Why your team’s not getting it – and what to do about it.
Are you a leader of your practice and thinking, You know, I’ve set the direction, I’ve told the team where I want us to be heading, and yet somehow they’re just not getting it? They don’t see the connection between their jobs and where the organisation’s heading? If that’s you, then listen closely. In the book Traction by Gino Wickman, one of the more famous concepts is something called the Entrepreneurial Operating System. If you’re a business owner, it’s one of the best laid-out business techniques or methods I’ve come across. Wickman emphasises the importance of having a clear vision and sharing it consistently. In fact, he says: “People need to hear the vision seven times before they really hear it for the first time.”
What he goes on to explain is that when people hear it for the first time, they might think, Okay, here we go. By the second time, you might get an eye roll. But it genuinely takes seven repetitions before your team starts to grasp it. In what I’d call Angus speak, the litmus test for you as an owner is this: are you utterly sick of telling your team about your vision? Until you’re at that point, you probably haven’t said it enough. It’s easy to think, Well, I’ve said it three or four times – surely that’s enough? But according to Wickman, it’s not. You need to keep at it until your team starts to say, Oh, okay, we’ve got this vision, and I can see how my role connects to it.
So, step one: clearly, you’ve got to have a vision. Step two: you’ve got to communicate it to your team seven times. And step three: if you’re not totally sick of saying it, you haven’t said it enough. See you next time! Bye.