Have You Gotten Through (Yet)?

In the fourth lesson of our Emerging Leader Development course, Cindy and I detail five critical practices for effective communication. In that process, we emphasize just how important it is that we keep our message simple and we share it over and over and over again with absolute consistency. Cindy always relates this need for being consistent to the marketing adage that we need to see or hear a message at least seven times before it sticks. While covering that lesson with an organization several years ago, I asked everyone in the group who had kids to raise their hands. I challenged those with their hands raised to equate that to how often they had to say something to their kids before it sunk in. The CEO immediately responded by saying, “I’ll let you know as soon as it happens.” After we all had a good laugh, I asked how old his children were. He shared that they were all grown and had kids of their own, but still didn’t seem to pay much attention to what he told them. I’ll say it once more: our behavior as adults isn’t all that different from our behavior as children…

In many cases, I’ll apologize when I pound the same drum repeatedly while making a point. This IS NOT one of those cases! The people we lead are counting on us to consistently model our core company values. They’re counting on us for explicit detail around how our behavior exemplifies those values. And, whether we ever realize it or not, they’re counting on us to connect all of that directly to the tasks they’re responsible for on a daily basis.

Through the second part of Leading With A Clear Purpose, I challenge readers with responsibility for leading teams to not only help each of their team identify their own clear purpose that inspires them get charge hell with a water pistol each and every day, but to provide those team members with everything they need to connect their individual purpose to the clear purpose they’re working to achieve as an organization. Make no mistake, I’m not suggesting that’s an easy task. It’s not! And that’s why I dedicated several chapters to detailing specific steps a leader can take to fulfill that need for their team members.

It’s critical that we keep the behaviors involved in living out our values as simple as possible, and we’d better be willing to detail why we’re doing what we do for at least as long as Truett Cathy was for “My Pleasure” to become embedded in the Chick-fil-A culture, but it still rests completely on us, as leaders, to consistently connect those values to what each of our team members can and should be doing daily, so we’ll work through the specifics of how we can do exactly that soon.