Ever been to a meeting and looked around the table to witness a sea of open computers and colleagues on their phones? It seems like all the intelligence is in the tech.
We’re relying on it to hold all our knowledge and gain insights, and our job is just to carry it around. I want us to be much better than that as leaders… much less tech and much more talk.
I expect client teams to know their key business-level and departmental numbers and to know where their priorities are up to. I want people to be able to draw their own conclusions. First, because it shows they are paying attention to these numbers and, second, because it makes them much more compelling and leaderful in front of their teams when they are clear and crisp about what is important and how things are tracking… and in the process they all develop a shared understanding of how the ‘machine’ of their business works.
I did smile when a client leader told me that his boss had emailed the team ahead of the annual offsite reminding them “Rob’s going to ask all of us about our #$%& numbers, so you’d better know them!” Blunt but effective as it turned out. And what it enables is really valuable… time for senior leaders to actually talk through the key challenges, air the brutal facts, debate options and arrive at an aligned set of actions.
How well do you and your team ‘know their stuff’? How much activity is centred around interacting and relying on tech versus having real conversations? What is a substantive ‘talk time’ topic that you should set aside time to discuss face-to-face and resolve?