Is your team wearing blinders?

Racehorses wear blinders to limit their peripheral vision, to prevent them from being distracted by competitors or activity that might cause them to deviate from the task at hand. This is a conscious choice horse owners or jockeys make in service of their charges’ focus.

There’s real value in this: it keeps the horse focused on the finish line. But that’s a horse race, where there will be a single winner.

Recently I’ve come across a lot of teams that are unconsciously wearing metaphorical blinders themselves. They’re operating a speed, often working on high-stakes tasks, and with their “heads down” work style they’ve inadvertantly placed blinders on themselves: they’ve lost sight of the big picture, their competitors, and/or their stakeholders, to the detriment of their ability to fully understand what they need to do and whose needs they must meet, and how.

There’s real detriment to this: no one team gets to the organizational finish line alone, and while speed is important so too is collaboration and shared endeavor.

I get it: in times of speed and complexity it’s natural for people to get tunnel vision: “Must. Complete. Tasks! Must. Achieve. My. Team goals!” But it’s a dangerous error to let that focus come at the expense of peripheral vision.

To home in on one area: stakeholders. I’m continually surprised by the way teams’ inadvertent blinders prevent them from seeing the work or needs of their adjacent sub-functions – who I call “small s” stakeholders - and how those blinders can prevent teams from ensuring their work is meeting the needs of their more impactful “Large S” Stakeholders – those who are external to their function.

(I have a pet hypothesis that this hyper-focus is amplified by the remote/hybrid work environment of the modern knowledge economy, but that’s another topic.)

What I’m seeing in my work is that times of speed and complexity are exactly the times that teams must consciously redouble their efforts to connect with and understand stakeholders. It’s not that hard, but teams must press the pause button; you can’t take off the blinders while you’re running full tilt.

Regarding “small s” stakeholders, the ones in adjacent sub-functions (for example a set of teams reporting to the same VP or SVP), it’s amazing how a simple discussion can open up their peripheral vision. I ask them to answer for one another variations of these 3 questions:

1. What do you wish your peers knew about your group and your work that you think they might not fully understand??
2. What does your group deliver, and to whom, to contribute to the overall purpose of the broader team?
3. What do you need from your peers to be better able to do your job??

Insights abound in this process.

For “Large S” stakeholders, I ask teams work together on a straightforward stakeholder analysis. I ask them to consider questions such as:

1. What do you really know about your stakeholders: their business priorities and challenges, their personal values, thier history within the company, and their hot buttons and influencers?
2. What do you need to learn? How will you gather that information??
3. What is their stance vis-à-vis your function today??What do you need it to be?
4. What ought to be in any plan to build a bridge to this stakeholder??Who will lead that bridge-building process?

This is a collective act: no one individual has all the needed knowledge about any Stakeholder. Only the combined wisdom can create an accurate audit of what’s known and what’s not known. And, by the way, this “Large S” stakeholder analysis, when undertaken by members of multiple “small s” teams, leads to enhanced understanding of the way adjacent sub-functions interact with their function’s key Stakeholders. “Large S” stakeholder analysis leads to “small s” stakeholder understanding, too!

And like the "small s" stakeholder discussions, it never ceases to amaze what people learn from one another and how much latent - and valuable! - knowledge exists in the team - when they slow down enough to share it with one another!

So tell me: What are you seeing in your team or teams you work with? Are you or they seeing enough of the world around you, or do you or they have inadvertent blinders on?