For a quick start like me, building sustainable momentum is a bit of a challenge.
Earlier in my career, one of my bosses used to drive me crazy with her decision making. She was slow. She seemed to take an excessive time to come to a decision. Sometimes up to 20-40 minutes! That’s not long, but it was to me. I’d make an in-principle decision very quickly. Maybe in 2 minutes. She would ask question after question and I’d get frustrated. We would come to the same conclusion mostly. But the real difference came when taking action. She was ready to start, I wasn’t.
The documentary I’m planning to film proves the point. I’ve enrolled people but struggled with action and momentum. I wasn’t specific enough about what I wanted to say. So taking action was hard. Finding the right people was hard. I’ve had to go back to the story I want to tell, and get a lot clearer about it. Make it a lot more specific. I’ve now done this by writing a high-level script. I’m ready to re-engage.
It seems one of the challenges of leadership is crafting the right level of specificity into a meaningful mission and communication. Too little and it’s difficult to take action. Too much and people don’t engage. But what is the right amount of specificity?
I enjoyed reading Chip and Dan Heath’s “Made to Stick” last year. It’s worth reading if you haven’t already. One of their concepts is that of ‘concreteness’. Language by nature is abstract, but life isn’t. Their suggestion is to avoid expertise language and talk about specific people doing specific things. That make’s your message concrete. I think that’s a useful idea for leaders as communicators.
