Part 1: From Results to People
Communicating Vision & Strategy with Impact
You attend a 3-day strategy offsite with your senior leadership team to finalise a refreshed organisational strategy to accelerate your company vision. You are tasked to cascade it to your team members. What do you do?
The results focused leader
Let’s assume you are a high-performing, high-achieving leader who smashes targets and delivers exceptional financial results. Chances are you focus on monthly, quarterly and annual results as a key marker for success. You achieve this reliably and consistently by triaging as follows:
1. Applying resources to maximise efficiency and effectiveness of completing defined tasks;
2. Focussing on jobs, roles and performance requirements; and
3. Directing work accordingly.
This works beautifully when controlling task completion. But, how about communicating vision and strategy?
The results focussed leader does this:
1. Communicates the vision & strategy – often by circulating copies to ensure that every team member knows and understands what it says.
2. Assigns responsibility – the more engaged leader arranges a meeting to discuss any queries or questions. In that session the leader describes how the team’s contribution will help to achieve the vision and strategy.
This leader has effectively answered the ‘What?’, ticking the box of having cascaded the vision and strategy to their team. The team is sent off to implement it. Job done. Or is it?
The conscious leader
The results focussed leader gets the job done, but that’s all. If we want to create a high-performance culture in the teams that we lead, we must connect them to the higher purpose of their delivery. We must help them join the dots between their contribution and their impact at strategic level.
When communicating vision and strategy, the conscious leader does this:
1. Communicates the vision & strategy in a way that inspires the team – translates it in a way that is meaningful and impactful, for each individual in that team. Each team member must feel a unique connection to the vision & strategy by being able to see how their specific areas, responsibilities and actions contribute to the overall picture.
2. Gives recognition for effort, performance and achievement – focuses on the process of strategy implementation and articulates progress and achievement as it unfolds. In doing so, the conscious leader creates an environment where their team feels collective pride in how individual contributions have had actual impact on raising them all to strategic level.
The leader has effectively answered the ‘Why?’ in what the team does. In doing so, the leader makes tasks meaningful and fulfilling to perform. And high performance becomes wholly self-motivated.
When we shift our focus from delivering results to having impact on people, we give people permission to step into their highest potential. They perform at their highest level of contribution not because they have to. They perform because they want to.
For an exercise in setting strategy, goals, and objectives for your team, visit www.kiranscarr.com/downloads.
If you want to take the courageous leap to being a Conscious Lawyer, reach out to find out more about C-Success Coaching at https://www.kiranscarr.com/coaching.