If you want to align a collaborative team that delivers on its priorities, you can do what most leaders do:
- Host weekly meetings to review progress towards targets
- Solve enough urgent problems to ensure the boss focuses elsewhere
- Emphasize (and create more) processes
- Stress the need for accountability to governance
- Talk (argue?) endlessly about who has decision rights
In many organizations, particularly large ones, if you do the above often enough, you will be safe. You will fit in and keep pace. The system will carry you.
And you will be good enough.
For some, however, being good enough is not what they are here to do. Drumming up others to play their role and do tasks is not what they call leadership.
These leaders spend their time differently, ensuring the members of their team:
- Yearn for a shared vision that is so clear they can feel it in their bones
- Connect humanly to one another (regardless of having to work on opposite sides of a sea)
- Embrace and hold core values as non-negotiable
Spend one day with a team that only does A-F, and then another day with the team doing 1-3, and a stark difference is observed. Specifically, the quality of interactions among team members in the latter group is so enhanced it transforms how everyone thinks, feels and acts.
And that’s the point.
Does your team yearn for a shared vision – one that mobilizes their hearts and minds?
