Mark Shead - Leadership501

Many leaders assume that everyone understands their vision. Often, there is a big gap between their vision and what the people they lead see as the vision. Unfortunately, many leaders don’t take the time to actually find out how well they have communicated their vision.

When the vision is unclear, people tend to default to doing whatever seems best to them. If they are effective at communicating their version of the vision to people they lead, you can easily end up with a direction where each department or organizational unit is heading in a very different direction.

I was sitting in a meeting at a medium sized organization that was having a discussion about branding strategy. One of the vice presidents gave his opinion on a branding issue and then casually mentioned how it aligned with the vision. The only problem was that the vision he articulated was in the complete opposite direction of what the CEO was trying to do.

The problem wasn’t that the CEO didn’t have a vision. He just hadn’t communicated it effectively to the rest of the organization. I’m sure he thought he had communicated the vision, but the test of a well-communicated vision is whether or not the people responsible for implementing the vision understand it.

A very simple way to test your organization’s vision alignment is ask people to write down the vision anonymously in a short paragraph. It doesn’t need to be a long drawn out thing, but this feedback will give you a much better idea of how well aligned everyone is. Keeping it anonymous helps people concentrate more on articulating the vision and less on worrying about getting it wrong. After all, you are really testing your performance, not their ability to remember.

Once you get the feedback, read over each and every vision statement. If you notice that most of them miss something that you consider to be important, that is a good sign that you need to do some more vision casting in that area. It is very likely that you’ll find things that aren’t part of your vision. These are areas where you may need to apply some course correction to make sure everyone is headed in the same direction.

If everyone comes back and states the vision exactly as you feel you’ve communicated it, consider yourself fortunate. Most of us will find that there is some room for improvement in conveying our vision.

Teamwork is not something that is easy to teach. While you may know certain teamwork principles, it is something that needs to be developed in each team on its own. If you take 5 people from separate organizations and try to put them together into one team, there will be a certain amount of learning that takes place, regardless of how skilled each individual is at teamwork.

When it comes down to it, most of learning to work together as a team is learning to communicate with and trust your fellow team members. When you are creating a team, keep this in mind and try to create an environment where people can learn how to communicate and trust each other.

Often, you can improve your team by creating a temporary environment that requires everyone to learn to communicate and trust each other. Many of the infamous corporate games and simulations help attempt to achieve this. You just have to know what you are trying to accomplish. Corporate games and team building exercises get a bad name when they are done without any particular end in mind. If you don’t know why you are doing them, there are probably better uses of your time.

One of the easiest ways to improve communication and trust is put people in a difficult situation and let them work their way out of it. In day to day business settings, we have a lot of ways to avoid communicating directly or learning to trust each other. You want to look for a situation that doesn’t lend itself to these types of avoidance mechanisms.

Here are a few ideas of ways to help create a temporary environment to help your team grow:

Take an afternoon and go work on something together where it is easy to see what you’ve accomplished. For example, take your team out to paint walls at a local charity. Painting works well because it is easy to see how much you’ve accomplished. Many of our business activities are difficult to quantify, so we are deprived from a real feeling of team accomplishment in our day-to-day work. Painting is also good because it gives people a chance to talk while they paint and get to know each other better outside of work conversations.

Do a ropes course or something similar together. This gets everyone working together in a hands-on way and solving problems. With the right activities, it can really help strengthen the trust in a team. I’m not just talking about the activities where you close your eyes and fall backwards and let another team member catch you. There is a lot of benefit in just forcing people to work through problems together in a different type of setting.

Do one of the survival simulation type games. In these types of simulations, your team has to work together to rank the most important objects to take with them after an airplane crash or similar disaster. The point is that they have to reach a consensus about what items to take, and they aren’t allowed to just take a vote and go with the majority. This forces people to explain themselves and helps them work through conflicting opinions.

In the military, “the men” are separated from “the officers.” The basic idea is that the leaders shouldn’t be too close to the people they will be commanding. In the army, this makes a lot of sense because if you are too close, you might have a difficult time making decisions that could result in someone’s death. On the military base, they have an officer’s club, where the officers go to eat. On Sundays the facility is opened up for everyone, but there is a separate side for the men and a separate side for the officers. The officers’ side is generally a little fancier with slightly better chairs and table settings.

There is a certain amount of separation that is wise to keep in non-military leadership as well. If you are too friendly with your direct reports, it may be difficult for them to respect your authority. This doesn’t mean you need to intentionally be a jerk, but you need to be aware that certain individuals misinterpret an overly friendly attitude as a sign that they don’t need to follow the rules because they are “on your good side”.

Many times, people go to one extreme or the other. On the overly friendly side of things, they look to their direct reports to provide a social life. This isn’t healthy, because it means the leader may not be able to make difficult decisions without having an extreme emotional impact on themselves. Putting yourself in this type of situation can cloud your judgment about an individual’s contribution or effectiveness. It is also unhealthy because, if all of your personal friends report to you, it is possible to end up with a bunch of sycophants instead of true honest friends.

On the other extreme are the leaders who place themselves way above the people they lead. These types of people end up making lots of rules that apply to everyone except themselves and often carry an air of being better than everyone else.

Somewhere in between these two extremes is a healthy balance. The balance may be different for each person who reports to you. Part of your job as a leader is to identify and sense the proper equilibrium that will give your reports the satisfaction of feeling like they have a personal relationship with you, while keeping yourself in an authority role.