Leaders, Your Team Needs You To Be Precise
About this episode
The episode discusses the importance of precision in leadership to avoid misalignment and wasted efforts in creative teams.
In many ways, leadership is about risk mitigation. You want to channel resources and team effort in the direction most likely to generate the results you want, while at the same time minimizing the potential downside of getting it wrong. This is especially challenging when doing creative work, because the downside of getting it wrong can be significant. If you make the wrong decisions early in a project, the net result can be days or weeks of wasted work, maybe making it impossible to course correct. Because of the risk involved, many leaders unknowingly become less than clear about their expectations for the work or of the team. They might speak in vague terms or give opaque direction because they themselves are not certain of the right decision. They know the team needs to move forward, but it’s not clear to them yet what forward actually means. They want to protect themselves from a mistake, so they lack precision. The problem with this is that their lack of precision and clarity has a trickle-down effect within the organization. Direction diffuses. Things don’t become more clear as you get farther and farther from the decision-maker, they become less so. Thus, a few team…
People in this episode
Host: Todd Henry
Topics covered
- leadership
- risk mitigation
- team dynamics
- creative work
- clarity in communication
Keywords
- leadership
- teamwork
- communication
- risk management
- creative projects
More episodes of Herding Tigers: The Creative Leader Podcast
- Agency and Optimistic Vision: Leading Creative Work In the Age of AI
- Alone With Your Thoughts: Why Self-Awareness Is a Leadership Superpower
- The 3 Things You Own as a Leader
- Optimizing: You're Probably Playing Different Games at the Same Table
- 5 Conversations To Have With Your Team
- Self-Care For Leaders
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