You are a fantastic leader. You’ve got a great team. You gather everyone together in an all-team meeting. You carefully announce and explain your new innovative and strategic initiative. It’s inspiring. People nod their heads. They even clap at the end. Then the meeting ends and everyone goes back to their desks and does what they’ve always done.

Despair

This doesn’t really happen, does it? Your team members are good people. You are the boss. Of course, they listen to what you have to say. Your presentation was well-articulated. It was strategic. It was aligned with the purpose. Why would your perfectly executed speech render no meaningful results?

Then you remember reading somewhere that messages need to be repeated somewhere between 7 and 20 times before they take effect. So, you follow that advice and repeat the message in different formats, audiences, and mediums. You even add a storytelling element to the message. You’ve read recently that this is key. That perhaps makes a little bit of difference, but not to the effect that you had hoped.

After all of that, you look at yourself in the mirror, and wonder, “Perhaps I’m not very good at this leadership thing after all.”

Hope

At this point, I’ll offer two possible interpretations of what’s going on. First, unless you have an existential mandate for change, it’ll take a while. Way longer than you’d like. Most leaders I know are driven and impatient. Organizational change requires patience. I often ask leaders to zoom out and measure the impact of their leadership efforts in years instead of weeks. When you do that, you’ll get a better sense of the impact you are making over time.

The other possibility is that you are just too high level and too far removed from the daily work to make an impact. The higher you are in the organization, or the more influential power you are using, instead of direct positional authority, the more likely this is.

The chasm

There’s a big gap between a leadership vision and the daily work of team members. This can sometimes seem as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon. There are ways to bridge that gap, but the first thing you should do is resist the urge to micromanage. That’s a weak move and it will be ultimately counterproductive, so don’t go there.

Your vision is big and broadly applicable. That’s nice, but unactionable. What you need to do next is some discovery work. You aren’t in the mode of telling people how they should work differently. Instead, you are looking for people or groups within your team that exemplify the strategy you are trying to realize.

A few examples:

Trying to get the whole organization to move to the cloud? Find a team that embraced cloud technology early on. Trying to get your whole organization to embrace Agile? Find the most agile team in the company. Trying to get everyone on the AI train? Find a few innovators that dabble on their own.

Most of you have heard of the Diffusion of Innovations curve. For reference, here it is:

Regardless of the initiative, it’s incumbent on the leader to identify those innovators and listen to them.

These are the people that don’t need to be told what to do. They come by it naturally. They don’t need instruction, but they do need something from you: support.

It’s lonely on the leading edge. It’s fun, but it’s also frustrating.   

Across my career span, I’ve always been able to find the innovators on my team. I’ve never been without them. I’ve never led a team that didn’t have any. So, that’s not the issue.

If you politically and financially support the innovators, they will organically expand on their own and create a grassroots group of early adopters.

That’s where I’ve hit a wall in the past. How do you get past that and reach the early majority and late majority? The innovators don’t have patience for it. Nor is it really their job. Your job as a leader is to make innovation work for the masses.

Context

Feel free to keep making big inspiring speeches along the way, but what your team needs at this point is context. Frankly, the leader at the top is poorly positioned for that task, but that’s okay. That’s why I focus so heavily on leadership development. I’ve got capable and qualified leaders positioned across my organization at various levels who catch the vision and can contextualize it for their respective teams.

It’s critical that they do this work. You cannot do it for them. You are too far removed. Encourage them. Hold them accountable but let them figure it out. It will take them longer than you wish it did. So be it.

Laggards

What do you do about those stinking laggards? They live rent-free in your head, driving you crazy. First, take a deep breath. There will always be laggards. Always. They will either eventually catch on or go away. The important thing to remember is not to let them zap your energy and resources. It’s not worth it. Focus your energy on equipping and educating those in the middle.

Summary

Don’t you wish you could give a rousing speech and transform your organization overnight? We all do, but that’s not how it works. It doesn’t matter how good your speech is. 

Here’s what you do:

1. Cast a vision. Be inspiring. Articulate purpose. Tell stories. Keep it up.
2. Find your innovators and support them.
3. Cultivate grassroots efforts to build an early adopter community.
4. Develop your leaders and contextualize the initiative. Let them figure it out.
5. Don’t let the laggards drive you crazy.
6. Be patient. This will take longer than you want it to.

Follow these steps and you’ll bridge the great chasm between leadership communication and reality. That’s how it’s done.

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