Leading to Greatness
In many situations, great people that make up great teams can still struggle to accomplish great things. Why is that?
There are many reasons for this but the #1 by far is lack of clarity from the leader about what the most important goal is NOW.
What’s the priority?
When leadership is not crystal clear about W.I.N. (what’s important now) leadership teams are left to try and figure it out for themselves. When this is the case most team members will simply do what is specific to their own teams and their own skill sets. Patrick Lencioni uses the term “silos” to define this. Silos are groups of people in an organization, many times great people, not all working towards the same goal due to lack of clarity on what is the most important goal NOW.
What is the rallying cry?
The idea of a rallying cry is critical. Without it, team members at all levels, especially the leadership team, can easily get lost, moving in different directions, not rowing the boat towards the same point.
Most organizations have too many top priorities to achieve the level of focus they need to succeed. Wanting to cover all of their bases, they establish a long list of objectives and spread their scarce time, energy, and resources across all of them. The result is almost always a lot of initiatives being done in a mediocre way and a failure to accomplish what matters most.
It is so easy to get lost in the day-to-day tactical minutiae when you don’t have a common rallying cry. Pulled in many directions without a compass, team members pursue seemingly worthwhile agendas under the assumption that their efforts will be in the best interest of the organization as a whole. Unfortunately, what happens is great work being performed by great people that ultimately doesn’t lead to a unified result. Different team members working in different directions and not making nearly the progress as an organization that could have, or should have occurred.
It’s human nature to have a genuine interest in working well with other team members. We need to give our teams a unified direction in which to row the boat. It’s one of our primary responsibilities as leaders of our organizations.
There is a simple and powerful way to create a common sense of purpose, they must establish a rallying cry.
What are the four components to a rallying cry?
- A thematic goal
- A set of defining objectives
- A set of ongoing standard operating objectives
- Metrics
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