The Secret Club

The horned dung beetle can carry the equivalent of 6 double-decker buses. Only one species must carry more: you (and no, I’m not going to make any obvious comparisons about what you’re both dealing with). The desire for Relevance and Freedom that propelled you to the top comes with such a weighty ‘to do’ list that it threatens to crush you. And all too often, the first thing your workload crushes is your ability to communicate.

What’s the issue?

1. With so much to do, you barely have enough time to attend meetings and wade through the treacle of your to do list. It all takes time you can ill afford to balance performance with politics, strategy with operations. Whatever colourful things followers say about their leaders, ‘lazy’ isn’t usually one of them.
2. Meetings often over-run as you and your team try to squeeze every last ounce out of your precious time together (ok sometimes it’s just rubbish time management). So when opinions have finally been marshalled and decisions have been made and minuted, it’s either off to the next meeting for a rinse and repeat, or back to earthworming your way through your in-tray.
3. What’s so often forgotten is that while everyone in the room knows what’s just been decided and why, no-one else does.

Activities to consider

1. It could be the pressure of work. It could be the implied assumption that by default, everything discussed at a senior level should not be shared with the masses. It could be that taking a discussion to decide what to tell people about the stuff you’ve just discussed and decided might feel like the type of bureaucratic overkill that made ‘Yes, Minister!’ so unbelievably believable.
2. The problem is, unless you’re going to do everything you’ve decided by actually doing it yourselves, those decisions are about as useful as a chocolate teapot unless those responsible know what it is you’ve just signed them up for.
3. They also want to know general progress. Distance, direction, hurdles etc. They’re on this bus too. If you don’t take the time to tell them, they’ll start caring about progress as much as you seem to care about telling them about it.
4. One of the most important roles of the senior leader team is to communicate. And yet all too often, leaders are guilty of being The Secret Club; so elusive that it would be easier for Sir Attenborough to find a dung beetle.

Try this

Every time you have a decent-length meeting, schedule 15 minutes at the end to decide what you are and aren’t going to communicate. And then actually communicate it. And if your colleagues think that’s a waste of 15 minutes that you could be using more profitably to get stuff done, call me on the red telephone right away.

At HPC, we developed Adaptability Based Leadership with the express purpose of raising productivity through more engaged, better led staff. If that approach resonates, contact me and let’s get you started on the next phase of your journey towards mastering leadership.