Episode #506: Never Underestimate The Importance Of Context As A Leader

Leaders are time poor. There is too much to do and not enough time. We are constantly being challenged to get control of our time management and for most of us, that struggle is often one we are losing. Meeting and emails are time killers. Multi-tasking is a given, which means that we are constantly losing time, as we keep having to get back up to speed on something we were concentrating on, to do something we hadn’t expected or diarised for that day. The upshot of all of this is our communication becomes very clipped. We are speaking in short form all of the time, because we don’t have enough time for the full explanation.

When we have children, we are constantly handing out orders. Don’t do this or that, don’t touch this or that. We don’t take the time to explain the why, we just tell them the what. We carry that same methodology into the workplace. If we recorded you for a full day, I think you would be shocked to hear how much of your day is telling people what to do. Often we give them no or very little context as to the why, apart for the fact that we are the boss and we want it done and we want it now.

“Someone convinced against their will, is of the same opinion still” is an old saw, but too true. Dale Carnegie says if we can help people create a world, they will feel ownership of it. What this means is that persuasion is very powerful, but often we don’t use this magnificent tool at our ready disposal. We are time poor and issuing orders like a pirate captain, is much more efficient. Not necessarily effective mind you, but it definitely takes less time and effort, which is why it is so attractive.

Context needs to be delivered in a story format. When people hear this for the first time, they immediately think that this is impractical. The story they are thinking of is more like “War and Peace” in length, rather than a one or two minute window into a big issue. There is no doubt that the global pandemic of ADD – Attention Deficit Disorder has made everyone’s attention span now microscopic in scale. The competition for the brain space of people has become unbelievably intense.

A very quick story on the WHY of what we want done is absolutely a habit we have to create. It won’t happen by itself though, because we are all being pushed into the delivery of rapid fire orders, rather than supplying the rationale. The issue is we know all the detail, we understand the background, we have had time to think about this, we are privy to corporate information our subordinates don’t have access to. We get to hear about the big picture from the big bosses. We just distil all of this down to a couple of sentences, telling people what they need to do and then we move on to the next thing, because time is tight.

Why do we believe the thing we want done is necessary or important? We must have read, been told, heard or experienced something which has impacted our thought processes. We should go back to that point – very briefly. For example, “I was listening to this podcast by an expert on SEO and she said a review of our blog headlines will show we are not using enough key words and our descriptors on our website need to be much more potent to be picked up by Google’s crawlers”. Now this is why, as the leader, we think we need to spend time reviewing aspects of our blogs and website – our rationale.

Now we can make our suggestion and we should exercise all of our discipline and strength and not go into order mode at this point. Instead, we should switch the terminology to using questions. We can say, “Do you think a review of our information is possible and that we can invest some time to improve our SEO? Or do you have any ideas on where we can improve”. The beauty of suspending that overwhelming urge to tell them, “Get on it now and rewrite our blogs and website descriptors” is that no one likes being ordered around and their engagement with that task will be very sparse.

We have provided some context as to why we think a change is needed but we have left the door open for them to own the world they are creating. This is powerful and motivating because we haven’t been proscriptive and told them how to do it. We have let them assume some leadership over the process. Obviously we need to agree with it and maybe we will chip in some of our thoughts and ideas too, after they have made their contribution and make it a collaborative decision.

This takes more time to explain why we think what we think and to have a conversation around what they think. Maybe we get frustrated because their thinking isn’t as advanced or as good as ours and it would be easier just to tell them how to fly straight. We have to keep in mind that this is only one part of the puzzle. The next component is the execution piece and if we put in the time and the effort now, we will get a faster and higher quality outcome. This means little or no rework and a much happier staff member, who will be more motivated to do a good job on this project. That saves us a lot of time and wear and tear down the track.

Precious time invested in explaining the context will save us time overall. Our biggest problem is ourselves – we have trained hard to issue orders and short circuit everything. We have to re-train our habits, end inertia and we have to recalculate time. We specially need to start looking for expanding the proportion of our leader quality time.