Leadership Wisdom of the Week #23

“If everything is important, nothing is.”

– Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage

This week’s quote appears in Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage, where he uses this adage to highlight the importance of leading not just individuals, but whole teams and organisations in a clear, shared direction. A shared goal and a willingness to move towards it together enable people to work more effectively than any one individual could on their own.

To set clear goals, you need to start by deciding what you want to achieve – and why. No organisation can be everything to everyone, even though saying yes to a multitude of opportunities may feel safe: surely, at least one of them will be successful?

Once you have decided on the direction, you need the courage to determine which actions will take you there – and what not to focus on. Too often, we develop strategic goals that exist in addition to, or alongside, our existing operational tasks. We may decide to focus on specific customer groups, for example, but still find it very difficult to say no to other customers.

We add, but we do not remove! We create something new, but do not have the courage to stop doing what we have always done. Clarity comes from clear decisions and choices: everything cannot be important. We cannot focus on everything.

Sometimes it is difficult to give up old ways of doing things because we do not trust the new ones yet. Sometimes it is difficult to tell people that something they have invested time and effort in is no longer a priority. And so, we end up saying that everything is important.

Making clear choices is only the beginning. If you want a team or a wider organisation to move in the same direction, those choices need to be communicated repeatedly and translated into clear actions. Lencioni calls this overcommunicating clarity. Even when we simplify and overcommunicate, people will still interpret what we say in their own ways. This makes a continuous focus on clarity critical.

All this requires a slightly contradictory combination of skills from us as leaders. We need the courage to make clear decisions and stop doing things, but also the patience and persistence to keep communicating and clarifying the choices we have made. In my experience, many leaders are naturally stronger in one of these areas than in the other.

Which comes more naturally to you – bold decision-making or patient implementation? And which one should you develop further?