Leadership isn’t a game – it has real impact on real people doing real jobs.
How your people think will shape how your team performs.
How you think shapes how your team thinks.
We’re still talking about the game between Survival and Mission. Set your personal mission, choose your missions at work.
As a leader, one key outcome you need to achieve is that your team choose the right missions.
Note that the question here isn’t “having a mission”, but “choosing the right one”.
Whether you set a mission or not, your team will find one. If you don’t choose the mission, the team will choose for themselves, or just follow you.
This is not just about alignment. A lot of attention is paid in the leadership industry to motivating and aligning teams.
Whilst alignment is important, it’s not the key.
Aligning to the wrong mission can be catastrophic.
A real-life example:
A business started a big project to change its IT system from old, disconnected systems to a new integrated system. The official mission was clear – “change from old systems to this new one”.
The problem came when some parts of the business decided they had no intention of changing how they worked. Their real mission was “adopt the new system to my old way of doing things”.
So that’s exactly what the business did. Instead of setting a mission to change, some leaders set a mission to not change, by default. Of course, the real mission never got printed on posters or mentioned in speeches, but everybody knew it was there..
Years later the “new” system remained unloved, under-utilized, and ineffective. The enormous investment made by the business was wasted.
The waste wasn’t caused by technical faults, it was caused by leaders who set the wrong mission. They played the game between short term survival and long term mission, and survival won.
They were so focused on short term goals they never got to the long term.
The irony in this case was that a lot of effort went into clear slogans and team alignment, but the simple decision by some leaders to not change undermined the mission of the project.
The lesson here is that your decisions as a leader set the thinking of the team more than your words.
If you want to succeed (who doesn’t?) be careful what missions you set your team.
Not just the official one, the real ones.
“…If you don’t choose the mission, the team will choose for themselves, or just follow you…”
If you talk about long term but keep making short term decisions which conflict with long term goals, you are playing for survival not mission.
You will likely get what you aim for..
Do you have a long term objective?
How often do you sacrifice short term goals, knowing that the long term can be better achieved by doing so? If never, can you say you actually have a mission?
How often do you get pressure from above to sacrifice the long term for today or tomorrow? How often do you consciously resist it?
Do you stress over the conflict between long and short term goals?
Does your team know what your long-term objectives are? Could they quote them?
How often do you talk with your team about long term missions?
Or are they focused only on this month’s target?
Are they thinking ahead?
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“I might be wrong, but at least I’ve thought about it…”
“If you talk about long term but keep making short term decisions which conflict with long term goals, you are playing for survival not mission”.
The above is so true. We fall into this trap often, especially in tough times,
thanks for sharing Bruce!