Leadership Symptoms Analyzed (5)

Editor’s note:

This post is inspired by a discussion that happened on the Leader’s Cafe Foundation Forum in LinkedIn. The forum can be found here: Link To LinkedIn Forum. And the specific discussion can be found here: Specific Discussion.

Dear Managers and Leaders!

In my five previous posts, I first listed 6 symptoms that leaders should take really seriously and then analyzed the first four symptoms: "A team member does not produce what the leader was expecting", "Team members are not coming up with new ideas" and ""Team members are unwilling to push their boundaries", and "Team is operating from fear". Today, we will continue our analysis and tackle the fift symptom: No one seems to know what is urgent, crucial, or at which point we are right now.

As you lead your team, you really want to have all your team members on the same page. You want them to build the same ship, to march to the same drum beat; you want them all to be aligned with your vision. This is what you want. However, reality can be quite different from what you want! Leadership deals with human beings and human beings are diverse, understand different things even when listening to the same source, have their own agenda, and sometimes forget. To succeed in having everyone on your team focused on the same end goal requires your constant effort and attention.

That means that you must always be aware of where your people are really going, not where you think they are going. You must also constantly re-enforce communication of your vision, of where you want them to go.

Signals

So, what are the first few signals that should alert you about an alignment problem within your team? I would say the following should compel you to re-state your vision and priorities to your team:

• Bad priority call by one of your team members – If one of your team members makes a priority call that goes against what you would have made yourself, you should be alerted and try to understand why it happened and align the team member right away.

• Lack of focus, or the focus is not important to attain the vision – When you see people on your team going in all sorts of directions that are not important to the achievement of the vision, you should definitely have a talk with them and re-focus their efforts.

• Team’s ideas are going in wrong direction - In team discussions, ideas brought up by your team members are not going in the right direction. You can see that if you followed them, they would not lead the team in the direction set by the vision.

It is probably impossible to come up with an exhaustive list of signals, but you should understand the general pattern and apply it to your particular situation.

Causes

Causes of this lack of alignment in your group can be multiple. Here are a few possibilities to help you sort out what is happening in your team.

• Lack of vision from the leader – if the leader himself does not know where the team is going, then the team will have problems following the leader. As soon as the vision becomes blurry, you will see the team members actually creating their own vision, consciously or not, and follow this vision.

• Lack of communication of the leader’s vision – if the leader has a clear vision of where the team is going but if that vision is not communicated clearly to the team, then it is equivalent to not having a vision at all.

• Team does not share or embrace the leader’s vision – here we are in a situation where the leader has a good vision of where the team is going and he has communicated that vision clearly to the team. Now, if the team does not share that vision, if the team members never bought into the direction where the leader wants them to go, then the leader will always have to fight with the team to make them go where he wants.

• Vision is clear but the plan is ill-defined – everyone agrees here on a clear, well-communicated vision. However, that vision is far and away and the path to get to the vision has not been clearly established. That means that the goal is defined but has never been actualized. People see the goal but no one knows how to get there. In this case, you are not facing misalignment but rather confusion as to how to make the vision real.

• Leader did not set priorities clearly – if the team is not clear as to what the priorities are, or if everything has equal importance, then it is really difficult for the team members to make the right calls by themselves when faced with a difficult situation.

Solutions

As you can see above, your team will lose its sense of direction when a vision for the team is not clearly established and shared by your team. When team members do not know what the collective vision for the team is, they will define their own vision and act upon it. This might not be conscious, but this is what will happen because a certain vision needs to be created before action can take place. You cannot really hammer a nail if the shape of the house to build is not well defined in your mind. The problems come when people building the house together do not have the same vision of the shape of the house. The house will likely never be finished if everyone working on it had a different vision of the completed house.

Leading a team is like building a house. The team needs to share the same vision of their end product or destination otherwise nothing will be achieved despite all the effort put into it. The team needs to share a collective vision. As the leader of the team, you own that collective vision. You are responsible to make sure that the collective vision is created, shared, communicated, and acted upon.

Note that I’m not saying that you need to define that collective vision on your own. Please do not get me wrong here. It is OK, even preferable, for the leader not to create everything himself. Have your team help elaborate the vision! Have your team find solutions to their own problems as a team. This is actually extremely powerful! If you have your team participate in defining the collective vision of your team, you will see that people are suddenly engaged and the vision will be automatically shared by everyone on the team. On top of that, your team’s vision will then be anchored in reality because your team members are on the floor every day. They are connected with reality.

What about you dear leader, does your team have a clear collective vision? Do you have all your team members acting in concert and going in the same direction? Also, if you see other causes, other signals, or other solutions, please share them with this group so that everyone can benefit from your experience!

Until next time,

Remi Cote

PS: InnovaChron offers a series of workshops and programs that help teams work together to create their vision, solve their problems, or improve their performance. To find out more, please visit InnovaChron's web site or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.

PPS: If you find these postings interesting and would like to learn more about what I can do for you and your team, then please visit InnovaChron's web site or contact me directly at remi@innovachron.com.