Everyone Needs To Lock In

Everyone Needs To Lock In

Every summer, my family and friends float the river that runs through our town. It's a slow drift past the shops downtown and under bridges, the kind where you lean back and let the current do the work.

About two thirds of the way down, the river stops being lazy. There's a set of rapids most people don't make it through without tipping over. Right as we get close, I stop enjoying the float and start getting ready for the next 90 seconds.

We need to find the right approach into the rapids, a plan for what happens if someone flips. We hold onto each other's tubes, forming a couple of chains. If one person hits a rock wrong, the whole line holds them. Nobody goes alone.

The easy part is getting myself ready. The harder part is being the one who has to say, out loud, to eight people who'd rather keep drifting, that we need to lock in.

Most leaders think leadership is measured by how focused they are.

It's not. It's measured by how focused the people around them are. Leadership isn't what you do: it's what other people do because of their relationship with you. Your own focus is inside your control, but getting them focused takes relationship.

August is a set of river rapids for most teams. Deadlines don't care that the calendar feels looser. Summer targets still land the same week as the lake house, the cousins in from out of town, the one afternoon too nice to spend on a computer. They're distracted, not disengaged. They're drifting, the same way we all drift on the calm part of the river, right up until somebody says, out loud, that the current's about to change.

I drew this on a flip chart a couple weeks ago with an Operations Team in San Francisco. The center ring is your Circle of Control: your own choices, your own calendar, your own priorities. Fully yours, no influence required. The next ring out is your Circle of Influence: the choices other people make that you can shape through your relationship with them, through what you ask and how you ask it, but never by telling them what to do.

Each person on this Ops Team had a lot of people reporting to them, and that's when I found myself adding a ring to the framework that isn't quite in the original model. This outer ring is the place of concern, the stuff you worry about but have no real hand in. This is the Circle of Partnership. It sits just outside of influence. It's the ring most leaders never quite get to, they stay concerned instead of getting in the water.

Influence is standing at the edge of the water, calling out where the rocks are. Partnership is getting into the water and locking arms. Influence tells them what to prioritize. Partnership sits beside them and figures it out with them. Some stretches of summer are calm enough that influence works. A well timed question, a clear priority, a visible deadline, and people find their own way. Other stretches move too fast for that. That's when you stop standing on the bank and grab a tube.

3 ways to help a distracted team get focused:

Control what's yours. Get your own calendar locked in before you ask anyone else to lock in theirs. A leader who's still drifting has no business calling out the rapids. Model the focus in your own choices first.

Influence what's theirs. You can't make someone care about a deadline in August. You can make the target clear and ask, "What else is going on for you this week?" That does more than pushing ever will.

Partner through the fast part. Some weeks are too fast for a nudge from a distance. This is where you grab a tube. Block an afternoon and do the prioritizing with them, not for them. Hold their tube through the one stretch that would otherwise flip them.

You don't have to navigate your team on your own this summer. Warrick can grab a tube with you and help your team through the rough spot in the river. Reach out, and let's talk about getting locked in, together.

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