Seth Dobbs (he/him): Do you feel that your team is delivering a collective effort, or are they working as individual isolated parts? When problems occur is your team able to rally together? And does it seem like there’s a lot of activity in your team with nothing to actually show for it? Hi, I’m 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. 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 in 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 taking today involves getting a deeper understanding of what forward motion looks like and how to regain a sense of why. So a few years ago, I knew a couple of team members at a small, but really strong organization doing some exciting work in a niche online marketplace. Really smart minds on this team, they were using cutting edge technology, they had boundless creativity. With all that the early days saw rapid growth, bringing various sellers and buyers together in a pretty unique industry. Now over time, it became plagued by confusion, mediocrity, and a severe lack of direction.

The leader Emilia had initially dreamt of revolutionizing her sector and her initial vision had been clear: to create a groundbreaking platform to connect different buyers, merchants, and manufacturers in a way that would shape the future of their industry. And she believed she could do this in a way to have unparalleled customer satisfaction across buyers, merchants, and manufacturers. And on top of that, that she could have top rated employee satisfaction. Fairly lofty goal, but remarkably she’d really achieved this in the early days.

And her platform and approach showed great promise. As the company and its impact grew, she could no longer handle everything herself. And so she brought on more leadership to help her. And even with that, she was often too busy to stay close to her new direct reports. And so she set up KPIs to measure and monitor their success, and this included fairly typical things like: number of releases per month for the technology team,

number of new merchants onboarded, number of new manufacturers integrated into third party delivery methods. The new operations team was given various productivity and cost management measures. And of course sales were given top line numbers.

Now, all of this worked, or more specifically, all of her new leaders took their individual measures and ran with them without really having a clear sense of why. Now, most of them felt they didn’t really need a why of course a few did wonder but were nonetheless propelled forward by all the energy and the need of the organization.

And soon stopped thinking about it.

The thing is at some point they were no longer truly moving forward. Team members started struggling to understand how their daily tasks and projects contributed to the company’s overarching goals. And they were working tirelessly and turning out a multitude of ideas and projects. But their efforts, lacked cohesion.

As a result, the company’s performance became consistently mediocre and its employees grew increasingly frustrated and de-motivated, and more and more of them began to leave. Now in parallel, the merchants and manufacturers also started pulling out. Not a ton, only a few really, but more than Emilia would have liked. And they had kind of slipped past the reporting initially because the merchant team was really more focused on acquisition measures than anything else. And that’s the thing.

This organization really lost their sense of why, and just focused on sort of some siloed numbers. So here’s the thing. If you’re not actively fostering forward motion, you’re not going to get it. Progress usually doesn’t happen accidentally and consistent, durable progress, especially. But clarity of direction of outcomes, even when people don’t completely agree with them, helps move your organization forward. Worst case providing this clarity, helps people find out that they might want to opt out and move on elsewhere because they don’t agree with the direction. And that’s good. It’s not a bad thing because if a team member is not on board with where you’re trying to go, they’re probably hindering your efforts, perhaps not deliberately, but nonetheless, that happens.

And a true vision isn’t just about the immediate term. It’s the beacon that guides and unites your organization. And it’s something more than just the individual roles and departments.

So you can think about it this way. Your car can be going 70 miles an hour. Which can give you a great sense that you’re actually moving really quickly, but if you’re on the wrong highway, the speed is meaningless. And perhaps even damaging, depending on how far you go in the wrong direction.

In the previous episode we saw how a lack of alignment not only slows down forward motion, but can create negative motion. That is motion away from what you’re trying to achieve. In Emilia’s story so far, several wrong turns have been taken. And while they were operating at high speed, it wasn’t really in a productive direction. Now the good news is for her and her team, she saw that things weren’t going the way they should and she wondered why the growing team didn’t understand what the big objectives were. And then realized that was on her. In her enthusiasm to make clear what everyone’s individual jobs were, she lost sight of making clear what their collective jobs were. Which was to change a complex and poorly integrated industry into an efficient marketplace that brought unparalleled satisfaction across all stakeholders. And she realized that the most important numbers, how she really thought about measuring, winning, or progress, forward motion, the satisfaction and the growth weren’t really prominent in her dashboard.

And instead it was dominated by each individual group’s localized measures. But like with any sport, your team members, individual stats don’t matter if you’re not putting up wins collectively.

Now, once this became clear to her, Emilia realized she had to make a change to the way she’d been leading, and she dropped everything and gathered her leadership team and announced: “we’ve lost our way. It’s time to refocus on our core vision and start measuring our success in a more meaningful way”. Now, a few questioned if they had time for this, as each were looking at their individual measures and worrying if they were going to hit them. But many others were actually relieved to hear this. And so as a result, the leadership team began revisiting the company’s original mission statement. Clarifying the vision, clarifying their values, defining the long-term objectives, and they identified the lag measures that would truly reflect their process such as the impact of their technology on the complex ecosystem that they worked in. On the delight of their customers. On the development of their employees skills and the joy they had in working. So as these changes took root, the employees noticed a significant shift in the company’s culture. There were no longer just chasing short-term targets.

They were now working towards a shared, inspiring vision. A collective set of outcomes that improved communication and team collaboration. The once elusive clarity began to emerge. And after about a year passed the results were undeniable. The organization began to make strides in their industry, not just in terms of revenue, but in terms of the positive impact that they had on the ecosystem. And the customers were happier, the company’s platform made a real difference in people’s lives, the employees felt a deep sense of purpose and satisfaction with all that, knowing that their work was contributing to something bigger than just their individual efforts. And so the organization that had once struggled with clarity of vision and achieved mediocre results, transformed into a beacon of innovation, guided by a clear vision and the determination to make a lasting impact on the world. And it was a testament to the power of leadership that focused not just on short-term gains, but on the long-term outcomes, that truly mattered.

Teams, whether they’re teams of doers, teams of managers, of leaders or whatever, are more motivated when they feel alignment, when they have a sense of collective aspiration. This is why the first core principle of Principle Driven Leadership is that Leaders Create Vision. Even in hard times and perhaps, especially in hard times, a holistic collective ambition can drive energy and create real forward motion.

That is, a collective and collaborative activity towards achieving real goals, necessary outcomes. Realizing the vision.

Vision is all about providing clarity of what outcomes you want to achieve and why. And without these two factors, a team can quickly get lost. It’s often easy to even fool yourself into thinking you’ve made this clear, but I’ve learned that it takes a lot of repetition to bring clarity and consistency. And you might find yourself falling into the trap of trading big outcomes with things that are easy to measure and think that the latter is enough clarity. But if those easy measurements don’t add up to the collective wins, to reaching the real outcomes, they actually become a distraction.

Ultimately forward motion is about making clear steps towards your vision. Without regular and repeated focus on it, it’s easy to go off track. But with the focus, you and your team can reach whatever heights you set your eyes on.

So I want you to think about what does forward motion look like for your team and how well does your team understand this? And what can you do today to confirm and reaffirm their understanding? Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe and share with a friend if you liked it. Send thoughts and questions to contact@pdlpodcast.com, and we’ll address a few towards the end of the season. Join me next time when I’ll talk about the importance of conflict.