Leaders: You Can’t Just Talk About it Once
Leaders, if you want to encourage your team to develop in a certain way, gain a certain skill, or create some other change, you can't just talk about it once. Like the strand of a braid, your priority topic must get woven into your operational rhythms and stay there. Or at least make regular, deliberate visits in and out of the braid. For a long time.
Over the past year, I have served as ICF New England's chapter president. (This is the local chapter of a global association of professional coaches.) The vision for the year has been operational excellence. I announced this at our team building retreat last August and we processed what it meant. But it didn't end there. We have talked about operational excellence at each board meeting – every. single. month. It has been the first item on the agenda.
The result was that the board leaders did not forget about operational excellence. They were clear on its importance and place in our priority list. As a result, they developed their own ways to implement the value of operational excellence.
And you might be surprised to hear this, but I didn't feel like a broken record. Which aspects of operational excellence got covered varied month to month. Plus, I felt like I was leading in an accountable way, and holding the team to account for our stated focus. It was like, of course we need to touch on this -- it's our focus for the year.
Thanks to the sustained attention on operational excellence, if you ask any of the board members what our focus for the year was, they will immediately be able to tell you. This would highly likely not be the case if it had only been mentioned in August and not again. Your leadership direction and priorities have to be simple and cohesive in order for your leaders to be able to recall them under the pressure of day-to-day work. David Rock, CEO of the NeuroLeadership Institute, points out that "it's very hard to be simple."
When your team has the vision, direction and priority top of mind, it positively influences everyday micro-decisions. For example, a team member might take an extra sixty seconds to contribute to operational excellence even if they feel a time crunch -- by looking into a file naming convention or properly referencing the name of a previous piece of work.
Leaders -- ask yourself, what's the most important focus area this year or quarter? Make it simple, meaningful, and coherent. Keep that topic on the table over an extended period of time. Your team should be able to recall this focus, even under pressure.
