Somewhere in the bright light of the movies and the folklore of business journals, barking, “just make it happen” to your team became mistaken for good
Now you don’t have to be Peter Drucker to know that it doesn’t work that way in the real world. Motivating human beings is far more complex. However, it is possible at a high-level, to breakdown the essential steps of making something happen. Basically, it boils down to three things: 1) You think a thing. 2). You plan a thing. 3). You do a thing. That is essentially how you make something happen. It sounds simplistic but the execution of it is anything but. For some people, this will seem incredibly obvious while for others this may be the first time you were encouraged to think about how you realize the thoughts in your head.
Let’s explore the first step: You think a thing. Now I’m sure we can all come up with examples of a leader barking at his team to “just make it happen” and they go off and come back with something brilliant. That leader got lucky. For that task, his or her team possessed the necessary skills to indeed come up with something out of the ordinary. That won’t always be the case. What do you do then?
When your team seems unable to come up with a groundbreaking new idea, what they may lack is perspective. They can’t see the great new idea because they may not have the same perspective as you. You as the leader have to shift your team’s perspective and help them go beyond the familiar.
We all have a tendency to fall back and what we know and rely on tried and true practices. To advance into the realm of groundbreaking, teams need to leave the familiar behind and be brave enough to venture into undiscovered territory. This is where greatness lies. This is how you get your team to tap into this zone. It is the very meaning of "thinking outside the box".
The next time your team seems to be stuck and unable to make progress on goals you have set for them, sit down with them and listen to them describe the impasse they are facing. Learn how they are thinking about a problem. After you have done so, offer a different perspective on the situation and send them back to think about it. You may find that you planted a seed, which will turn into new ideas.
I'll give you an example of this principle at work. One time I gave my team a task to come up with a new management report. In order to create this report it was necessary to combine information from two different systems that did not talk to each other into a single report. This required manual intervention to create the report, which was time consuming and inefficient.
Normally when I would give my group an assignment they would comply without incident. Ok, maybe not completely without incident but they usually were no major issues. This time I received very strong push back. I couldn't understand why. I got everyone together and they explained to me what it would take to produce this report and how hard it would be to produce it in the frequency being asked. My team was clearly communicating to me that this report ran counter to my efforts to make the department more efficient.
They were correct. However, what they didn't know was that the company was preparing for a new regulation to take effect. This report had to be done to be in compliance. Once I told them that, my team understood that it wasn't me being unreasonable but rather us reacting to a circumstance beyond our control. If they had a better way of doing it, I promised to listen. I encouraged them to think about changes even if they had to be made to other department's procedures. My team made proposals about capturing certain pieces of information upstream during the client intake process. They worked with IT to find unused fields in the database, which could be used to store the information, and worked with IT to figure what would be the impact to existing reports. In the end, we were able to substantially automate the process.
Once the team changed their perspective and viewed the creation of the report as mandatory and looked at the process as a whole rather than by which department does what piece, they were able to think of ideas, which they would have not normally accessed because of their perceived boundaries. I could have said to them “just make it happen” all I wanted but that wasn’t going to help get the job done.
Coming up with the idea is the first crucial step in making something happen. In my next post, I'll discuss the next phase: planning.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gregory Q. Jenkins is Founder and CEO of Quentasia Industries Inc.