By Vincent Rush
As a leader, you are all in, 24/7. You wake up and go to bed thinking about your organization. It’s a life style, not simply a title or occupation.
If you are an effective leader, you are always scanning the horizon as the point man for the team or company that you lead. You honor the heritage of your past and the lessons learned along the way. You pay attention to the here and now and the people you have been entrusted with as a part of your team. You also constantly look through the prism of the future and strive to adjust to the winds of change that tomorrow brings.
And through your experience and in the best interest of the company and the welfare of the employees and their families you develop strategies to take advantage of tomorrow’s opportunities as well as navigate tomorrow’s challenges.
Refusing to become the leader of the inevitable that simply allows the future to determine its self, you are proactive in your approach to strategy and casting a vision for your team of where you are going.
However, even the best thought out plans and most compelling visions of a brighter tomorrow, seem to meet with obstacles in the form of attitude and acceptance from your team.
What confuses you is why do some of your team members attack and criticize the strategy and attempt to sabotage the vision.
Not everyone will buy into the vision for the organization, even if it is compelling and even if the leader does a fantastic job of communicating it.
It’s just a fact…and it isn’t because people are bad followers.
In fact there are some very common reasons that you may have overlooked as you set forth on this mission of taking your team to a new level.
There are actually some very common reasons that people are not as enthused or quick to buy into your plan.
1) They didn’t help create it. Most people don’t like change and when someone begins casting a new vision, change is inevitable.
People’s attitudes toward change are different when they help create it. Participation creates a pride of ownership. Think about it, when is the last time you waxed a rental car?
2) They don’t understand it. People don’t buy into a vision that they don’t understand.
Just because a leader has cast a vision in a clear and compelling manner doesn’t mean that people understand it. Sometimes you have to act like a 3rd grade teacher and continuously repeat it and communicate it over and over. An effective mission statement should permeate the entire organization and you should be able to call your team members at 3am and have them instantaneously recite the teams’ mission statement.
That’s where our customers really derive value from a partnership with Lynx Telematics. With our first of its kind, Lynxsafe *360 Connect Program as part of our innovative “NEXT PRACTICES” guide to implementation we don’t just provide telematics to our partners, we constantly drive ROI through the life of our partnership by helping to bridge the gap between understanding and acceptance.
Never confuse the simplicity of telematics with the complexities of a properly managed and well run program that produces positive and residual results, long after the system has been implemented.
3) They simply don’t know the vision. I reality, there is no difference between people not knowing the organizations vision…and the organization not having one. The inevitable result is always dissatisfaction and discontentment.
Every organization needs a built in process for passing on the vision to all levels of the organization, from upper level management to the end users. The bigger your organization, the more fields that the vision and purpose has to be sold across. Big companies and organizations do not confine the decision making process to silos.
This is where Lynx can assist you in your telematics projects and help bridge the gap of understanding among the various levels.
4) There’s also another key reason people don’t buy in; they feel un-needed to achieve it.
There are 3 different types of attitudes that management will take when it comes to enlisting people to fulfill a vision.
• “We’re going to do it with or without you!”
• “We sure would like your help in accomplishing this goal.”
• “We can’t do this without you!”
The 1st is very outdated and more typical of older autocratic leaders. The second works occasionally and the 3rd is one in which the leader understands how important it is for people to feel as if they are a part of something bigger than themselves. Once people see how their contribution contributes the greater cause, they become more motivated and inspired to perform their work with excellence in the face of obstacles.
5) Finally, they are just not ready for it, emotionally, intellectually or professionally. Sometimes it may be the competency of your team, sometimes it’s the pace of change. Pushing too fast leads to rigidity.
Our value to your company resonates in our ability to become informational conduits that connect the top and bottom of your organization in delivering the message and assisting in articulating, not only the vision, but the purpose that drives that vision.
If the conduit becomes clogged and the vision cannot flow from the leaders at the top, to the people that actually accomplish the work, then the vision will fail to connect with the workers and it will never come to fruition.
The bridge that connects vision and purpose is strategy. The execution of that strategy is the strength of Lynx Telematics.
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