It’s tough to keep a team motivated when the strategy from the top keeps shifting. That’s the challenge facing a leader in a large global organization. He’s been getting positive feedback on his work, but he’s having trouble leading his team amid conflicting priorities and without direction from his senior leaders. Host Muriel Wilkins coaches him through how he can help his team have organizational impact, with or without more clarity from above.
- Listen to the original HBR IdeaCast episode: How Do I Lead My Team without Strategic Direction from the Top?
- Find more episodes of HBR IdeaCast
- Discover 100 years of Harvard Business Review articles, case studies, podcasts, and more at hbr.org
- Read Muriel Wilkin’s new book, Leadership Unblocked, out October 28th: leadershipunblocked.com
AMANDA KERSEY: Welcome to HBR On Leadership–case studies and conversations with the world’s top business and management experts, hand-selected to help you unlock the best in those around you. I’m HBR, senior editor and producer Amanda Kersey.
It’s tough to keep a team motivated when the strategy from the top keeps shifting. Without clear direction leaders have to figure out how to set priorities, keep morale up, and make sure their team’s work has an impact. That’s the challenge facing a leader who’s going by “Michael”, to protect his identity. He built an internal consulting team at a large global organization. Mid-level managers value the group, but the C-suite barely knows they exist. And frequent turnover at the top leaves him uncertain how to chart a course forward. He brings those concerns to executive coach Muriel Wilkins, host of the HBR podcast, Coaching Real Leaders. In their conversation, you’ll hear Muriel advise Michael on how to anchor his team through ambiguity by celebrating small wins and applying the same tools he uses to coach others to himself. Here’s Muriel.
MURIEL WILKINS: Michael has a passion for helping others succeed inside and outside of work, and he was excited by the challenge of this job. So he’s pretty motivated by his work, but beyond navigating the complexity of running a unique team at a large organization, he’s also finding it hard to get his bearings. As the leadership team keeps changing course.
MICHAEL: We’re finding that there’s so much change constantly happening around us that sometimes we are not sure what our motivation is. Why do we do what we do? Is it impactful? How do I keep myself motivated and keep my team motivated because of these constant changes in the environment?
MURIEL WILKINS: We begin our coaching conversation now as I ask Michael to share more about the exact kind of change his organization and team are facing and why it’s so hard to navigate.
MICHAEL: The biggest challenge is the fact that there’s a lot of change. So I will say that number one, at our top level, C level board level, just this year we have four changes already.
As we go down a couple layers, there’s a lot of changes happening there as well. And within 24 months, changing boss twice, whole structure above that changing and my team even adding individuals. So of course the traditional, alright, we’ve got a lot of change within and people challenging each other of what is our direction? Are we aligned and do we have the same understanding of our own vision and mission that we have had for the last five years? Because of all these different changing elements at the different layers, how do I keep everybody motivated when sometimes I don’t know if I have that right motivation?
MURIEL WILKINS: And so when you say how do I keep everyone motivated or even how do I keep myself motivated, motivated to what end to do what?
MICHAEL: I would say, to keep delivering the high quality of what we do to not get bogged down in minutia. I don’t want to have to create all this extra work whereby other higher level people might be saying, you’ve got to do that. You’ve got to create these unnecessary extra work to then deliver your actual work. So we have people in the team saying, if I’ve got to do that kind of stuff, I’m not motivated to work here. I don’t want to be in this kind of environment if they’re going to be forcing this extra work. And like I say with the changing layers, we just don’t know where they’re going with those potential requests.
MURIEL WILKINS: Okay. All right. And so are those requests keeping you from doing what you’ve articulated around the what you want to be motivated towards? Are they keeping you from delivering the high quality work of what you do?
MICHAEL: At this very moment, not so much. The concern is not knowing whether the new leaders will shift into that. Now I met with my new boss and something was jokingly commented, well as long as you charge them. And that kind of line in our organization is very well known that it means you’ve got extra work you have to do upfront. There’s all this extra reporting and system entry, et cetera. I took it as a joke and I chuckled with him and I laughed and I said, well, you know how we work. I never got real clarity on it and I’m hoping to do so in the future, but as soon as that information gets to my team, they’re saying, okay, what’s the answer?
MURIEL WILKINS: So it’s not necessarily that you’re worried you won’t be able to deliver effectively, you are just worried that they’re going to be requesting that you do the work in a way that doesn’t really fit with the way that you’d like to do the work.
MICHAEL: The way that it fits. Yes, that’s the right way of saying it, yeah.
MURIEL WILKINS: Okay. Because I think part of this is making sure that you don’t lose what the prize is, right? Keep your eye on the prize and I don’t know what the prize is, that’s why I keep checking in with you. So I’ll just repeat it again. I think what you said is, hey, I need to be motivated and keep my team motivated so that we can deliver quality work. And so is that the end goal for you? Is that what keeps you motivated?
MICHAEL: Yeah, by saying the eye on the prize that helps it reframe for me as well. So the quality work is of course the focus of what we do. One thing that we proposed was taking the concept of who my team is and expanding it beyond my team, but not creating headcount. So creating a bigger network, being able to teach and coach other people on the skills that we have, building up their capabilities. We presented it in a way that somebody said, well you’ve got to get approval, you got to present it to get approval so that you can then move it forward. And when we presented it, it was met with crickets.
We’ve been chipping away at that little by little. And so that big prize in the end is how far can we reach out that network such that everybody sees us as that center, call it the center of excellence, where they would come to us. This would be the central, and then yes, we’ve got all this network of capable experts. So that bigger prize is how can we expand that with the blessings of competing leaders so that C level you’re going to have competing leaders are going to say, well, maybe that’s in my area or maybe that’s in my area, and how do we make sure that that expands?
MURIEL WILKINS: And why is that expansion important to you?
MICHAEL: For the company. Really for the sake of being able to have the company grow and learn and to stay competitive, to stay relevant. I will say that for me, I’m really only about eight to 10 years from retirement and I don’t want to be in a position of having to look elsewhere. I want to be at a company and this is a strong company, it’s one of the largest in the industry we’re in, and we should be able to make those adjustments so that we can continue into the future and I want to have an impact with the larger network that we can create to make the company work.
MURIEL WILKINS: So clearly I am sensing from you both a very strong belief and passion around the need for the type of work that you do, that you and your team do and that it falls within, quite frankly the survival of the company. It almost sounds like right, in order for you to be able to compete at a certain level as an organization, this is a requirement.
MICHAEL: It is. I have seen it at other companies within this same industry where they’ve made similar shifts that we are suggesting, and in those companies it was required for them to move forward to have the leaps that they’ve had and in some cases even the survival of their companies.
MURIEL WILKINS: So you’re kind of ready. The question is anybody calling.
MICHAEL: Right. And we have a few, like I say we have some, but I’m not sure that they’re the top line leaders that we want to be working with.
MURIEL WILKINS: OK. Who are the top line leaders that you want to be working with? What is the difference between the ones you’re working with and the ones that you want to be working with?
MICHAEL: The classic terms would be the C-level, the C-suite, and the board of management. So some of their reports, sort of those senior vp, vp, senior VP levels who are driving a lot of the topics, driving a lot of the desire for change and transformation. Those we feel are where we need to have the impact. We currently work with a lot of the middle management layers but not cracking that ceiling.
MURIEL WILKINS: And so what would cracking that ceiling look like?
MICHAEL: First and foremost, getting, like you said earlier, getting the call, if we could be getting those calls, if we could be getting from some of those higher levels of oh, this is the group to work with, this is the team and we know you exist and we’re coming to you regularly. I would love to be seeing an explosion of requests from that type of person. I would like to see that their requests are relevant to the bigger frame of what we’re saying of well, we’re not just here to facilitate a moment for you. We’re here to help you actually transform and we want to coach and work with you with your work and continue that relationship.
MURIEL WILKINS: And what do you think is getting in the way of the calls being made from the top at the order of magnitude that you would like?
MICHAEL: Getting in the way? I think that the easy, it sounds like an excuse and trust me, I’m not a fan of excuses. I even use the German phrase keine Ausreden with my kids to say no excuses.
MURIEL WILKINS: No excuses.
MICHAEL: It feels like there’s not enough promotion and not enough marketing that on the flip side, we get requests at the layers that we’re working with and it’s a lot. So the competing prioritization of do we just keep doing the work we do or do we go and promote?
MURIEL WILKINS: So it sounds like what you’re saying is what’s missing the missing link in order to be able to have the impact that you’d like to have is not enough promotion to those more senior levels. And the reason why the promotion’s not happening is that there’s not enough time in the day because you have these requests coming from the mid-level.
MICHAEL: Correct. And all the time being spent in all the intake and the communication with those requests and then within the team and understanding, okay, who’s got what work and who’s doing this or that, the other, it’s literally some of the stuff we are trying to teach others. We’re trying to teach them to carve out X number amount of time for other things and we’re stuck, not able to walk the talk.
MURIEL WILKINS: Right!
MICHAEL: Sometimes we can’t walk the talk.
MURIEL WILKINS: Right. So Michael, I mean here’s what I’m really curious about. What if it was one of your internal clients coming to you with this issue. As their coach what would you be coaching your internal client to do in the exact same situation?
MICHAEL: It’s funny you asked that because there was a moment, I had lunch with one of my colleagues on Friday and we were talking a little bit about the same and I said, why aren’t we carving our 15 to 20% of time per week? Why aren’t we carving that out and being very focused on what is inside that space? Why aren’t we doing that? Part of the response was don’t know. The other part of the response was, well, because we have so much to do, so many of these people are asking for help.
MURIEL WILKINS: But isn’t part of what you do, again I have a very elementary understanding, but isn’t part of what you do with your clients and say, okay, how can you get done what you need to get done in 70% of your time?
MICHAEL: It is it a lot of that. Yeah. That’s why I say it’s walk the talk.
MURIEL WILKINS: Michael, I feel like we are having a very existential moment right now.
MICHAEL: I literally wrote walk the talk.
MURIEL WILKINS: Let’s step back for a minute here to think about where Michael is in this coaching session. He came to the session with a problem around creating clarity and goals for his team when the levels above him in the organization not only lacked some of that clarity, but also the consistency of people in some of the highest level roles. Michael created this team as a way to step out of the usual ways of doing things at this organization and to think about how they could better guide leaders from across the company. But he’s finding himself lacking some of the clarity he encourages in others because of the pace of change at the levels above him. Walking the talk is important here, which means Michael can apply some of the tactics he uses to help others and apply them in his own situation. Where can he take control and find some structure in the chaos? I asked Michael, what could he specifically do to help his team reach their goals and gain more traction within the organization?
What would it look like for you and your team to walk the talk and instead of saying, Hey, it’s one or the other, we either meet the demands of middle management or we promote to senior levels. What would that look like?
MICHAEL: One of the phrases we say often is, what am I saying no to? So if there’s something coming in and we’re going to talk about prioritization, should we pick up that work? The phrase to ourselves is, well, what am I saying no to? What thing on my list gets me prioritized so that we can keep that 20% time protected and I have that amount of time blocked off to be able to say, we’re going to put some focused effort on promotion. We’re going to put some focused effort on the actual conversation with those senior leaders.
MURIEL WILKINS: So that’s one question. What are the other questions? Let’s see two or three that you think you can use to coach you and your team to be able to move closer towards this better vision of what you would like to be in terms of both doing the work and promoting the work.
MICHAEL: One question that I’d want to ask has to go into the direction of their motivation. What are the things that are really motivating you or whatever it is that you’re working on? So that would be a question about, let’s talk about their motivation. Supplemental to that is okay, tell me more about what’s motivating for say that next move, the next big move for either you or for the team. Don’t just focus on what we’re doing today, but what is the motivation for the next big move? Do we grow to X number, which might be double or triple the size of who we are or how do you step into a role, another leadership role that could be just as big as the team that we have? So it’s about that regression for your career.
MURIEL WILKINS: Okay. I mean I think where we’re landing here, Michael, is this is an amazing opportunity to kind of be a little bit mad scientist and treat yourself as the client and even posing that as the challenge to your team. It’s like you’re the protagonist of your own case study because if you all are not able to be agile in this moment of tremendous change, as you’ve said, if you all can’t walk the talk around being able to respond to change and apply all the tools that you coach and you want to coach the entire organization on, then why should anybody else do it?
MICHAEL: That’s so true. So if I turn that around as you pose here, if I turn that around to my own motivation and I think about being in the position I am, it’s kind of when it landed in my lap and it was that, oh my gosh, here’s an opportunity to really grow with this challenge. And being seen as the expert it’s nice. That’s not part of my motivation. I get to grow a team to this level of success, to this level of impact. So I had a mentor and one of the things he had said to me was this ability to recognize talent in the same kind of concept here of I’m always looking for that talent. So for me the motivation is how much more can we grow this team slash network to just be so impactful for the organization that they’re writing the book, they’re writing the book of who we are and what we’ve done and all the successes we’ve had. I don’t care if I write the book, I want this for the people that I get to work with.
MURIEL WILKINS: I just want to kind of circle back to this word motivation that you’ve used a lot, right?
And I sense you, I mean you’ve articulated it. You’re kind of seeking for the motivation that when you took this role, the motivation was on way up over indexing because guess what? It was like a brand spanking new opportunity. Nothing had been written. This is like this for everything. When it’s new and shiny and we don’t really know, but everything just looks ahead of us we’re highly motivated and then we get into it and you’re like, oh crap. This isn’t what we thought it would be. So I want to talk a little bit about that with you breaking down this word motivation, and again, check me on this. It sounds like you’re highly motivated by impact.
MICHAEL: It’s sort of like winning on the soccer field.
MURIEL WILKINS: Yes.
MICHAEL: It’s sort of like that. You got to be gracious losers, but we’re trying to win.
MURIEL WILKINS: You are trying to win. So you are motivated by the outcome. You are motivated by the final score.
MICHAEL: Absolutely.
MURIEL WILKINS: What else can you be motivated by? And you can use your soccer. I’m going to show my lack of knowledge around the sport, but maybe I know more than I think, but you can use that as a metaphor. What else, as the coach, can you be motivated by over and beyond the win? The win is important. Yes. So that’s motivation number one. What else?
MICHAEL: The analogy at the level of that I coach is being able to take that team competing in the league. They’re competing within the group of teams that they’re competing with and they’re doing great. They’re having bits of success here and there and okay, there are going to be some losses. Maybe somebody doesn’t step up or something, but that next level is winning the next big tournament, that sort of regional space maybe at the state level and then can you get it to the state finals. In the business environment for us, we’re still just competing within