Which Why?

A senior leader team I was working with this week spent time sharing their individual “User Manual”. Some great insights about how and where people work best, their preferences for information, building trust, working hours and more were shared. Super valuable. A common theme was that for them to commit time, effort and resources to something, they needed to know why. Makes sense - few if any of us like wasting time on work that doesn’t seem relevant. Whole books have been written on “why”. But which why? Those leaders articulated 5 different types of why:

• Large, audacious ‘change the world’ vision/mission why

• Large organisational purpose why

• Personal mission why

• Tactical ‘how does this relate to the rest of my/our work?’ why

• Unrelated to the organisation whys like family, health, travel, personal growth, freedom, balance, choice.

All the leaders wanted to know why. They all agreed that knowing why was fundamental to alignment of effort. But not all of them wanted to know the same why. A challenge to alignment is we tend to articulate importance through our own why and huddle with others who share that perspective. An effective leader works to understand the different whys in their team and works with people to align effort with the why that most interests them.

There’s a good chance that most of the whys you work with are in the list above. There’s also a good chance I’ve missed some. What would you add?

Police or Purpose

Many moons ago I was a Youth Worker. I once saw a great act of policing. There was a group of young people from a country town visiting Freo. They had gathered in a car park drinking around a mate's ute. They were loud and dropping empty cans/bottles everywhere, but not causing any harm.

A couple of local cops turned up and the older of the 2 leant on the back of the ute and had a yarn to them about street drinking, noise and drink driving. He politely asked them to chuck all the empties into the back of the ute, identified a guy who hadn’t been drinking, eyeballed his licence and then said, “My partner and I are off on patrol, when we get back it would be great if you had cleaned up the cans, and moved you and the ute back to wherever you are staying. If we come back we might need to write some cautions”.

He could have technically thrown the book at them and been much more pushy in his approach. His explanations and requests made sense, and had the group immediately on side. If he’d taken another approach it could have easily escalated with undesirable outcomes for all.

Workplace policy and procedure is similar, I reckon. As a supervisor, employer, or business owner you know that they have their place. From there you have 2 choices:

1. Use them to ‘police’ behaviour and productivity. This approach usually has lots of black and white compliance, criticism, right and wrong involved. The problem is that it rarely motivates people to do a great job. It’s more likely that they’ll adhere to the minimum standard, and/or hide stuff that will draw attention and heat.

2. Tell people about the purpose of them. Involve them in discussions about why they exist and what ‘good’ work looks like in your context. Get people focussed on a good job, not just a compliant one. They’ll be more likely to follow your lead, get excited about doing great work, and evolving great procedures to do it.

Like a Lighthouse

My mate Jeremy Watkins reckons we have the wrong idea of clarity in leadership. People commonly think of clear glass or water when picturing clarity. Jeremy says a lighthouse in heavy fog is a more useful concept. The lighthouse can't help you see in the fog, but it can show the way and mark the rocks. Good leaders do that by distilling purpose and challenges down to a few clear pieces that their teams can action.

In a recent workshop with senior leaders I saw this in action. We generated a large page of current challenges. Some impact their whole sector, some unique to their organisation. It was a lot. The page was overwhelming. But they can't afford to ignore any of it. Every item is mission critical in some way. Ignorance, far from being bliss, could spell ruin.

One leader had a lighthouse moment. “This all boils down to 4 themes”, she said. She nailed it! The page didn't change but there was a palpable sense of relief and clarity about what they needed to do about it. That clarity will flow on to the whole organisation. It's much easier to make and communicate a clear plan for 4 themes than it is for the 100 plus items on the original page.

Could your organisation benefit from clarity like that? In what areas? What would the impact be of achieving it? How will you create the time and space to reach it? It’s unlikely to emerge from the fog on its own. Be the lighthouse.

Make it Purposeful

What’s the point?

There was a period last year where my work felt pointless. There was lots to do. There were good and valid reasons for all of it. But it felt pointless. I talked to a mentor about it, because at its worst it felt like dragging an anchor chain up a hill. He reconnected me to Purpose - At its best my work makes a difference. I’m all about raising people’s capacity to lead, and raise the capacity of others. When I lost sight of purpose everything felt like hard labour. With purpose in view, doing the same work makes sense and feels compelling.

Over the past few weeks I have been working with leaders who are mired in a huge volume of work. Many are dealing with the impact of COVID on rostering and service standards. For my clients in aged care, disability support and emergency response there are serious and severe consequences when teams are compromised.

Several have described exactly what I was feeling last year. Their work feels wearing and endless, with little sense of connection to purpose. For each of them, taking a bit of time to reestablish clarity of purpose and link the current transactional grind to it has added a boost to energy and brought a sense of joy back to the work.

How’s your work/purpose connection looking right now?