Team Archive - The Art of Communicating

Does Lighting the Path actually work?

Um, yes.

Lighting the path works because it changes how impact happens.
And you’ll never want to go back once you tasted it.

Most leaders try to drive progress by pushing their teams through persuasion, pressure, or performance metrics.

But that kind of force creates compliance, not commitment. It moves bodies, but not minds.

Lighting the path is the opposite.

Instead of pushing harder, you trust that when people see where they are headed and feel why it matters, they will start moving on their own.

Not because they have to, but because they want to.

There’s just no need anymore to motivate and incentivize, let alone enforce accountability.

The energy comes from within the team.

Three requirements for this to work:

Say what’s true, in the most plain and simple words.
Favor alignment over agreement.
Stop trying to be right and start getting it right.

Your team is smart and will figure out better answers than you could ever find alone. If they believe in the path, they will push you for better rather than you having to push them.

And that’s what I call leadership: Creating the conditions for teams to rise above their wildest dreams.

Isn’t that the kind of leadership people are longing for?

Keep lighting the path,
Michael

What makes a team fly?

When people ask me about teams, they are usually surprised when I dismiss the passionate talents, charismatic leaders, or the visions with big, motivational words.

But I’ve seen too many talented teams fail.
I’ve seen brilliant visions collapse.
I’ve seen strong leaders struggle.

High performance in teams is very rarely about the big stuff.

It’s not the grand speeches, the lofty goals, the once-in-a-lifetime charismatic leader.

More often, it comes down to something deceptively small.

The habits.
The things you do when nobody’s watching.
The little rhythms that slowly, bit by bit build trust.

A team that listens before it argues.
That remembers to give credit before moving on.
People saying what they will do and then actually doing it.

None of this sounds glamorous. But stack a handful of these habits together, and suddenly you’ve got something extraordinary.

So when we ask, what makes a team great?, maybe the answer is simpler than we think.

Not the strong leader.
Not the perfect plan.

But the discipline to show up, day after day, in ways that build each other up.

This is what creates a foundation so strong that when the big moments come – the crisis, the pitch, the turning point – the team is ready.

If this is the kind of team you want to build, there’s a brilliant new book out by Jan Fischbach and Alisa Stolze. For now, it’s in German only but if you speak German, read it. It’s called Teamleitung konkret.

Keep lighting the path,
Michael

The work they do

Does your team love the work they do?

Do they love what they do?

How they do it?

Why they do it?

Have you asked them?

What would make it so for them?

(And, of course, do you love the work you do?)

The team

It’s not “we, the leaders“ and “you, the team.”
It’s “us, together.”

Watch for language that separates you from the team. It can be subtle, but it’s almost always there.

It could be in the way you express what you want, what you expect, what you value, etc. …

… and it separates the team from yourself …

… when, actually, you’re in this together.

How do you create that sense?

Who’s responsible for that?

What empowerment means:
The leader trusts the team with making choices.

How it’s often done:
The leader trusts the team with making choices as long as it’s the same choice the leader would have made.

The worst version might be this:
The leader trusts the team with making choices as long as it’s the same choice the leader would have made and unfairly assigns responsibility for any negative outcomes to the team, even when the leader would have made the same choice.

Do you work for a leader who truly trusts their team? Please drop me a note! I’m assembling a list of leaders who light the path.

Leadership lessons from Germany’s Qatar disaster

Among the many fascinating leadership lessons from Amazon’s “All or Nothing” documentary about Germany’s Qatar football disaster, here’s one that stood out for me:

For Germany’s coaches, it was US and THEM, not WE.
“Us” the coaches and “them” the players, not “we” the team.

The coaches expected them to deliver.
As opposed to being in this together.

When the coaches expect the players to deliver, it delegates the responsibility the wrong way. It frees the coach from the responsibility and puts that burden on the player. Basically, the message is this: “I’ve told you what you need to do. If you fail, it’s on you.”

A leader who lights the path would turn this upside down. They would trust the players to deliver. They would believe in the players to deliver. Because they would figure out a path and light it in a way that the players would see it, believe in it and trust in the path (and themselves), too.

No need to expect anything.

But Germany’s players didn’t trust in the path (or themselves). Head coach Hansi Flick’s words made it sound like he didn’t trust in the journey and in the team’s ability to deliver. And so, the players couldn’t find that trust, either.

Flick used pressure (“We expect X from you”) as a substitute for trust. But that can’t work when the players don’t even trust in themselves.

Worse, when it’s US and THEM, i.e. when the TEAM is missing, then you can’t compensate lack of trust with will power (despite the obvious individual strengths of the players). For will power to surface you’d need a reason – such as belonging to something bigger than yourself. As there was no team, there was nothing bigger. Who would they stretch themselves for? The coaches? But why?

The documentary is a rare glimpse into how professional top-level leadership actually performs (or doesn’t). You’d make a mistake to assume that 1) this example would be the rare exception and 2) businesses would be any different.

Which is not to say that there aren’t businesses that are different or that there aren’t leaders who truly light the path. But it’s certainly not the default.

“Leadership skill” is still largely expected to just somehow come to leaders “naturally”. You’re either born with it or not. Training, coaching and professional advisory around communication is still the exception to the norm – and even when it’s done it’s sometimes just to check the box.

And yet, communication can make or brake leadership – even if you’re highly skilled in other areas.

If you’ve watched the documentary, what was your biggest takeaway?

PS: It was heartbreaking to see the outsized role that PowerPoint played in the team meetings. PowerPoint is no substitute for empathy and trust and the way it’s being used in these meetings is a bitter example of that.

“Can all of you see my brilliance?”

Status updates are supposed to quickly inform everyone about the status of a project.

Too often, though, these updates are much rather about the status of the people in the project and carry double meanings along the lines of “I’m not to blame for the delay.”, “This is my kingdom. Don’t you dare to invade it.”, “I’m smarter than her.” etc.

In many cases, this happens when the team can’t see how the project is about something bigger than themselves. And so, they lack a sense of belonging to a team that achieves more than anyone could achieve on their own.

Which means that, effectively, everyone’s on their own team.

Which is why they need to protect their status.

Great project leaders create that sense of belonging. They light the path by communicating with irresistible clarity where we’re going as a team, why we’re going there and why everyone belongs.

Alex, the brilliant time waster

Alex is brilliant. Her words are often full of wisdom. In fact, I only know a handful of people who know as much about their field as she does.

Alex is also a huge time waster. Because her wisdom is usually the team’s to discover. Her thinking is dense. Her slides are packed with stuff that’s totally clear to her but not to her team. Her language is quite special with words that have a specific meaning to her but not to the team.

The sad part of the story is that this happens not only with brilliant minds like that of Alex but it is often the default even for people who are far less brilliant.

In fact, often we find ourselves to be ok with communication that lacks clarity. Somehow, it seems acceptable to have the team figure out what it all means. Rather than have one person invest the time to figure out how to speak with clarity, we have all the others invest the time to figure it out.

Great teams get stuff done more quickly because they have figured out how to speak with clarity (among other things, of course).

PS: Of course, Alex is not her real name.

It’s the crappy days we can learn the most from

When you’re used to being first, it hurts to end up on the 7th place. It hurts more when it’s not your fault but the fault of others.

But the reason why you end up being first most of the time is because you don’t stop at being hurt but take it as an opportunity to learn. And you don’t blame the others but take responsibility for the crap and take it as an opportunity to grow.

Lewis Hamilton, arguably one of the best Formula 1 drivers who ever lived, suffered from a bad decision by his team in the last race and ended up becoming 7th. There was nothing he could do about it.

But there was something he can take away from it. After he got over his initial frustration, his mood changed:

“I’m often grateful for crappy days like this, as it is days [like this] when you learn the most. If you’re winning all the time, you learn less.”

But there’s a twist about how the learning happens. While others focus on finding out who’s to blame, Hamilton’s Mercedes team has a different approach:

“We don’t like to kick each other when we’re down. I think… there’s no finger pointing, so no one individual that takes the blame. We win and we lose as a team. We have a very open and honest discussion and it’s not personal. It’s like: ‘hey man this should have been better, this should have been better, why didn’t we do this?’, we all take everything onboard. It’s constructive discussions, and if there’s any constructive criticism we take it onboard, then we huddle up, do the work, get on the call.”

So, what was a crappy day you were grateful for? And how did you learn from it?

Simplifying decision making

“I try to make one decision that removes 1000 decisions.” – Tim Ferris

Rather than to struggle each time you’re standing in front of the candy aisle, it’s much easier to decide that candy just isn’t for you and skip the aisle altogether. Or that you only buy this or that chocolate brand. Might be a totally different decision for you, but Ferris’ point still holds: making a thousand decision is actually exhausting, even if they are small. Whenever you can find a general rule for your actions, life gets easier in that regard.

What Tim Ferris uses as a life hack works even better for teams.

It can be super frustrating and totally exhausting when every decision escalates into a discussion about tiny details and different perspectives. Aligning your team and focusing everyone on a common mission takes this load off of your team and makes life so much easier for everyone on the team.

But it does more than that: if everyone agrees on a guiding star, decision making can become distributed. When it’s obvious how a decision is made, everyone on the team can make that decision.

What’s required is to get clarity about what actually matters for us as a team and as a company and then communicate this openly and frequently.

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