Seth Dobbs (he/him): Do you ever think that it can be easier for you to just get stuff done yourself rather than try to get your team members to understand and do everything that you know and that you’re capable of? And while initially it may seem that that is the case, do you think this is a sustainable model for growing your team?

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 teams and 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 going to take today involves understanding that any reasonably meaningful vision needs a team to realize it, and that teams themselves need a vision to rally them. So for this, I’m gonna talk about Kailani. She worked in the hospitality industry.

She was ambitious, a quick learner, driven and full of big ideas, even from her earliest days. And she moved around a bit in her career, taking on many different roles in hotel operations, event management, food service, and so forth, and was delighted when she landed a post as the executive director overseeing hospitality and operations of a boutique hotel.

The property had around 150 rooms and included conference and event space, catering, a spa, several restaurants on site, and a golf course. So a big responsibility. Now, when she took over the post, the property was struggling a little financially, but she had a strong vision for what the hotel could and should be.

In fact, she had a long list of ideas from earlier in her career that she hadn’t been allowed to implement at the time and saw this leadership role as her big chance.

But even beyond that, more than just executing those ideas at the one hotel, she wanted to prove out her vision so that she could take on an executive corporate role and apply these thoughts across an entire chain of boutique hotels. So she quickly settled into the position. She met all her leader, her.

She quickly settled into the position meeting her leadership team, the head of hotel services, the spa manager, the catering director, all the rest, and she told them she had big ideas to create seamless hospitality and had them all excited. They were ready to change and bring new life to the property. So Kailani went into planning mode, starting at a high level.

She realized her team wasn’t going to move as fast as she wanted, whether because they were still trying to understand the vision, or for other reasons she wasn’t sure. So she actually took on the detailed planning of each function herself. She’d meet one-on-one with each property leader and quickly dole out instructions, but then had to rapidly move to the next person, the next urgent issue and the next big idea.

She’d pore over the operational update she received and when she saw problems such as the catering team tended to under order food for events, she’d go in and fix it herself. She’d run catering before and, and felt it’d be faster to just fix that problem rather than explaining everything. This pattern was repeated in most of the other functional areas of the hotel.

Sometimes leaving worse problems in her wake as she didn’t take the time to fully understand the details of this specific operation and relied instead on solutions that had worked for her in the past but didn’t necessarily apply here in this situation. Kelani ended up working really long hours to keep everything moving and she knew that once the performance of the hotel turned around, it would all have been worth it and she’d be able to ease up a little.

Unfortunately, the performance didn’t improve and six months in the customer survey data seemed to be worse than before Kailani had started. And beyond that, the data indicated that customers were seeing the opposite of what she wanted, that each function felt disjoint to the customers.

Resort staff seemed uncertain about things outside of their own area, and often seemed unclear about even their own area. And in fact, that wasn’t just the customer’s perspective. This was the case. The different resort functions were in effect siloed as Kailani seldom tried to bring them together. Her haste to do the right things for each group prevented her from building what she wanted to actually build from realizing her vision.

Leadership and staff started to become disinterested as Kelani would swoop in and fix things, then swoop out again. Here’s the thing, no matter how good you might be at one or more of the functions that you lead, no matter how much faster you might think it will be to do something yourself instead of taking the time to explain to others, going it alone does not scale, and in fact can rapidly fail.

And Kailani needed to embrace the enabling principle for this episode in order to turn things around. And that principle is We Win Through Teams. Now, this seems obvious, but perhaps the nuance is in how you think about your team. Any meaningful vision should take more than just yourself to achieve. And this is more than just having a bunch of doers, but a team of leaders that I discussed in season two.

But regardless of whether or not you have role power, a hierarchy, or whatever it might be in this context, you should think of a team as a group of people that you can motivate through your vision. It’s a group of people that are ready to refine your vision and take it deeper into the organization aligned together.

I found this to be one of the most powerful concepts in leadership and couldn’t be successful in my C-suite roles without understanding the individual and collective strengths and weaknesses of the people I lead, and then how to motivate them collectively to create results. Now, the reverse is important as well.

As a leader, you’re often not close enough to all the details, and in fact, can’t be close enough to all the details in any reasonably sized effort. You need people with the appropriate expertise, motivation, and alignment closer to where the work is happening. Without this sort of interconnection, an organization will end up along the lines of what Kelani was experiencing.

Her leaders didn’t know the big picture, and therefore the team members didn’t know what they were working towards. So they just evolved to trying to do their jobs and trying not to get fired, which is honestly one of the worst mindsets you can have in an organization. So for Kelani, she was so caught up in her urgency around her vision that she felt she couldn’t take the time to fully bring others on board, that it was easier for her to just do things herself.

It’s possible she thought that others might learn from observing her, but that wasn’t actually the case, particularly as she spun quickly from one department to another. What made things even more challenging for Kailani was that her efforts were making things worse, piling a greater sense of urgency on top of everything.

And what she needed to realize was that a leader can’t go it alone, and that you can’t simply change an organization by trying to take it all on yourself. Organization-sized challenges, team-sized challenges, aren’t resolved through a single individual. They are resolved through the team. Kailani needed to rethink her approach to her leadership team, and rather than seeing them as extensions of herself or perhaps worse as obstacles to what she was trying to achieve,

she needed to embrace their individual talents and their collective reach. By making clear what her vision of the future looked like and giving ownership of realizing that vision to her direct reports, She could get things much further. She could win through her team. Now if Kelani was able to shift gears and work through her team by alignment on what they were trying to achieve and why, that is clarity with vision, she would likely see several signs of progress towards a better state.

You would see that people are getting aligned on a new future path, and that often results in a new sense of energy and excitement in the organization. And if done well, you’ll see more people taking on true ownership, running with your vision and actually enacting the change that you’re hoping for. So rather than Kelani trying to make spot fixes, she would leverage her team through alignment with her vision.

She would see the organization evolving and taking a new shape, becoming the beacon of hospitality she was hoping to create. This kind of problem, a leader essentially trying to go it alone, can really occur at any level, can be the manager of a small team trying to do everything because they feel it’s faster than trying to explain things all the way up to a CEO, not letting folks act on their own autonomy and trying to direct every piece of work in the organization.

And this gets back to why Leaders Provide Vision is the first core principle of principle driven leadership. Without vision, an organization rapidly devolves into isolated pockets of people acting on their own instincts, their own self-interest, or perhaps even just trying to get along and not lose their job, but a team that understands what they’re trying to achieve and why is capable of so much more.

Leadership is a team sport. If we’re not leading a group, if we have no team, what are we leading? To be clear, this ultimately is not about having people assigned to us, about role power or authority relationships. Leadership is about influencing individuals, teams, and organizations, not bossing them. And providing those group with vision is how we influence and guide actions across the team to create the results that we seek.

When we’ve influenced that team to the point of being truly motivated, amazing things will happen, and the desired outcome of the vision principle is a motivated team. This is the core of creating great results and driving ownership.

We simply cannot succeed without others, and we can never lose sight of that as leaders. Getting others on board to help drive forward motion is central to our own success as well as theirs. And this is where we get people to not only want us to succeed, but want all of us that are in this vision together to succeed together.

So ultimately, the heights of what you can achieve isn’t dictated by solely what’s within you, but by your ability to bring the most out of those around you. So I want you to think about the projects that you’re involved with right now. Are there anywhere you might be overstepping in hopes of saving time?

And what changes can you make right now to help your team better understand the vision so you can guide them to the results you’re looking for? Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe, follow, comment, and share with a friend if you liked it. And send feedback and questions to contact@pdlpodcast.com, and I might address a few towards the end of the season.

Join me next time where I’ll share more thoughts on successful communication.