Seth Dobbs (he/him): Do the people you lead seem uninspired and unmotivated? Do you wonder why work for your team can just seem like drudgery? Hi, I am Seth Dobbs, and this is the Principle Driven Leadership Podcast where I share principles of leadership, along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be.

And these principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building organizations and in coaching others to become leaders themselves. And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential for helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact.

And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results. And leadership is a journey. The step we’re gonna take today involves shifting the way we engage with the folks we lead by moving away from just telling people what to do and towards inspiring people to be their best.

And a clear vision helps you do just that by giving people the clarity to take real ownership and what they’re trying to achieve. So for this, I’m gonna go back to my younger days and talk about my own experience with the negative side of this. This goes back to when I was in my early twenties. I was a young hotshot software developer in a very small team inside of a very large international corporation.

The team I was on was doing a lot of stuff around factory automation, so we were helping to build various applications to support manufacturing lines. Lots of different things including automating chip placement machines and the way they build circuit boards, tracking defects in manufacturing, controlling flow of, of some of the lines, and even real time visualization of the flow through various factories, through various lines, so we could look for bottlenecks and, and maybe find ways to create better efficiencies and stuff like that.

Honestly, really cool stuff. I learned a lot from the experience and there’s a lot of upside to it, but the downside are our organization’s prevailing philosophy, seem to be micromanagement, and that was in spite of there being a lot of good talent at the individual contribute layer. Our manager also made a lot of use of contractors to augment our teams and take on some entire projects themselves.

Sometimes it was pretty typical then. Pretty typical now to do that kind of thing and all that was good. But, the problem was our core team was given very little choice in much of anything. It’s sort of what I think of today as kind of classic, big corporate nineties management style. We were told what projects we would work on when they had to be done, how to do the work.

Basically told everything. In other words, we had very little autonomy. Really no clear sense of purpose. No, no clarity down what we were trying to achieve. No real leeway for making decisions or for leveraging any of our expertise. Honestly, it felt more like we were the tool rather than the craftsperson.

And I’ll tell you, that’s not really fun. It’s not motivating to be in that kind of situation. And it’s an environment that really stunts growth. How could I learn in that environment? How could any of us, when we’re just being told what to do all the time without understanding any of the why, what we’re trying to achieve, all we could do is just execute tasks and no more, no development of knowledge, no real improvement in skill.

No way to really set a bar to understand how we were growing. Were we doing our best work? In fact, it was the opposite. This kind of micromanagement really led to an erosion of any real desire to do our best work. I. So at some point it, it was bad and several of us complained about all of this, that we weren’t really getting much out of our work.

We didn’t feel motivated, we weren’t getting much in the way of choosing. We couldn’t decide our own paths or really have much of a even say in helping that. And because of that, we found it demotivated. We found it limiting. Now to his credit, our boss listened, uh, seemed to hear us, and a few weeks later came back to us.

Very excited. So at the time we were now onto a new round of funded, internally funded projects, and so he was gonna give us our choice of what we could work on. So he showed me a list of, a handful of projects, several of which were very exciting and would be really give me that opportunity to develop new skills, to do something fun and so forth.

And there were a few that were basically just menial work. And so the dialogue went something like this, I’d say, Hey, you know what? Project one looks very exciting. I’d love to do that. Well, no, actually we probably won’t start that one for months, was the answer, so. Okay. Uh, how about project two? Well, no, I’m gonna have the contractors work on that.

Okay. So project three looks pretty cool. Oh yeah. Yeah, I think it is. And that’s why I have Susan from the consulting group getting it underway. So you can probably understand the pattern. Guess how the next couple probably went? And in the end I was left essentially with choosing between like the small handful of lousy projects.

And at that point I didn’t really care which one. I might as well have thrown a dart at the board or whatever. And, and picked one. I found out later the same thing happened, same exact process to a coworker and in both our cases. At the end, our boss had the audacity to smile excitedly and say, see, I let you choose your work.

It was not long after that that several of us actually made the choice to leave the company. The principle people thrive when they own their work. This really gets to the true power of having a strong, well communicated vision. And this is because it’s really, if you think about it, it’s impossible for you to instruct everyone.

You lead every day in how to do their work. And selfishly, if we think about just ourselves as leaders, how many people can you really lead? If you’re focused on that kind of minutia on a daily basis, it’s hard to scale and. At least as important, it’s demotivating to the team to treat them that way.

They’re not gonna thrive. There’s no sense of ownership when you do that. So over the past few podcasts, I’ve made several points around vision that I wanna revisit and bring together here to really see what we’re working towards and understand the outcome of a good vision. So I started by talking about the three keys to a good vision several episodes ago, and this is one, I mean a sense of purpose to providing clarity on the outcomes we’re trying to achieve.

Three, bringing those together to inspire forward motion. Then I later talked about focusing on outcomes and how that helps create a better sense of purpose. Then I talked about clarity and narrowing the outcomes you and your teams focus on so that you all can achieve more. And so now here. If you’ve done a good job in purpose and clarity, the people you lead will be able to take real ownership and excel in their work, thereby creating forward motion towards the vision.

And that’s exactly it. You know you’re doing this right when you start seeing that forward motion, when you start seeing the folks that you lead, take ownership of the vision and start taking steps on their own towards achieving it with their own drive. You’ll see a growing sense of excitement and energy in the team that’s thriving through clear ownership of the outcomes that the organization is moving towards.

And that’s because this connectedness to bigger results and the ability to apply and ideally sometimes even grow their own expertise, will bring a joy and a pride to the team. That simply isn’t gonna happen if you’re just telling people what to do. So let’s look at that a little more closely. I’ll return to my early experience.

What if instead of what happened, what if my boss had come to us and said something like this, Hey, we have several objectives. We need to reduce the defects in our factories to reduce the cost of rework and waste. We also need to increase the efficiency of line changeover, which is the amount of time, the effort, the cost to switch the product that’s being produced in a manufacturing line.

Reducing that is actually a pretty great efficiency for manufacturing organization or, and maybe we need to understand which lines are operating the smoothest so that we can apply learnings from what’s happening there to other manufacturing lines. And where do you, Seth, think you could help make us better?

With that setup, we might have even been able to have discussions around personal growth, around organizational growth and how together supporting the big picture, making the entire business unit improve. With that kind of clarity, I might have had a very different view of the choices that I was given.

To actually absolutely possible that the work that I had perceived at the time as a bad choice might suddenly been one of the most exciting things that I’d ever worked on, because I would’ve shifted from just seeing something as a task that I was being assigned and had to do to seeing what I was being asked as a contribution to truly improving the organization.

And in doing so, that could have done wonders for my motivation. Knowing why something is important, perhaps I’m just creating a report that shows where there’s flaws in the line, right? In the old way it was presented instead of making it about what I’m doing, oh, yay, I’m writing another report. If my boss had made it more about what I’m achieving, my response might have been, oh wow.

This data that I’m bringing together shows that we actually have a defective machine that’s creating flaws in the product and costing us money, and we can fix this. With what I’ve been able to find out how exciting is that knowing that I was working towards making a meaningful impact would’ve driven me to really dig in and look for more possibilities than what I’d just been told to do.

This is real motivation. It’s real drive. It’s creating real forward motion and energy in the organization, and that’s the key outcome of having a good vision. Motivating your team members to bring out their best, motivating the team to take real ownership. And with that, bringing in excitement and energy, that’s not possible when you’re just dictating to people what they should do.

Now I understand. I think it’s actually somewhat natural to, to just want to tell people what to do in a leadership position. It’s likely your first job experiences when you started out and perhaps even your current, were more centered around being told what to do and how to do it, but without the sense of purpose, without the clarity on what you are trying to achieve.

It’s just a list of stuff to do. When you bring a good vision into clarity, when you communicate it clearly, when you live it truly, and not just use it as internal marketing, instead of motivating your team to look for a new job, you’ll motivate them to look for new ways to reach that vision, create truly powerful impacts.

So. How are you talking about the work your team is doing? Are you making the connections between each of their individual jobs and how that contributes to their growth, to the team’s growth and to positive impacts on the entire organization? And if not, how can you starting today make those outcomes clearer to them in a way that allows them to take ownership and move things forward?

Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe and share with a friend if you liked it, and join me next time where I’ll shift gears and talk about five steps to making more effective meetings.