Excerpt from the 90-Day Leadership Training Track

You need to show your team what you want to achieve and let them help you get there.

 

The army refers to this as commander’s intent.

 

“Intent is similar to purpose. A clear intent initiates a force’s purposeful activity. It represents what the commander wants to achieve and why; and binds the force together; it is the principal result of decision-making. It is normally expressed using effects, objectives and desired outcomes….The best intents are clear to subordinates with minimal amplifying detail.”

 

It is not detailed step-by-step micromanagement, it is a clear goal that needs to be achieved with the decision-making left to the people on the ground. Can you lead better than an organization in which team members literally risk their lives for the goal?

 

How do you create the goals your team will help you achieve?

 

The most consistent outcomes come from good planning.

 

Leadership is an art. Art evolved with us as an essential part of our humanity. By applying artistic principles to leadership you can draw from a deep well of tried-and-true methods that have helped us tame our whims and make them productive for centuries.

 

Consistent writers, those who start and finish multiple books, write the ending first.

 

Why? Let’s look at these writing tips as they apply to leadership training:

 

• Having an ending in mind allows you to spot problem areas before you begin.
  • It’s important to think your problems through as much as possible, to solve them before they come up. (At a certain point you have to just try it, by adhering to the baby-bird principle.)
  • This planning saves you time in the long run by preventing things that don’t fit in the plan from entering in the first place. The easiest fix is for a problem that never happens.

 

• Characters, or in our case, your team.
  • “If you know who the characters are at the end of the story, you will know how much you should reveal about them at the beginning.”
  • Looking from our perspective, what we’re talking about here are the people you need as part of your team. Your “characters,” as defined by the end of your plan, make up the organizational chart that you’ll need once you get there.

 

• Goals.
  • “You will have something to work towards. Instead of aimlessly writing and hoping for the muse to show you the way, you will be able to pull the characters’ strings and write the words they need to get them from the beginning through the middle to the end.”
  • This should certainly sound familiar. I have spent countless hours pacing and hoping for the answers to come to me, unsure of where I’m headed. When the ending is in place then things have a tendency to work themselves out.

 

• Facing reality.
  • “Writing the end forces most of us out of our comfort zones. We have to confront the reality of what we are doing. It might not be as romantic as flailing around like a helpless maiden, but if you want writing to be your profession, it’s good to make the outcome visible. This is a way to show yourself that you are serious. The end gives you a goal to work towards.”
  • You have to follow yourself before you can expect people to follow you. Do you really believe in what you want? Your team needs to know that you may waver in how to get there, but you have no doubts as to where you’re going.
  • This topic is addressed more in the leadership training section: Is what you want unreasonable?

 

• Perhaps the most important of all: you have to sell this plan to your team and align them towards achieving the same ending.
  • How can you communicate and align your team effectively when there’s nothing written down?
  • How do you bring on new people? You can’t sit down with each of them for several hours to articulate your rambling vision.
  • Is there another way to make sure the message is consistent, time after time?

 

OK, so where exactly do you start?

 

Anywhere.

You need to start somewhere, so start somewhere!

 

 

Put something down, prime the pump.

 

The first things you put down aren’t going to be good, but so what?

 

When the good ideas start to come delete the bad ones. In this way you can overcome the fear of starting and the fear of worrying that what you have is not good enough.

 

The beauty of life is that things are changeable. Your initial sketch is done in pencil, not ink. Putting something down on paper doesn’t commit you to that forever. If circumstances change, change the plan.

 

All of humanity, all of nature itself, is built on messing things up and trying again in a slightly different way. 

 

Writing it down forces you to think it through and clarify it in your mind. Once it hits the paper it’s a coherent thought. When it floats around in your head it’s just an idea. When it’s on paper, it’s out of your head and you can stop turning it over and over.

 

Once it’s down forget it for now, you actually can come back to it later.

 

Looking at it from this perspective you can always be looking at yourself, your leadership skills and your business as a work-in-progress. How can anyone, you included, accurately judge a work in progress? Release the pressure on yourself to be perfect because you’re just not finished yet. You can get leadership training to stick if you don’t expect yourself to be perfect at it.

 

Another benefit is that once it’s down on paper you can share that paper with other people. The words you’ve chosen are deliberate, you can be consistent.

 

Once your thoughts are down, have everyone on your team do the same thing. Then bring it together. Talk about what you share and what you don’t share. Are the differing thoughts and opinions deal breakers? If they are, that gives you a reason to consider parting ways.

 

Everyone has to be in alignment with your vision, you are the leader, you set the goal that others need to achieve.

 

How you get there is where different perspectives become an advantage. Different perspectives on what the vision is makes your team dysfunctional.

 

As the leader, if people don’t share your vision, that needs to be the end of them being on the team. But it’s up to you to articulate that vision and recognize when someone doesn’t fit.

 

All of this becomes clear when following this organizational outline:

 

What does your business look like in 10 years? What about 5 years? What about 3 years? What about next year? What about in 3 months?

 

By thinking about it like this you can be reasonable about time expectations to achieve your goals.

 

For example, you may decide that you want to be totally paperless in your office by next year or in three years. By setting your goals and expectations on a shared timeline, you can allocate your, and your team’s, limited focus on the tasks most important to you in the near term.

 

Another example: if in ten years you want 12 locations and in five years you want six locations, don’t build 12 locations next year! It sounds obvious here, but without an organized way of thinking you can overextend.

 

Additionally, a tip to arrive at your goal without alienating yourself and your team is to be satisfied when you reach 80-90%.

 

It’s important to have uncompromising goals and realistic expectations.

 

It is your job as the leader to create the plans that others can use to succeed and to keep your team on track.

 

This requires a good working knowledge of what you are trying to achieve. This is how you get A-level performance from B- and C-level employees.

 

It is also the way to determine which employees are worth keeping on your team.

 

It’s easy to blame others for not succeeding. However, we all live patterns.

 

If you find yourself with a pattern of staff turnover look at the common denominator in the equation.

 

By creating a system in which following directions carefully and having a good attitude leads to success, it is easy to weed out those who don’t.

 

Consider this about your employees:

 

• Do they want to do the job?
• Do they have the skills to do the job?
• Do they have the right attitude?

 

Just like leadership training, skills are teachable, attitude is not. Desire can be short-circuited with incentives, but consider if incentivizing the person is worth it based on their skills and attitude.

 

Think about a complicated recipe: a list of things to do and the order in which to do them. People with cooking experience will be successful. People without experience will fail.

 

Some will quit and blame the recipe, and yet some will fail and try again and again until they achieve success. Does this sound like your hiring history?

 

Unfortunately it is not scalable to rely only on finding those with previous training. Even when the skill you need appears on a dazzling resume it is still no guarantee of a good fit. It is incumbent on you to create an environment in which the majority of people can be successful.

 

If you do that, and someone fails it is easy to dismiss them without a second thought (and eliminate yourself from the possible reasons the person failed in the first place.)

 

If you’ve done everything you can to have someone succeed, and they still fail, they are not a good fit. Even with a personal connection someone can be dismissed objectively.

 

If you find yourself asking with some regularity: “who dropped the ball on…”, the answer is you.

 

The good news is it’s all in your control, the bad news is it’s all in your control.

 

That’s where leadership training comes in and it’s why you’re here.