Making Your Leadership Vision Work

Your leadership vision must be bold, compelling, and achievable. These are the things that will inspire, motivate, and drive your team for excellent performance.

To lead your organization into the future, this is crucial.

Most of you reading this can affirm that your own leadership vision meets these criteria.

You articulate the vision relentlessly.

You’ve defined the organizational goals to support it.

Your team is fired up and ready to go.

What are you missing?

You are missing the one thing that you and your team need in order to achieve the business imperative.

The team culture shift.

The team culture shift answers the questions:

• Together, who do we need to become in order to make this work?
• What specific changes in behaviors and interactions, in ways we relate to one another, do we need to meet the business imperative?
• What behavioral changes do I as leader need to make in order to support this team culture shift?

Begin your team evaluation by examining and discussing the following:

1. Do we deliver acceptable outputs to the client (internal or external)?

If not, why not? Examples of behaviors that can interfere are:

• • Team complacency. This is especially prevalent where team members have been with the organization for several years. Signs this may be happening are a slowness to adopt new systems, or a poor ability to handle transitions.
  • Team victim mentality. As a group, your team may be suffering from a victim mentality, unable to look past assumptions and biases to see how things might work differently.
  • Myopic team lens. Is the team willing to step outside its comfort zone to reach new stretch goals, or does their messaging reflect an inability or reticence to grasp the “why” of the business imperative?

2. Do we work together in a way that creates and fosters a cohesive team for the long term?

If not, why not? Examples of behaviors that can interfere are:

• • Power coalitions within your larger team that defer mostly to each other. These coalitions tend to stick to their small group without wider acknowledgement or connection with other team members.
  • Competing factions within your team. These are team members who are passionate about their own viewpoints, but slow to collaborate to reach agreement.
  • Conversations in all the wrong places. This dynamic can occur when one team member has a personal agenda that vies with the larger leadership agenda. It can also take place when members simply don’t feel like they have a voice in the collective or they fear not being valued in the group.

3. Does each of us as an individual team member contribute to have positive impact on the other team members?

If not, why not? Examples of behaviors that can interfere are:

• • Collaboration sabotage. Do you have someone on the team who continues to silo in order to showcase his or her team’s own accomplishments above the rest? Do you have someone who throws people under the proverbial bus?
  • Lip service. Is there someone who provides a lot of affirmation, but is revealed later to have a different agenda? Or do you have a team member who promises a lot, but is poor in delivery?
  • Lack of organizational awareness. Do you have team members who demonstrate that they are unable to keep the larger picture in mind as they work? Signs of this may be an inability to work through inter-team conflict or to understand and consider the business impact their team results have on the other teams within the organization.

As you begin to identify together the team behaviors and interactions that need to shift in order to work more effectively, remember to evaluate what you as leader need to shift in order to support this change. Consider areas such as how you make decisions, delegate, empower, and hold others accountable.

And since we all have blind spots, ask your team for their feedback on this. What do you need to shift or change in order to support them best?

To your leadership vision success!

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© Patti Cotton and patticotton.com. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express written permission from the author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that attribution is made to Patti Cotton and patticotton.com, with links thereto.