Great leaders have a deep & wide toolkit: delegating effectively, listening attentively, facilitating quickly, making decisions, speaking transparently. Every tool has its purpose, some come naturally to us, others are blindspots. One of the hardest leadership blindspots to conquer when it doesn't come naturally is inspiring others.
Very few career paths require us to get good or even practice this skill before we become a leader, and what makes us successful as team members early on is our ability to assimilate and execute based on someone else's vision, not create our own based on the execution required of us.
What makes it even harder is that, for many, inspiration is synonymous with lacking substance. There is an implicit bias that a good story is meant to disguise, not illuminate; therefore, many leaders associate doing something of substance with having a complicated story that is unclear - you may have heard some version of the following in the past: "If it were easy to explain, someone else would have already done it. We're solving hard problems, and hard problems are complex."
While one blindspot is to mistakenly equate complex with complicated, today I'd like to explore the blindspot of inspiring others, the team narrative that we tell, or don’t, or don’t tell well around what our team is doing, why it’s important, and how to work with us.
What's your Team Narrative?
A leader's team is their product and a product is only as strong as the narrative around it. A narrative is a simple, powerful story that underscores our purpose. It enlightens us with anembolding vision of the future, and it sets us on a mission to achieve that vision.
Great brands have compelling narratives, and great leaders inspire their teams and the ecosystem around them with a compelling narrative in order to achieve outsized outcomes in our broader ecosystems.
Some quick parallels between building a brand and inspiring with a vision. Strong narratives are:
Consistent: everything you do needs to be a continuation of your narrative, evidence of your purpose, proof that you are still on your mission.
Authentic: what you stand for, how you express it, the actions you take to demonstrate it feels real, plausible, Ambitious but achievable.
Multi-faceted. I like to break down narratives into three categories:
Business: how are you driving growth or facilitating others to do so?
Product: how are your releases & roadmap evidence of your vision?
Company: what team dynamics are you fostering that make your team compelling to work with?
A great team doesn't just happen.
Strong narratives don't just rally the world behind your vision, they rally your team members behind it as well. Inspiring is as much about aligning your team as it is about aligning your team's stakeholders - other teams, users, customers, vendors, regulators, investors. The two reinforce each other, and one cannot flourish without the other.
The blindspot for most people here boils down to a mistake that most engineering founders make: "A great product will sell itself." A great team doesn't just happen. Teams exist in a greater ecosystem and you are competing for attention within that ecosystem so that you can work together, build trust, create outsized outcomes.
Most team leaders find themselves regularly defending their team's value to other stakeholders, re-explaining how the team works, what their focus is, and why it's valuable. Like real sales, if you're "selling" your team's vision after the problem has been identified, you've already lost the battle:
You'll compete on features: "look at all these team initiatives & accomplishments."
You'll bring the price down: "we don't need much budget."
You'll be compared to your competitors: "we can get this done faster than Team X."
You're rationalizing a decision that has faced irrational resistance. The only way to win the emotional battle is to win it proactively, before the problem arises.
When you've won the emotional battle, talent comes to work on your team, other teams/companies come to you because your team is the team, your purpose is clear.
If you want to inspire your team and inspire your company around your team's purpose, you need to know how great companies inspire today.
📚 Define your Team's Strategic Narrative.
When I was looking for a great model for building a strong narrative, Play Bigger fell into my lap. Endorsed by the leaders at Drift on the heels of their Conversational Marketing coup that supplanted Intercom in a space Intercom inventing, Play Bigger provides a playbook for building a compelling narrative around your business. While most team leaders don't need to create a new category or redefine how their department functions, the mise en oeuvre is particularly poignant.
Here are three ideas from the book that I always come back to:
The beat of the drum is more important than the song. Create consistent rallying points that are proof of your vision - communicate about achievements, create initiatives that rally the whole team.
Build a category by solving problems that no one has noticed: make your team strategic & inevitable by shaping the company's problems in a way that only your team can solve.
Timing is everything: know when you need to be exponential and when you need to be incremental. Be the right team for the moment, oscillating between heads down invisible execution and mountain-moving visibility.
Show consistency. Spot what others don't. Have great timing. That may not be the whole recipe, but those are three key ingredients to baking a strategic team.
🔧 The Five Elements of every Compelling Strategic Story
The current godfather of crafting strategic narratives is Andy Raskin. I regularly reference articles from his publication Firm Narrative such as stop naming stuff & the greatest sales deck I've ever seen. His new podcast The Bigger Narrative as well as his punchy LinkedIn posts are worth your attention as well; however, you probably don't need to pay Andy Raskin $60,000 to write your team's strategic narrative. Instead, you just need to remember the five elements
Something has changed: this something is bigger than you or your team. The company has pivoted, raised a large amount of money, cracked a hard problem, has an opportunity to be a global leader.
There will be winners or losers: draw a line in the sand that explains your team's priorities. "Sure, we could continue doing business as usual as if something didn't change, but if we ignore what's needed from us, we will lose, because something has changed."
Tease the Promised Land: paint a picture of what it would look like to win. I personally like to ask my team, "what are we going to do in the next 18 months that HBS will write a case study about?"
Everything you do is about getting to the Promised Land: bang the drum as often as you can; share little wins on internal communications channels with an eye not on what you've done, but on how what you've done is proof of your team's purpose.
Present Evidence that you can make the story come true: remind people of your past accolades, the team's track record, the things that exist because of your team - build a track record that will create confidence in your predictions of the future. ****
There is a similar process outlined in Building a StoryBrand and other books, so if this one doesn't resonate with you as a structure for the narrative you want to tell about your team, keep looking until you find one that does.
Start / Stop / Continue
🟢 Start each team weekly and 1:1 by reiterating the strategic narrative. If it gets boring, have other people say it. If everyone can say it perfectly, you've succeeded.
🟢 Start communicating internally regularly on little achievements to explicitly restate your narrative - "we recently achieved X milestone, which is critical for us as we {strategic narrative}. Big props to Karen and Carl who crushed this initiative." Keep a list and set yourself a calendar reminder if you need to.
🟢 Start communicating in terms that people can relate to. Don't build your own vocabulary that others will need to decipher.
🟡 Continue executing efficiently and making sure things move forward. Inspiration isn't a replacement for execution, it is another tool in your toolkit.
🟡 Continue connecting the dots for people to see both the trees and the forest.
🟡 Continue pushing your team to succeed, while being realistic in what each department can accomplish.
🔴 Stop trying to avoid repetition ("I already said that"). A consumer has to hear a message seven times before they will consider taking action. You probably need to repeat yourself more than seven times.
🔴 Stop defending your team's mission when a stakeholder misunderstands it or articulates it differently than you would like. Take the lick and make a mental note that it isn't clear enough for everyone yet.
🔴 Stop sharing ideas that aren't fully flushed out yet, or changing the narrative with each new piece of input. Consistency requires stability.
Thanks Liam :-)