Deliberate Leadership - with Intentional Clarity

Not only do we need to provide a daily example of deliberate leadership, showing our team just how engaged we are in working toward the initiatives we’ve set, we also need to make sure our behaviors that show this engagement directly translate back to those objectives! This is where we can’t just be focused on working hard, we need to make sure we’re working hard on the things that will have the most impact on the overall goal we’re working toward! AND we need to be intentional in communicating exactly how the hard work we’re exemplifying for our team ties directly to the goal.

Cindy and I occasionally offer a complimentary webinar called Building Buy-In Around a Clear Mission & Vision where we detail the steps a leader can take to get their team genuinely engaged in what they do. We reference the fancy mission statements we so often see framed in a company’s lobby that hardly anyone on the team is familiar with, let alone knows how anything they do actually ties back to that statement…

When we’re deliberate in the steps we take to lead our teams, we provide extreme clarity in describing the steps we’re taking as an organization as we follow the course that’s been charted in order to reach our goals - be those three, five, or even ten years ahead. All that said, this kind of clarity can’t be exclusive to the overall course of the organization; while we may inspire part of the team as we rally them around big ideas, we can just as easily overwhelm a bunch of them - causing them to tune us out altogether!

Any time I think back to the quarterly and annual bonuses we sometimes received during my nearly two decades in a manufacturing facility, I roll my eyes. While the money was always a nice surprise, I’d argue that the vast majority of us working in that particular facility had next to no idea whatsoever as to how anything we did on a daily basis played a part in whether or not those bonuses ever made it to our bank accounts. When we’re intentional about providing our team with the clarity they need to understand how their daily tasks tie in with their departmental goals as well as the overall goals of the organization, we earn a level of engagement that even the most impressive mission statement in the fanciest frame never could.

But developing this kind of clarity, for how our own actions support the bigger goals or how the things each team member does helps us reach the desired destination, doesn’t just happen! This requires some very focused work that so many leaders miss, especially when they don’t have a process they can use to effectively identify the individual steps that are necessary. Next time, we’ll look at a simple approach we can all take to nail down this kind of detail!