Everyday Strategic Leadership: Strategic Leaders Promote Team Speed & Alignment
The U.S. Army Leadership Field Manual quotes a brigade commander as saying, “None of us is as smart as all of us.” The sentiment crystallizes the fourth practice of strategic leaders: they’re focused on promoting team speed and alignment.
Most people spend the first years of their careers demonstrating competence. They’re at the bottom of the totem pole, but knowing a lot is what got them ahead. Then, when people get promoted to their first leadership role, a common reaction is that their effort must shift from what they know and can do to what the team knows and can do.
A few more promotions later, that shift is mostly complete. Once a leader has a few layers reporting to them, their share of the team’s impact becomes dangerously close to zero. If they took the day off, their team would accomplish just as much as they would on days the leader works 12 hours.
Leaders who realize that dynamic know that an hour spent enabling the team to become 1% more effective is more impactful than almost any individual work they could do. Brainstorming solutions is less effective than helping the team understand what problems must be solved. Studying the problem themselves is less effective than providing the team with information to help them solve it.
In short, they’re focused on unleashing the team’s energy.
On the other hand, leaders who aren’t strategic operate as if their individual competence is the critical factor to success. Rather than providing clear decision rights that help team members act in an empowered way, they suck decisions upward (and then complain about having too much work to do!).
Rather than designing team routines and meeting practices that optimize coordination, they make everyone else’s schedule work around theirs, often showing up late and causing chaos by constantly rescheduling meetings.
In my experience working with leaders and researching for Everyday Strategic Leadership, the differences in approach sometimes reflect how central leaders believe themselves to be to the team’s success. But just as often, leaders accidentally operate in non-strategic ways because they aren’t conscious of how their daily leadership behaviors affect the team (hence, the reason for writing the book).
In either case, the effect is similar. Where strategic leaders help everyone run full speed in the same direction, non-strategic leaders force everyone to be in line behind them, constrained by the leader’s pace and vision.