How are you deploying your strategy?
Are you tossing the ball with the intent to be caught? Or are you tossing simply to free yourself of the ball?
In business, you’ve been told to “get the monkey off your back”.[1] That you shouldn’t take on anyone else’s problems. That you should delegate. Sure, there’s some truth there, but to me, it always sounded more like deflecting and avoidance, rather than collaboratively working with others to get something done.
If you lead a team, it’s almost the time of year where you’d like to have folks start cranking with fresh energy. Charge forth and execute that strategy you just expertly crafted! But we often overlook the complex dance of communication, understanding, and acceptance that has to occur between people before anyone else can take action on the thoughts swirling in your head.
In Lean, we teach organizations to deploy strategy through a practice called “catchball”, the idea being that I’ll throw the ball to you, we’ll throw it back and forth a few times, then you’ll initiate the throw to your team, and so on, until everyone understands how they’re supposed to contribute to shared objectives.[2] While I like this analogy better than the monkey one, I still see organizations mostly get it wrong. Because they’ve forgotten the point is the catch, not the toss. They’ve forgotten that in the real game of catch, there’s no end – the point is to keep playing.
I was playing balloon toss with my 3-year-old the other day. We were trying to keep the balloon from falling on the ground by gently batting it back and forth. Then I hit it too high, and it went over her head, and she had to spin around to run and get it. I had ruined the game.
On the next toss, being careful not to go too hard, I duffed the balloon and it fell far short of my daughter – I had to scramble after it and throw it again. It took some time to calibrate my toss based on how far away my daughter was standing and what she was capable of volleying back.
As companies attempt to deploy their strategies, I’ve seen both types of errors – going over people’s heads, or not even reaching them – but most leaders don’t seem to want to play the game long enough to calibrate their toss, to get a rally going.
In one company, the leadership team had great intent, and they made an earnest effort to communicate the plan. But the “strategic priorities” they described were nothing but a gorgeous word salad. They looked great on the slide, everyone who heard them nodded “yes, wouldn’t that be wonderful!” But once the slideshow ended, they went back to doing exactly what they were doing before. What did that jumble of elaborate phrases that could have been plucked out of a management journal have to do with their “real” job?
I’ve also seen a CEO barely try to toss the ball at all, saying “I just want them to use common sense”. Team leaders had to make up their own priorities, or try to decipher the leader’s intent from cryptic, inadequately detailed guidance. The toss came up short. The team was scrambling in the dirt to find the ball. The CEO consequently had to get involved in every decision the team made.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In another large corporation, I helped the leadership team strive towards an effective rally. It looked a little messy – there were many multi-hour meetings where team members said things like “I don’t agree” or “what do you mean by that?” or “why aren’t we doing this instead?” If you’d dropped in for 5 minutes in the middle, you would have thought, “Why is this so heated? Why are they wasting so much time on this debate? Someone should have made an agenda!” However, it was exactly this conversation, this making of meaning, iterated over multiple sessions and across successive combinations of teams, that honed and sharpened the focus of the team’s strategic objectives. In the end, the future state was clear, the approach was clear, the success measures were clear, and the team embraced ownership.
So as you enter this New Year, eager to get going on your 2024 plan, remember that you’re tossing the ball up with the intent to get it back. Commit to the dialog. Be patient. Embrace the discomfort of others questioning your ideas. You just might be rewarded with the true engagement of your team, putting their hearts and minds into the game.