Why Your Team Isn’t Getting the Message
Leaders, are you helping your team align your strategic vision to action?
In the early 1990’s Novell was the second largest vendor of software for personal computers, trailing only Microsoft. Novell was king of networking, and well-positioned as the internet took flight.
In 1994, I was a young engineer, a leader on my team, and a noisy person at Novell with a reputation for asking “annoying” questions. I was part of the Unix division, which had an untrusting relationship with the corporate leaders in Utah since being acquired from Bell Labs. We were not confident that the exec team had a clear vision of how we fit into the broader company strategy, dominated by NetWare.
In March of that year, Novell acquired Wordperfect, an early competitor of Microsoft Word, with significant market share, in a deal worth over $1b.
Shortly afterward, the Unix division was gathered in the crowded cafeteria in Summit, NJ, to discuss the new acquisition. Everyone around me wanted to understand the strategy around Wordperfect and Unix. We were recently told that Unix was to become an “application server”, a new term in the brand new internet economy. My colleagues demanded an answer as to when Wordperfect would be ported to Unix. As the squeaky wheel, they prodded me to ask the question.
I got back a non-committal answer, and we left dejected and angry.
What the executives at the meeting missed was that my question was not about Wordperfect (though I did not know that). It was about what it meant for us to be an application server if we didn’t port our own apps to it. In short, we did not understand corporate strategy. Our distrust grew.
In time, it would become clear what an application server was, but it was too late for Novell. The organization was divided by mistrust, turf battles, and a strategy that could not be implemented on the ground - because no one understood it.
Some of Novell’s assets and people would later end up at BEA Systems, where the Java Application Server boomed as part of the ecommerce revolution of the Web 2.0. Novell had pre-saged that moment, but was unable to communicate its vision, and how we can help reify it, in that cafeteria meeting. Within 18 months, Novell began to fall apart, and Wordperfect itself would be sold for ten cents on the dollar.
I listen to leaders frustrated with their team all the time. What I’d like these leaders to know is
If you’ve hired right, your team comprises professionals who want to do the right thing.
In order to do the right thing, they must truly understand corporate strategy and mission. They must know how it impacts them, and how they can help. Not one person left that Summit cafeteria understanding how their decisions should be impacted by the meeting.
Pay attention to what your employees are really asking you. In meetings we sometimes want to get through our agenda, but getting to the end of the meeting should never be the goal of a meeting. If its important to say something at a meeting, it is important for that something to be understood.
You cannot expect your team to buy into strategic change in one meeting. There is a name for this: the Marathon Effect. In marathons with staggered starts, people will be expected to cross the finish line in staggered waves as well. If it took you, as a leader, weeks of time to get comfortable with a new direction, you should expect your team to need a similar amount of time.
To combat the marathon effect, for any major shift in strategy, you will need to be intentional in how you work through questions and challenges to that strategy. And will you need to recall when you and your leadership team itself had to work through those very same questions and challenges.
At the end - the crossing the line of the marathon - every person should be able to state how their priorities will have shifted before and after the strategy change.
How confident are you that every member of your team understands how your strategy impacts their daily work?
