by Peter A. Arthur-Smith, Leadership Solutions, Inc.®

 “There go my people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”― Mahatma Gandhi

 It’s been the tradition since time immemorial that country, company and other organizational leaders deliberate either alone or with their immediate confidantes prior to moving forward. Ulysses Grant – civil war General and US President – was well known for deliberating alone for hours or days before summoning his troops into battle.

 This writer was often befuddled as an army officer why he was expected to lead his men on particular missions without being briefed on the bigger picture. It seemed like, as a troop leader in the Signal Corps, he and his men, as with the front-line soldiers they had to support:

“Yours wasn’t the reason as to wonder why: yours was just to do and die.”  Based upon his experiences of working with many varied organizations since then, this sort of executive behavior still often persists.

Quite apart from conventional organizational habits, this writer has come to understand that this behavior likely persists for at least three reasons:

1. Leaders-managers prefer to make-up or improvise their organization’s journey as they go along – to feel their way as each day unfolds. This seems to be a highly prevalent mode.
2. Leaders-managers are overly concerned that their intentions and plans will become common knowledge and therefore keep their intentions close to their vests.
3. Leaders-managers are uncomfortable that their people will question their intentions and they won’t have part-icularly good answers: largely because they haven’t devoted the time to think things through especially well.

To be fair, there’s something to be said for feeling your way forward, since the dynamics of organizational life are constantly evolving over time.  Even so, your people still need a pretty durable strategic and operational framework within which to work; otherwise they would probably be lurching all over the place. Just imagine sending two football teams out to play without a designated football field with its rectangular framework and particular field markings. Those teams would also expect to be given particular principles or rules by which to play, as well as be given appropriate game objectives to meet.

So players know in advance what field they’ll be playing on, what principles-rules they will be playing with, what their game-plan is, and what their overall team intentions are. That’s certainly true if they intend to be serious competitors. Hopefully they would also have a great coach-leader, other talented players on-top-of-their game, and would practice their game strategy and tactics numerous times in advance of key match-ups. Just imagine actors going on stage without any knowledge of what their play was about, or not having a play-script to work with, or not having rehearsals to figure-out how to interact with each other?

But there are numerous organizations that don’t do any of these things. People arrive everyday to fulfill their jobs and are required to figure-out the principles and ground rules by which they are expected to operate. Newcomers are expected to learn their enterprise’s gameplan by osmosis and how to interplay with their new-found colleagues. Often they have no clear idea where their organization is heading. And then so many executives are puzzled as to why their people are not fully motivated or committed.

And so, having established the good sense of executives figuring out their field of play, appropriate principles and ground-rules, their required talent, their organization purpose and outcomes,  their day-to-day collaboration and activities, and their journey and milestones: then the question is left open as to what will maximize everyone’s  motivation and engagement to bring about an optimum outcome? There’s no doubt that it will all come down to two words: Maximum involvement.   

The more your people are involved in everything, the more they will understand the bigger picture and journey and the more they will comprehend the beneficial outcomes. Such engaging activities will inspire their full participation and near-total utilization of their own special talents. With this in mind, your appropriate organization principles should be as follows:

» By all means possible give some advance thought with regard to your intentions. If you utilize our Strategic Streaming approach as outlined in prior articles – but not before you’ve understood many other enlightened leadership (EL) principles prior to that point – your intentions will evolve quite naturally, as your desired future picture-vision will build over time. 

» Now involve your Strategist team to help put together a Simple Success Strategy (SSS) or Strategic Framework (SF). Use these tools to draw upon this team’s collective-wisdom and commitment owing to their inclusion.

» Form breakthrough or initiative-pairings from your Strategist team to flush out their initial thoughts and then expand those pairings into full breakthrough/initiative teams of seven that are a representative cross-section of your organization. They will ultimately draw-up initiatives depicting WHAT, HOW, WHO, WHEN and WHERE (this latter item for choosing advisory allies).

» Now find the most effective way of communicating and involving others across your organization for co-opting their awareness, questions, comments, suggestions and even fresh ideas, so as to bring  everyone together on the same page.

» Set intended timelines and briefing points with appropriate follow-through.

» Establish vital celebration points – organized by chosen pairs from within each seven-person break-through/initiative team – based upon finding the most creative and frugal way of orchestrating appropriate celebrations of success.

» Assuming you’re successful, REPEAT – then keep cycling through the five key phases of EL on a similar basis.

   By cycling through continuous rounds of ever-increasing and upgraded forms of envisioning, positioning, engaging, collaborating and orchestrating, you with build a powerful enterprise ‘engine’ fueled by some highly committed people. You will experience an ongoing outcome that will never cause you to doubt the wisdom of involving and engaging – rather than excluding – your people at every stage going forward.

To find out more about a positioning and pathfinding approach, talk with: