Doug sent a frantic text, Jenny replied in Slack, marketing in turn launched a premature email campaign, and customer service was immediately inundated with angry clients.
Leadership meets, confusion all around, too many cooks in the kitchen, while ten people are working on the same task without being assigned to work together on any given project.
The wheels are falling off the bus, or rather, they did a long time ago.
In business culture, it is easy to observe where things aren’t working.
Just set up a call with any employee and let them tell you the truth, once you’ve established what they say won’t be held against them.
Just look at the confusion coming into customer service due to the latest mistake sent out.
Just take a gander at Slack and see how well that’s being utilized.
The Slack one is so frustrating I made a silly and comical song about it just to see if it would get a laugh from people in general who have complained to me about their teams not using it, showcasing how important it is.
In leadership, however we can, we must utilize our Signature Moves to inspire, lift, call out, use humor, wisdom and right behavior.
No question, having the hard conversation is brutal, and yet, essential.
This past week, I mediated a company going through a major mess, and fixing broken promises that had been made without the knowledge of the team, as we began picking up the pieces.
What is the promise of the leader?
To under promise, and over-deliver? So I’ve heard it said.
I don’t like that thinking, that is pathetic. Be a man! Stand for something, dang it!
Make promises that you can keep, yes, that will push you and the team to work as one, set goals that aim high, and you will blast through the lesser thinking and philosophies of wimpy managers who are afraid to commit to something great.
As the team licks its wounds, we get each member on the phone, on text, however we can, to make sure everyone is ok and still breathing.
Assess the damage, bandage the wounded, rally the troops!
Leadership is communication, and once that’s over, communicating again and again to confirm all is well and understood. What have we agreed to? Confirm it over and over.
Want to know the secret to increased accountability through aligned leadership behaviors?
Make and keep a Promise as the Leader yourself.
Don’t allow your leaders to break their promises.
Reach out to each team player, each leader, and let them know you trust them, believe in them, and you need them to correct some behaviors.
Lean into their strengths, address the mistakes, suggest where a weakness can either be learned or delegated to someone on the team with that strength.
Systems are in place for a reason, let’s return to that.
Don’t just send a text, that’s not the process.
Firing it off in Slack may not be enough…we don’t even know who’s really looking in there anymore.
A return to the basics, they say it all the time in sports, the fundamentals matter.
Talk! Reply! Do we understand the task at hand?
Affirmative! Let’s Go!
Get on the same page, assign tasks to those who can be relied upon, we are looking for those who keep their promise on a daily basis.
Who shows up? Who governs themselves well? Who is a steward we can trust over small things and eventually the biggest needs?
Your Leadership Promise is to Identify, Clarify, and Magnify the Signature Moves of the people you lead.
Text them, so they can read it over and over again, what you see in them as their strengths, what you need from them, how you are there for them.
This is Promise Leadership.
How to increase accountability with your Leaders? Ensure they know what is expected, and follow up on the behavior set in place and agreed upon. Without this, all programs, processes, systems, projects fall apart.
After the debacle of last week, we had a big meeting with many. And then little meetings with a few. A reminder of the way processes need to be, an assurance that the leaders have their backs and it was failed communication that was the issue.
Broken promises come from either forgetting what was promised or lack of proper communication.
If you can’t deliver on what you’ve promised, over-communicate what happened, and work like your business depends on it to deliver the promise in the end.
Don’t “under promise so you can over deliver”. That’s for the wimps.
Promise what you know you can deliver, exceed their expectations in your communications, and you win in business and leadership every single day.
One Response
The part that rings true is that the breakdown is almost never about capability — the people could all do their jobs, they had just stopped being able to say the awkward thing out loud. Once that goes, everything else looks like a process problem and gets treated with more process, which makes it worse. The promise framing gives people a way back that does not require anyone to be the villain. Thanks for writing it up honestly rather than as a tidy case study. I run a small tool called MotRadar and the same thing nearly happened to us at two people, which is a humbling number to admit.