Provide clarity
One of your most important roles as a leader is to provide clarity to your people, in planning, project management and communication
What do you want me to do? What’s next? Remind me again, why are we doing this? These are the questions you field every day as a leader. Depending on your role and seniority, your team will look to you to provide clarity on company mission and goals, clarity around how people should work together, clarity on the success of projects, and clarity around what’s coming next. It’s unrealistic to think you can provide certainty in a fast-moving environment, but what you can do is provide as much clarity – of purpose, process and priorities – to your team as you are capable of.
As a leader, your commitment to clarity should be focused on three specific areas that are essential to get right: planning workstreams, organising people and communicating objectives and outcomes, so that your team know what victory looks like.
Minimum viable planning
Whatever project, launch or initiative you’re trying to deliver with a team, you’ll need a plan. That doesn’t mean you should sit down and write a planning document that rivals War and Peace, or build a 10,000 cell GANTT chart that maps out a project inch-by-inch over a period spanning months. In today’s business environment that would be commercial suicide and a waste of time that you simply can’t afford.
Instead, what it means is compiling a crowd-sourced skeleton plan to provide a constant yardstick and reference point for the lifetime of a project. In the same vein as the minimum viable product (a term which refers to the simplest version of a product that you launch with), you need a minimum viable plan for projects: the simplest plan possible that will get your team aligned around what you’re trying to achieve, who’s doing what and when it needs to be delivered.
You should get started by bringing the project team together as soon as possible and holding a kick-off meeting where you in your role as leader start by giving the commercial context of the project – why we’re doing this and why we’re doing it now – and set out any top-level goals you want the project to deliver, e.g. new clients, more website traffic, improved deal conversion … of course, this will be different for each and every project. Once you’ve done that, you can open a shared document and write the MVP together. It should include the following:
- Context: Why are we doing this project? What’s the business rationale and is there a reason it’s especially important now?
- Goals: What are we seeking to achieve and deliver? On launch, post-launch? What does good/better/best look like on this project?
- Timing: How long will it take and can we chunk delivery into phases?
- People: Who’s the executive sponsor, the project manager, key stakeholders, and who assumes ownership of specific areas? Are we missing anyone we need to make this happen?
- Resources: What’s the budget; do we need additional space, people, co-funding?
- Obstacles: What could slow us down or trip us up? Any lessons that we want to remember from previous projects? Anything we can do to pre-empt this from happening ahead of time?
- Next steps: What are the very next steps that need to happen – with a name against each one? Is there anyone not here who needs to know about the project and when will we next meet to discuss progress? (Establishing a project email alias or slack channel on day one can massively help streamline communications.)
It’s important to note that the minimum viable plan does not map out step by step everything that needs to happen over the lifetime of the project; it’s a compass rather than a map and that’s a key distinction as it builds resilience, agility and flexibility into the project from the outset, whilst at the same time bringing absolute clarity as to the purpose, process and people involved in delivery.
As well as building the beginnings of a living plan, writing the document together ensures the whole group is bought into the project and understands WHY the project is important. If you can explain the purpose of the workstream, the team can be more valuable contributors to the project. Co-writing an MPV together will also help you start to shape a committed team of people who understand their roles and take responsibility for ownership of the plan and the project’s success.
Use the MVP as your shared agenda for subsequent group meetings, so you can keep track of actions in the context of your original goals and be explicit with the team as and when things need to change, which they undoubtedly will!
When you’re the leader responsible for delivering ongoing workstreams that may not warrant a project plan, you should still consider how you bring clarity to the team around workflow planning. That might mean a longer planning session every fortnight where a team agrees priorities, supplemented by 15-minute daily stand-up meetings, where everyone shares an update on yesterday’s progress, today’s focus and potential blockers. By getting all the people together briefly, and the information on the table, you can troubleshoot in real time, avoid duplication of effort and surface opportunities to shortcut.
Tip: Do as few meetings sitting down as you can. Emphasise brevity and maintain momentum by doing status meetings on your feet. If you’re leading the group, don’t forget to ask whether there any blockers you can help with – this is the chance for your teams to flag any issues with you.
A meeting such as this can be organised either via Trello, a project management app, or for a low-tech alternative, with Post-it notes on a physical wall. Mark up key tasks with the name of the person owning them, and include timings such as ‘Upcoming’, ‘To do this week’, ‘To do today’, or ‘Done’. The wall then becomes a live representation of the status of a team’s workstreams and a visual marker of progress and the work yet to come. It also makes everyone on the team publicly accountable for what they have said they’ll deliver.
As you step up and take control of multiple projects and teams, these MVP templates come in very handy and help you to scale best planning practices across your business. Not everything will run smoothly, though, and continuous learning and adaptation of processes is a key part of the leader’s responsibility, especially when teams come together for the first time and may have different styles and approaches.
As a leader, you need to have a mindset of continuous improvement: every significant undertaking by your team should be throwing up new ideas and thinking for the business to assimilate and build on. Start to see planning as a vital ingredient in developing your team’s collective knowledge and skill base.
Action: Can you spot an opportunity to try an MVP approach? Let the team know it’s an experiment and prepare a template with questions in advance so you can hit the ground running when the meeting starts. Work hard to include everybody’s point of view. Assign a scribe to capture next steps. At the end of the session, which could be as long as two hours, ask yourself the following:
- Are the goals clearly defined and is the timeline agreed?
- Does everyone on the team know exactly what their role and key responsibility is? Is there anyone not in that meeting, maybe a peer from another team or your boss, who should be on the email alias and given access to the MVP so they have visibility of the project?
- Are there any areas of confusion that you as a leader need to go away and address, e.g. secure additional budget or check alignment with company goals?
Sarah says: Start at the end
The first thing that happens at the beginning of an Unruly project is that a retrospective is booked into the diary for the end of the assignment, to collectively discuss how things went, what we learned and what we would consider doing differently the next time. The phrase ‘post-mortem’ is banned because this is not about apportioning blame or focusing on shortcomings. Rather, it’s about ensuring that the work just completed is recognised, celebrated and acts as a springboard for the next big project, and that the vital intelligence gained in the heat of a high-intensity assignment is not lost but captured and put to good use for the future.
Just as there is a temptation to skimp on the planning of new projects, it is easy to fall into the bad habit of shifting focus and moving on from a project the moment the ribbon is cut on a new product, or the launch you were planning is out of the way. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to learn from all the work that has been put in. Make retrospectives a key part of how you learn from big projects and apply learnings to future work.
And don’t allow retrospectives to become a blame game. Start each of these meetings with a statement of the ‘prime directive’, a central part of the Agile development ethos: ‘Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.’ The statement is invaluable to setting a positive and non-judgemental tone.
Organising people
We’ve already discussed the importance of nurturing and developing the individual members of your team; if you want to secure the victories, it’s just as important that people are organised to best effect. Think of your team not just as specialist individuals organised according to specific skills and workflow, but also as a group of people that will need to be mobilised in different ways at different times to have the maximum impact. Here are some key ways to do that.
PAIRS
One of the most effective ways of organising people is to pair them up. This is a technique often used in software development, where two people writing code together – although it may seem slower – will be more efficient in the long term than solo actors. As a pair, developers can peer-review each other’s code in real time and come up with better solutions when they’re pairing on the code base. Mistakes are spotted and corrected before the code goes live and knowledge of the code base doesn’t live in just one person’s head.
This is something you can apply well beyond software. A team of two means there’s someone to bounce ideas off, play the devil’s advocate, and to proofread, fact check (or sanity check!) each other’s work. Work at pairing together people with contrasting skills and personalities, who will improve each other and produce better work together than they could alone. Encourage your pairs to deepen their partnership in other ways, presenting at conferences, for instance.
MOBS
The practice of ‘mobbing’ takes pairing to another level. This is where you bring together the full muscle of a team to attack a big problem or open up discussion of a new area as one big group. In software development, it means a group of engineers sitting around one super-sized screen for up to an hour, each taking turns at the keyboard, working on the same piece of code. It’s a brilliant way of making sure that thought processes and knowledge bases are shared across a wider group. It’s a practice you can apply to all parts of your team, from HR to marketing: get a mob together to contribute to the same piece of work, provide feedback and build on ideas in real time. This can even work for teams based across different offices and helps to massively reduce information asymmetry. Are there any projects you’re running in your company that you think would benefit from a mobbing session? They’re exhilarating, positive, shared experiences that can generate unexpected ideas and give a whole team a stronger sense of ownership.
SQUADS
In addition to pairs and mobs, for large projects consider creating squads: cross-functional teams that bring together people from all areas of the business to collaborate on key projects such as a new product or major campaign launch.
A squad can vary in size, depending on how many different teams need to be across a project. Together they develop a minimum viable plan and meet regularly to discuss progress.
On the road to victory, squads fulfil a number of purposes:
- To signal the importance of the project As special teams that have been brought together specifically for a given assignment, they help increase focus and purpose around the project at hand and the rest of the company can also see that this is a priority area.
- To solve complex business challenges Squads are designed as crack teams that are first and foremost about bringing together all the necessary skills and experience to deliver on complex projects. By being cross-functional across all areas of the business, they bring a range of different perspectives and necessary skill sets to certain problems. For the same reason, they serve to spread interest and awareness of key projects company-wide, and to represent the needs (and concerns) of all different teams.
- To help emerging leaders gain cross-functional experience and company profile Squads can be immensely valuable vehicles for learning and development. With emerging leadership talent, they can offer a proving ground for those ready to gain their first management experience, in an environment where they have more experienced leaders who can have their back and help them keep the show on the road.
Action: Work at mixing up the way your team works and the combinations of people and talent you put on particular projects. That could be encouraging individuals who wouldn’t normally work together to take on a joint project, or creating your own multi-skilled ‘squad’ to tackle a big project or business problem. Create a sense of aspiration around special teams that people should want to become a part of.
Words of wisdom: Team and structure trump personality
My observation is that there is too much emphasis on the leader as a personality – rather than on what s/he stands for, his/her values and what ideas s/he intends to execute. Empathy with others is crucial to being a good leader – understand what motivates others, give good advice, be generous, be helpful with feedback, and lead by example. But equally importantly, you need to have in place a good organisational structure and team to back up what the leader can deliver.
CAROLINE WIERTZ, PROFESSOR OF MARKETING, ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP, CASS BUSINESS SCHOOL, CITY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
Extreme communication
A key part of providing clarity across your team is communication. And while that may sound obvious, the reality is that communication is not just one of the most important parts of any business, it’s also one of the most frequently neglected.
Communication is often asymmetrical, in that leaders think they are doing plenty of it, while their people think they are hardly sharing anything at all. As a leader, you need to continually test and challenge your assumptions on how you communicate key business information to your team. Quickly consider these questions:
- Is important (non-confidential or privileged) information regularly shared with the whole team?
- Are key decisions being explained in the context of why and for what reasons they were made?
- Is bad news – e.g. client losses or product defects – openly shared and communicated?
The reason communication matters so much is that a lack of consistent information flow from leaders creates a vacuum that is inevitably filled with speculation and rumour. When this happens, it’s often more a case of bad organisation than bad intentions. With so much going on, it’s incredibly easy to miss things and to allow gaps to appear between the information held at the leadership level and things that are known across the business.
Tip: Try and put yourself in the shoes of the people receiving your communications in order to minimise the scope for communication breakdowns. How will they feel? What will they think and what will they do next? And never be afraid of repeating yourself. Are your people bored of hearing you say the same thing? Excellent news. Your message has finally landed!
When it comes to sharing information, the need to explain context is often overlooked – if you want to step up your communication skills, one easy hack is to start every communication by explaining why. Why you’re asking for this now, why the priorities have changed, why you’re considering changing the process, why the client has asked to do things differently. The more insight you can communicate here, the more people will understand what you’re shooting for and that will put them in a much stronger position to help you succeed and resolve problems with solutions you hadn’t even considered. And when your own Big Boss asks YOU to get something done (whether that’s your board, your boss or your biggest client), take the time to ask them why they want it, what good looks like and when this needs to be done, so that you in turn are best positioned to deliver wow.
Sarah says: Extreme communications
There’s no one ‘best’ way to communicate across a business, especially as it scales, so if you want to lead the way in communications, you’ll want to build a wide range of tools in your communication toolkit. At Unruly we started a weekly newsletter – The Friday Flash – when there were only twelve of us in the business and we were all sat on two banks of desks. Over the years it has become indispensable for ensuring that everybody knows what has happened across the business that week. We communicate quarterly objectives orally at Town Hall, by email and also visually with posters on fridges and the backs of toilet doors. Face to face is the best way of sharing information and gauging responses, and if you can do a video hangout rather than a phone call, so much the better! This will help you more effectively read and empathise with your colleague halfway round the world and will help to build the open communication and strong relationships you need as you’re stepping up your leadership responsibilities.
To facilitate both information sharing and a two-way dialogue around key decisions, we have a whole series of different forums that bring our teams together, some on a regular pulse and others on an ad hoc basis. As you read through the list, have a think which ones would be the most useful in the context of your own business context. They include:
- Daily 15-minute stand-up meetings to do a quick runaround on progress and key actions (and every Monday, a similar meeting for the whole office)
- Weekly leadership meetings of the exec team and daily 10-minute check-ins
- Fortnightly product planning sessions: these bring together people from across the business to map priorities and resourcing in the engineering team
- Monthly show and tells, where squads and functional teams share latest work, recent findings, changes to process or examples of best practice
- Quarterly exec retrospectives where the exec team meets with a broader senior leadership team to share feedback on the quarter that’s gone and to discuss priorities for the quarter ahead
- Quarterly Town Halls where overall company strategic priorities are shared and discussed
- Quarterly #Oneruly days: a 24-hour, all-company #hackathon where every team in the company focuses on a specific strategic objective. This really brings everyone together and can help build massive momentum around important projects
- Annual ‘Dragons’ Nest’ pizza and prosecco events for the team to pitch new product ideas and concepts to the leadership
- Biennial ‘UnrulyFests’: part training power-up, part knees up! In London, with every employee around the globe on the invite list
Given Unruly now operates across 20 offices and eight different time zones, you can understand the need for rigour in making sure that key messages, developments and achievements are being communicated across the group. Yet the same principle applies even if you are leading a small team who all work within earshot of each other. Proximity is no guarantee of good communication, so you have to work at it, ensuring that people on your team get the opportunity both to understand what’s going on outside their ambit, and to feed in their own ideas into the bargain.
Small things can make a big difference: we do a lot of video hangouts with our international teams, so we had a ‘tapered table’ built in the boardroom, with video screens at the wide end, to put the people via video at the head of the table, able to see the faces of everyone sitting in the room. This makes remote participants feel more included and has massively increased their active participation in discussion and decision making.
Words of wisdom: Over-communicate your vision
Lead with a vision. Leaders show people a vision for the future and how they can contribute to that. Err on the side of over-communicating your vision. You must ensure everyone knows where and when to point their oar and help row in the right direction. Listen more than you speak. From a social and cultural perspective, listening shows empathy, which is a great trait for leaders to have. But also from a pure business perspective, listening instead of speaking will gather you more data points to make better decisions. Active listening demonstrates that you are aware, respectful of others and above all, coachable – a trait that will serve you well in your career and in life.
ANGIE CHANG, SERIAL ENTREPRENEUR
The leader needs to be transparent and explain the context for decisions – to empower their management team with the knowledge they need to get everyone in the business on board. The leader is someone who can bring a team together. Not just an Exec/Board Team but senior leadership teams. Someone who focuses on people’s strengths rather than pulling people up on their weaknesses. I admire leaders that inspire and drive change. With the world moving so fast you can’t be left behind. All the leaders I’ve respected have cool heads and kind hearts.
LOUISE TULLIN, VP MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS, EMEA AT UNRULY
Wisdom box:
As a leader, having a clear vision for your business is not enough. Make your vision come alive for your teams through storytelling that creates a picture so that everyone understands not just what role they play, but how that fits into the overall vision. Change is the norm - so get used to it and get your people used to it.
NICOLE SHEFFIELD, CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER, NEWS CORP AUSTRALIA