Give the team lights.

How are you helping your team deal with swirling, quickening winds of change, while making sure they keep their eyes on the shared horizon ambition and remain aligned in their progression despite the continual terrain shifts?

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Maybe it’s never been harder to be a boss.

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Coerce, command and control is gone.

Set and forget Strategic Plans don’t work.

Nimble and agile can easily become purposeless dodgeball.

The folk in your care don’t all want what you wanted, nor respond the way some used to.

You can’t see around the corner, but you know there’s more hiding there to bop you on the nose, most of it unknowable early.

And you, you’ve somehow found yourself with this gig of direction setter, posse organiser, motivation rouser, pastoral care giver, herd settler, camp cook and lead Husky that has to demonstrate the moves and inspire the rest to help pull the company sled through the storms.

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So what do you do, to make your role a little less overwhelming, to arm and empower the team to not need you “on” 24-7-365?

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You can;

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• Help them appreciate why you’re all here together, doing what you’re doing, and who benefits, and why that matters, short and long term. That deep sense of shared appreciation and commitment to a legacy piece gives them something to stick their chin out and go forward with.
• Clearly describe the most important measures of success you’re collectively working to achieve, giving them a picture of outcomes being achieved that excites, something that all can look forward to, and that they can find their own ways to contribute to.
• Unpack the shared sentiments and ethos elements that seem to tie you together, that reflect you all in your best moments, and give them licence to use those attitudes, beliefs and behaviours at every juncture, for every decision and action.
• Develop and communicate a set of your community standards, of principles and ideals that all can and should employ when they’re uncertain of turning left or right, when they're vacillating between phoning it in or doubling down on the calibre of the delivery.
• Establish and focus all attentions on a small handful of priority areas the organisation needs to place disproportionate energy into for the next wee while, articulating the clear choices made, the positions adopted, and the things that are going to get the most airtime for the best reasons, and invite them to align their work accordingly.
• Take all of these decision, action and alignment guides, and turn them into something they can refer to and employ really regularly – a guide for the guides - that they know, get and can connect with, frequently.

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If you don’t already have these things sketched out, you don’t need to pull them together alone in the dark. The team can and should help you. And they don’t need to be plucked from thin air as a swing-and-hope theoretical playbook.

When constructing them;

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• Ask yourselves if it “feels right” for your crew, your culture, your back story, your ambitions, the situation you find yourself in (and does it reflect the kind of team, the kind of culture, the type of outcomes you’re seeking to create?) The feeling matters. If you don't feel it, they won't.
• Consider the evidence for your positions. Why are you thinking and landing on these areas; what proof sources or data or intelligences are you drawing on to make that particular call? Are there past or current practical examples of these things in play? Is there counter-data to offset your gut feeling that you need to balance and weigh?
• Play them out long-form. Walk all the way down the cause and consequence cascades, in different directions, to get a sense of the practicalities and potential implications of your choices. Flesh out how they work in a system, how they look and what they might give rise to.
• Tighten them up into the clearest, cleanest, most concentrated form, the essence of what you mean – give them focus, help them resonate and click in the heads of those that will use them.
• Pressure test the ideas across a spectrum of potential future scenarios, from the difficult moments to the shiny opportunities (do the words fit equally well in what you’d likely do in both cases?)? Think about how the CEO would use them, consider whether they fit the cleaning staff's roles equally, and how practical they become when overlaid on the kind of decisions and actions different contributors to the cause confront each day.

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Perhaps you boil down this collection of thought, decision and action guides to a single page, a concentrate of the ways we’ll agree to roll forward, each of us, together, through thick and thin, in clear air and smog, to get where we’d all really like to go.? A single solitary tool, a tool all can employ, as they navigate the changes and emerging new trails, to keep you moving in the right direction with fleet feet.

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Maybe that’s what the bosses best role is in and beyond 2024.

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Arm them with the guides to make aligned right calls, all and always, calm and stormy.

And change the guides when the world changes enough to warrant it.

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Want a hand with that?

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We design lamps to suit.

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Contact Troy - [email protected] - to gift your team clarity and illumination for the roads ahead.