Leadership is more verb than noun, it’s more about activity than title. Sometimes in the milieu of decisions, meetings, and lists we forget to lead.
Here are three things you can do to lead your team this week:
Define the scoreboard, scope, and speed.
Scoreboard
The scoreboard tells you if you are winning. You can define the scoreboard by telling everybody around you what is the most important to accomplish this week. The beauty of a scoreboard is taking a complex organization and simplifying it to a number.
The scoreboard answers the question: “What is the number we are moving?”
Jan leads a nonprofit. She stands up on Monday morning and says, “Here is what is most important this week: We need to strengthen relationships with strategic partners. So this week, our goal is to get five organizations to commit to short- or long-term partnership.”
Scope
The scope is the lane you are working within. Defining scope helps everybody know what is on the table and what isn’t. Once the scoreboard is clear, everybody should be rallied within their lane to help us get there.
The scope answers this question, “What’s the number you are responsible to move?”
Jan tells her leadership to make sure everybody understands how their role contributes to the scoreboard. “Whether you are answering phones, making sales, sending thank-you letters, or keeping receipts in order every person will help us build stronger relationships.”
Speed
The leader defines how fast you must move right now. Without the leader defining speed, an organization can drift towards believing more is always better.
Jan reminds everybody on their Wednesday staff meeting, “We don’t need five new partnerships every week. We need five this week. Five great partners are better than twenty mediocre ones.”
Speed is one of the most misunderstood facets of leadership. I’ll write more about it (and how to determine how fast you can push people) next week.
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