as I’ve previously mentioned, powerful themes have emerged. They roughly parse into an awareness that strategy has never mattered more, teams have never been busier and talent has never been scarcer.
Remember What Internal Clarity Feels Like? (As Well as What Threatens It?)
Let’s get into the “Wayback Machine” and recall what it was like when you and your team were on point and on purpose. From the top of the house down, everyone was confident they were applying their best efforts to the most important task.
It’s that simple and that profound. The question is, how can we make that present tense?
The often unspoken truth is that this kind of clarity comes on the back of strong decision making – and strong decision making is rooted in strong leadership at multiple points in the firm.
Leadership needs to choose clear and unambiguously the strategic scope and direction. Operating leaders need to guard against scope creep and unchartered distractions that can quickly pop up like dandelions after a spring rain.
And now the other shoe: to be able to choose wisely, teams need to provide leadership with great choices. Subject matter experts need to deeply understand the context of their contribution and serve up as many insights and ideas as possible. Inducing those insights and making room to process them is a very important leadership role and opportunity – for those tasked with leadership at both the formal and informal level.
One runway level example: In every product-oriented firm there is a list of above the line and below the line projects. We all know that performing well in making choices on that list determines the future value of our firm as we serve clients and customers. What is less focused on, but every bit as important, is the decisions represented by that list guard the capacity, capability and performance of teams within the firm.
Open the gate just a bit too far and the creative part of the firm slows to a crawl.
Enter COVID, and Virtual Work
COVID hit us hard in our ability to collaborate, and many of the informal tools we previously used to monitor the health and capacity of our internal systems were not present. We covered for these shortfalls with herculean work hours and superhuman individual efforts.
This eroded the strategic clarity and decision making to keep focus clear and distractions at bay. It takes only a minor shift in a group’s clarity to bog the group down. For example, if we start to skip monthly project updates “because we are all Zoomed out,” team members are left to make directorial choices in a smaller, less specific context. Within this smaller world, almost imperceptibly at first, decisions are made to make the product easier for the team to create, rather than doing the harder work to make the customers’ lives better.
Taking the Lead
To get back on top of this, effective leaders are stepping into the middle of a triad – looking at the combination of committed projects, team effectiveness and plan. By making these three-way trade offs, footing is being restored and team health is coming back.
The challenging portion of this is to work on real root items that create momentum and leverage and not just symptoms. I’ve seen teams try to attack this by an all out blitz at the tactical level, and find that while it felt temporarily good to do the heavy lifting, when they put the shovel down, the tactical issues rushed right back in.
Having a guide to provide a question that is not being asked, or listening for what is not being said, creates those fresh insights and unlock points for standing above the tactical.
Getting Started
Just as it’s important to create clarity for your teams, it’s equally important to pursue this clarity with solid tools and diagnostics. My role is to be that guide to connect leaders with framework, vocabulary and a suite of tools that allows them to arrest the complexity and reinstall the clarity that the team is seeking.
This journey starts with a leader and a tight group who collaborate to make the shift. If you’d like to talk this through with me, please reach out via email, or use this link to put an appointment on the book.
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