It is! The State of Chaos within your organization often has a lot to do with misalignment of priorities: are you pursuing short term results or long term peace of mind? Meeting a deadline elicits high-fives around the room, but is your infrastructure sustainable?
Through our work together, you will see the bigger picture ROI, and calm your mind in the process. Sound like a lofty promise? Read on so I can share with you how this is possible…
The common theme I see all the time is that chaos ensues when we don’t have the courage to go after the root cause of what is keeping you up at night. The result is rallying the troops to focus on the effort and at the end of the day after beating the teams until you can claim victory. The result is never sustainable because leaders don’t have the discipline to focus on the issue earlier and to seek peace of mind through sustainable processes, capable resources and continual leadership development.
I dropped in recently into a situation where the leadership was hell bent on getting an immediate result. Then upon the “hurry scurry” of making things happen, the leadership changed direction and expanded the scope and suggesting we get back to examining the process. That should have been the primary focus in parallel with stopping the bleeding of the current situation, but instead, pressure was their guiding principle and blinded them to the greater opportunity and causing havoc in the process.
After a bit of wasted time and effort, the team is back on track in hopes of getting to the root cause and sustainably creating a process that not only results, but long term trusted results… or peace of mind.
I keep using this principle of “peace of mind” over and over again in my writings. I do so because I don’t think most leaders have ever experienced this. When they don’t know what it feels like, they use the same playbook over and over again and artificially gain satisfaction, but often will lose sleep at night. This is not a good result for their health both for them and their team.
I propose leaders do the following going forward:
- Provide guidance on what the outcome should be and trust the teams to do the work; don’t micro manager, but guide the ship
- Focus on the real barriers of team dynamics, misaligned organizational goals and in general barrier removal vs. the task at hand.
- Paint a picture of what the future looks like and also what peace of mind could be. If you can show them the picture or how it will feel, you will Lift up your team to achieve even better results than you envisioned. This is the missing peace I find in most leaders and I hope you can heed this advice.
I’ve been there, done that and I’ve seen a lot of wasted effort and leadership maturity that is needed. If you enjoyed this piece and want to discuss your situation, I’m all ears, heart and mind invested in your story. Until we meet, I wish you well and much success -Deb
