August 27, 2020
1 Leadership Thought
One mistake leaders often make when setting goals for their team is believing that all they have to do is “cast vision” for the team to get on board. Here’s 2 problems with that:
You’re treating your people as employees instead of as teammates — they deserve to have a say in the goal.
You’re letting your ego say you can rely on charisma instead of creating connection — you want your team to serve you instead of you serving them.
“Without creating real buy-in, you're not setting goals—you’re setting quotas…and no one likes quotas.” (Share this on Twitter) Here’s 3 ways to create real buy-in:
Collaborate with your team to align on the definition of success.
Release authority so that your whole team takes ownership of the goal.
Keep it clear and simple.
To sum it up, setting goals doesn’t always mean you have buy-in from your team. Getting buy-in is the key to setting clear goals that you’ll actually achieve.
1 Resource
Adam Grant on generating good ideas:“When we’ve developed an idea, we’re typically too close to our own tastes — and too far from the audience’s taste — to evaluate it correctly…It’s widely assumed that there’s a tradeoff between quantity and quality — if you want to do better work, you have to do less of it — but this turns out to be false. In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality.”
Source: Adam Grant’s New York Times bestselling book, Originals
When we take this as a principle and apply it to setting goals with our team, it quickly clicks that combining everyone’s thoughts typically produces a better goal (and more ownership) than if we just come up with the goal on our own and tell everyone else to get on board.
1 Question
Who in your life today needs to be celebrated tomorrow?