Leading a Team When the Strategy Keeps Changing

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 our league and very rare you might talk to somebody two, three layers up and they’re asking for help to work with some other initiatives or other teams. And so it’s still kind of in the league and what we’re hoping for is to be able to expand this in a way that goes up to that say sort of regional or state level to say the people who are recognizing our efforts at those higher levels. Our names are on the tip of their tongues.

MURIEL WILKINS: Got it. So there’s the win, meaning you win the whole thing, right? You’re the champion. Then there’s what we call the best next alternative, which is hey, we made it to the regional level and state, but we’re known. And what you’re interpreting that internally is like we are a known entity within this organization. Both of those still reflect getting a point on the scoreboard. It’s very point driven, it’s very score driven. It’s very like what is the result of playing the game? That is definitely one bucket to get motivated by. Where’s the motivation in everything that happens before you win the scores?

MICHAEL: Yeah, that’s about having those little successes in the process and going about reaching for that point, right? So what are the little things that we’re doing? Again, using the on field analogy, what are the little things that we’re doing every single day that scoring the goal is just natural. It just becomes a natural thing. So how do we create those processes and those environments such that everybody is just saying to us, you want this kind of learning moment, this is the group you go to. They have everything really well-defined, really well identified and bought out that we can see by engaging with them, by going into their processes that will have success. We know that. Yeah. There’s another whole story on the athletics field that makes me realize like, oh, had I only said that.

MURIEL WILKINS: What would you have said?

MICHAEL: I would’ve talked more about the process of how to get to that success than versus hey, we’re just, our end goal is to win the state. It’s more about the process.

MURIEL WILKINS: It’s more about the process. So how does that relate to finding the motivation in what you all are doing right now?

MICHAEL: It’s asking the questions with my team to say, what are those missing pieces right now in the process that will help motivate us, that will help us get to that known space? What is that thing that’s missing in that process right now?

MURIEL WILKINS: Yeah, what is the thing that’s missing? What are the things that we think might lead to it? Because if we know that that is generally the direction it’s going to take us in, then we start focusing on not just the outcome but the process, the effort

And the motivation is in the effort. Actually with the hope that it gets us to the outcome, but with no guarantee. And so I think where you are, Michael is that as a leader, you’ve sort of held up the big win, the world championship. What is it called in soccer? What is it? Is it World World Cup?

MICHAEL: The World Cup.

MURIEL WILKINS: You’ve held up the World Cup. I was going to say the Super Bowl, the World Cup. You’ve held up the World Cup and what I’m asking is like, wait a minute. There’s a lot that needs to happen before you get to the World Cup. You don’t go from boys little league or girls little league soccer to the World Cup, both at an individual level and at a team level.

It’s a long game. And so how do you find your motivation to stay for that long game? Yeah, you keep your eye on that prize, but what’s the day-to-day motivation? So we’ve sort of expanded the framing of motivation that yes, it needs to happen at the macro level with getting the big win, being at the C-suite, being able to have those conversations at the C-suite, that’s your World Cup. And in the meantime, we’ve got a ton of matches to play. We’ve got a lot of drills to practice. We’ve got a lot of different things that we need to do and we have to have the patience and determination to get through it. We have to put in the effort that we hope ultimately will lead to that. So where do we find the motivation to do that? And I think you articulate it very well. We have to celebrate those small wins because they are just as worthy. Now motivation will get us but so far, and so if you do all of this and the motivation is not there one day, for one week, for one month, what needs to kick in?

MICHAEL: Yeah, this is one that I’ve always struggled with. You have those ups and downs and you have those days that are like, oh, do I want to get out of bed? Do I want to do this today. But the interesting part for the team, and I’ve heard it many times from my team, I get up because of this team. And every time I hear that from anybody on the team, wow, that’s motivating. That’s motivating to me. And I don’t know if it’s motivating to everybody else to hear it, so it just makes me think how much more can we keep saying those little types of things, those little, I’m so motivated to be here today. I am so glad I got out of bed because I know that I get to be with you all today. Even the virtual calls, just those little pick me ups always help.

MURIEL WILKINS: Yeah, I think there’s a little bit of managing expectations. Motivation in essence means you are moved to do something. There’s a motive. It’s motive driven. That when you think about what underlies the word motivation, it’s the motive. It’s like motive and action. So you move to meet that motive. As you said, there might be days where you get up and you’re like, I don’t want to get out of bed. My motive right now is to stay in bed. I felt like that this morning.

MICHAEL: It was Monday.

MURIEL WILKINS: I feel like most morning.

MICHAEL: Same thing.

MURIEL WILKINS: Like, oh my gosh, I

MICHAEL: Hit my alarm and I was like, I need 10 more minutes.

MURIEL WILKINS: Exactly. So I think you can wait for motivation to hit, but when motivation doesn’t hit, here lies the difference. There are those, they wait for motivation to hit and if motivation doesn’t hit, then they don’t do anything. And there are those who wait for motivation to hit and if it doesn’t hit, discipline kicks in. And so what’s the difference between motivation and discipline?

MICHAEL: Well, discipline you’re doing it every single day. You’re staying on target with whatever that thing is that you’ve set, whether it’s reading something every day or getting on a bike or a treadmill or something of that nature or practicing the same little move on the field that you do every day. Just doing it over and over. Getting into it.

MURIEL WILKINS: Right. And why do you do it?

MICHAEL: Because you know that by doing it, you’ll be better at it in the long run.

MURIEL WILKINS: Exactly. It’s not based on a feeling. It’s not based on whether I like it, it makes me happy or it doesn’t make me happy. It’s feeling irrelevant. It’s agnostic when it comes to feelings. It’s not, oh, when it’s sunny out, I’ll go out for a run, but if it’s raining, I’m staying indoors. It’s 6:00 AM I’m going for a run within reason. If it’s under 20 degree weather, I’m not going anywhere.

MICHAEL: And that’s one of my things too. For me, there’s discipline in, I have to get on my bike and my rowing machine at least three times a week. I know that that’s not perfect in this sense of discipline, but it’s every other day, so I hit three days.

MURIEL WILKINS: There’s a cadence to it.

MICHAEL: Right. There’s a cadence.

MURIEL WILKINS: So it’s not to say that, hey, you should only have discipline or you should only have motivation. I think why I’m offering this up to you or where we’re getting here, Michael, is that you have more to tap into in terms of sustaining yourself and your team than just motivation. You also have the tool of energizing their discipline. And so the question becomes what are the practices of discipline that make up your team? What are the things that you all agree you do day in, day out, week in, week out, whether you like it or not. For me, I hate going to the dentist, but you know what? I do it because I hate the consequence of not doing it.

MICHAEL: Yeah, yeah. That’s good. There are a couple moments that we practice every week. We have three specific moments and one of them is this is where we learn, this is where we practice. This is where we challenge each other. There’s one particular day every week for an hour to hour and a half where we challenge and question and ask each other those questions of what are we doing? Why are we doing it? For us that’s a great discipline, I think.

We even tried to teach it to other people, but nobody ever sticks to it.

MURIEL WILKINS: Yeah. Discipline’s hard to stick to.

MICHAEL: It is, I’ve even tried to question the team of, look, we have these particular moments. Do we need to change any of that? Is it working or is it not working? Is it contributing to how we’re communicating with each other on our work, on our successes and our priorities?

MURIEL WILKINS: Yeah, I mean, so look, I think that what you’re sharing here is you’ve been trying to pull the motivation lever and you have room in how to do that. There’s the small wins, there’s this other lever, which is when the motivation’s not there, what are we still going to do regardless of how we feel about it? Because we believe that if we do them, it is going to contribute to this end prize that we’re trying to get to. It is going to contribute to us getting to the World Cup. That’s a mindset. And the mindset starts with you as the team lead. Are you creating a culture where the only way that folks will move or be engaged is if they’re motivated a hundred percent of the time all the time. Which I’m all for motivation, but it’s just not realistic. We’re human. There are days we don’t want to get out of bed. Or are you creating a culture where we operate both from a place of motivation and discipline. Both not one or the other. Please don’t get me wrong. Please don’t think I’m saying, you know what, just go and be like discipline, discipline, discipline.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely. It’s inside the language of discipline that allows for the motivation to sort of come out and blossom, I think.

MURIEL WILKINS: That’s right.

MICHAEL: What I’m hearing as well as some of the experiences and ironically enough, we teach a lot about how to understand your work through vision. Where are you going in the future? What is that future state? What does that look like and feel like? And we teach it at a very generic level in order to get into the conversation within teams and within projects.

MURIEL WILKINS: But here’s the thing, right? It is about not resting your laurels on one end or the other. And what I hear you saying is what you tend to use, even if in your work with your internal clients is sort of dangling the future state and sort of saying, Hey, look at this bright shiny future state. Don’t you want to get there? And I think what we’re talking about here is there’s this other side of it, which is current state and what actions you can take. And I think the motivation is found somewhere in between.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

MURIEL WILKINS: It’s the top down meets bottoms up approach. You find it in real time between the vision of what can happen and the actions of what are happening. And so this is why, again, going back to your sports experience, sometimes the motivation, I’m a runner, sometimes my motivation doesn’t kick in until I’m at mile four or five. Yeah, I’ve been miserable the first couple of miles, but I got up. I did it. That’s the discipline I’ve kept going. Then I’m like, oh, okay. And then sometimes it doesn’t happen until afterwards. Sometimes it never happens, but I got it done. But if you only rely on one, it’ll burn out. It’ll sizzle out at some point. So what’s at your disposal as a leader is knowing that you have at least you have a lot more, but I’m just trying to prioritize. You have more levers at your disposal than just dangling the big prize, the World Cup in front and saying, Hey, because what’s happening is when your people feel like they’re not there or they’re not super close to there, then they lose it. You got to give them something else.

MICHAEL: Right. Right.

MURIEL WILKINS: We may have run with the World Cup metaphor a bit long here, but the point worked for Michael, so I went with it. Michael is someone well versed in coaching others, and so he gets the idea of celebrating small wins along the way to the big goal. I get the sense that he knows he should be doing that with his team, and maybe this serves simply as a reminder of what he knows he should have been doing all along. This conversation around motivation and discipline being different levers at his disposal is an important one, both for himself and for what he projects onto his team. But we also started this conversation in part thinking about not just Michael and his team, but those above him, the managing-up piece of this. And it’s important to return to that point with Michael. He in part might be missing some of the clarity with his team because it seems like the leadership above him is also lacking that, especially with all the change going on. We’ve established at this point that it’s up to Michael to determine the mile markers for his team to keep them feeling encouraged. But now we’ll loop back and address the fact that those mile markers haven’t been defined from the top of the organization. And as a result, Michael doesn’t know what his own objectives are.

MICHAEL: I guess part of the crux of that motivation because of all the different leadership changes and all the unknowns and the different changing opinions of some and me saying, what do you want? What are you expecting? And trying to get some of those expectations set, and in some cases being quite vague.

MURIEL WILKINS: Ok, so in an ideal state, you would be getting direction and it would not be vague.

MICHAEL: Yup.

MURIEL WILKINS: I would love that for you. If that doesn’t happen, what other choices do you have?

MICHAEL: I think it’s really just continuing to ask. I think it’s saying here’s what we are doing and saying we intend to deliver through this process, or this is the way we do X, Y, and Z. And until someone is saying no, until somebody says, no, you can’t do that, we’re going to keep doing it because we know there’s impact, because our discipline in our motivation helps us get to that next state.

MURIEL WILKINS: So I’m hearing actually two choices that you have there. One is I’m asking, I’m not getting a clearer response. I’m getting very vague response. So choice number one is I keep asking. I keep asking and I keep waiting, right? That’s choice number one, basically doing what you’re already doing. Choice number two is I’m going to keep taking action.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

MURIEL WILKINS: I’m going to make some decisions. I don’t know if they’re right. I don’t know if they’re going to land okay. But we’re going to keep forging ahead until somebody tells us not to do that or somebody tells us to do that. Until we get more concrete answers. So that’s choice number two. What other choices are there?

MICHAEL: Boy, this is a tough one. I can’t think of good options within the company other than those two. Alluding to something else that I wouldn’t want to go down that road anyways.

MURIEL WILKINS: Which is maybe doing something outside of the company.

MICHAEL: Correct.

MURIEL WILKINS: That’s an option though, right? Option is exit.

MICHAEL: Right.

MURIEL WILKINS: That’s an option. Look, I don’t really, no judgment on your options. I have no skin in this game. I have no in my head I hope he goes with option number X. I’m good. Okay. All I want you to realize is that you have options. You have options. And when you have options, this is what leads you back to, okay, what’s the purpose? What’s my motivation? What are we trying to do? Which one am I going to follow today? Left without making an explicit decision on which option you’re following, it feels like you’re operating with no direction, and that might be what your team is feeling.

MICHAEL: Yeah, that’s quite valid because there are, I mean, over this year there have been a lot of questions of do we do any one of literally those three? Because there was that third option that was floated and we played around with what does that mean? But it just doesn’t, it’s not feasible in what we do. And like I say, I’ve been with the company long enough knowing that I want this to be my one company to finish out my career, finish out my real career. With the direction some of this has gone, has been a lot of those positive things and the growth of what my team is. It’s very positive. But yeah, I guess that’s a little bit of an eyeopener to think, oh, without making the choice, that leaves the team with a lot of questions. It leaves the team with a lot of, what are we doing?

MURIEL WILKINS: I mean, you’re kind of being, if I may, as vague as the other people are being with you to your team. So I think what we’re getting to is at some point in the midst of the ambiguity, in the midst of the change, you’ve still got to put a stake in the ground. The difference is that you accept that that stake in the ground might not stay there for very long, but at least it’s a stake in the ground for now. And so going back to your original question around how do I keep people motivated? How do I keep myself motivated? I think a part of it is, well, you need to be motivated around something. And it sounds like the big prize of being at the C-suite level and having impact at a scale is a worthy anchor, but it seems a little too far and a little too nebulous right now. You need something a little closer to home to anchor on. It’s like when I take long drives, I start looking for the little mile markers because my gosh, the next exit, it’s like next exit is a hundred miles. You’re like, ah!

MICHAEL: Right.

MURIEL WILKINS: Okay, let me start looking for the little mile markers. And that makes me feel like I’m getting a little closer. I’m getting a little closer. That’s my anchor. So you got to give your team an anchor, Michael, and if they can’t articulate it, then you articulate it.

MICHAEL: Just the other day, we did an exercise whereby we were looking at what do we want to see as that future state? And then we went through the exercise of saying, okay, what are the things? Let’s focus in on two or three of those that you feel are the most important. And we had a ton of information. There was just so much that we had collected. One member did say, I don’t see sort of the red thread. I don’t see connecting all of this together. And I said, well, can we agree that those three items are the most important items? And everybody but two said yes. And when the other two said, no, we’re not aligned. We don’t understand. We said, well, okay, what is it? What’s missing? What’s not in the alignment?

MURIEL WILKINS: So it sounds like you’re asking the right questions and you’re facilitating the conversation. What I’m not hearing is wherein are you also using the managerial leadership communication skill of asserting and setting direction?

MICHAEL: I intentionally did not do it because I wanted to give the team an opportunity to help set some of that direction this time. I wanted to say, okay, there are so many things that we could be doing. What’s everybody thinking? When the question was asked of, what is that red thread on this whole thing? I said, well, look, there was like a hundred ideas over here on this side, and you got to these three, you all got to these three, so these are the three that you want to focus on. And I agree with those three, so let’s focus there. I did leave it open-ended to say, look, can we do these three? I did not state. These are the three. This is it.

MURIEL WILKINS: There is one assertion, which could be these are the three, and I understand you saying, Hey, I want them to spend more time. But there’s also the other question that you said, the person asked is, what’s the thread? Which is different than do these need to be the three?

MICHAEL: Yeah. That was never asked. It was purely what’s the thread? It was never.

MURIEL WILKINS: Yeah, I think that’s a different question.

MICHAEL: I do too.

MURIEL WILKINS: And I think part of the responsibility of a leader is to be able to pull back and as they say, get on the balcony and pull everything together. Frame the collective, create the thread, make sure there’s a thread. Going back to this notion of the mile markers, the little wins, your team can come up with those. And you’ve also got to make sure that as they are articulating what those things are, whether they’re priorities or activities or practices, whatever you want to call them, it’s your job as the leader to say, okay, when we put all these things together, does it make sense? And why? As your team members stated, what’s the thread that pulls all of this together? So you need to frame the activities.

MICHAEL: Agreed, understood. Yep.

MURIEL WILKINS: Yeah. I think what you’re balancing is continuing to be the facilitative consultative leader that you are, which is what probably makes you a great internal coach. And also exercise the directional framing, context setting capabilities that also are required of a leader.

MICHAEL: Thankfully, my calendar starts to look more like that.

MURIEL WILKINS: Right?

MICHAEL: Yeah. It’s definitely taking those blocks of time, being more intentional in saying, I’m going to focus in on creating this red thread. I always forget how it’s said in German, roto Faden, I think.

MURIEL WILKINS: You could say it, and I wouldn’t even know

MICHAEL: <<laughs>>

MURIEL WILKINS: Oh my goodness. Alright, very good. So we’ve covered a lot.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

MURIEL WILKINS: And you started off with the question of how do you keep people motivated? I think we’ve gone there as well as other places. I’d love to hear what your key takeaways are coming out of this conversation and what feels different for you now versus when we got started.

MICHAEL: So I think the first one that really stuck out for me was being able to reframe how I’m asking the question about motivation for myself. How am I really thinking about it just for me in terms of not just the work, but it’s all the other things around that, and how do I ask myself and how do I connect that to the discipline of the work every day, the showing up, whether it’s the little phrases for the team or the little reminders of the small wins or the identifying of the markers and being able to highlight and celebrate those all along the journey. I think I’ve written discipline on my notes about four times already.

MURIEL WILKINS: That’s discipline.

MICHAEL: And then understanding that this, and we talk a lot about mindset, but understanding how the mindset of operating from discipline and operating towards motivation, this top down, bottom up in the actions and the vision. Being able to remind myself over and over that, keeping that mindset focused on discipline. And finally, it’s that I have to be more clear with my option, be clear with my options, but also in the direction that I’m setting with which option I’m taking. Even though we have a ton of ideas, these are the three focused areas, and this is the decision we make.

MURIEL WILKINS: Yeah. Beautiful. Beautiful. I think I’ll just add one more if I may, which I think can be your mantra, because what it reflects is that you have full capacity to be able to do this. And I think the mantra that I would leave you with is to walk the talk.

MICHAEL: Yep. All too true.

MURIEL WILKINS: All too true.

MICHAEL: All too true. Yep.

MURIEL WILKINS: All right. Very good. Thank you so much.

MICHAEL: This is really good. Thank you. Because it really helps bring the things that I’ve been very compassionate with others about, but sometimes coaches need coaches too.

MURIEL WILKINS: Yes, they do. All right, Michael, thank you.

MICHAEL: Thank you.

MURIEL WILKINS: Finding motivation isn’t easy for yourself or your team, but when you look to those above you for answers, you aren’t always going to get what you’re looking for. This is a lesson Michael is learning in his role that in the face of ambiguity, you still need to establish some mile markers for yourself and your team to keep things moving. For much of this coaching session, Michael was able to come up with answers to his own questions by just thinking about them in terms of the advice he’d give his own internal customers. Coaching yourself can be as simple as that, creating space between you and the issue by asking yourself, what would I suggest to a colleague, a friend, an internal customer, if they face the same challenges. And just like Michael, you may find that the solution is right in front of you, and it’s just a matter of walking your talk.

AMANDA KERSEY: That was Muriel Wilkins, host of Coaching Real Leaders, in conversation with a leader who appeared on the show as Michael, for anonymity. Season 10 of Coaching Real Leaders has just begun, which means there are not only new coaching sessions to listen to but also a rich archive of past episodes.

HBR On Leadership will be back next Wednesdaywith another hand-picked conversation from Harvard Business Review. If this episode helped you, share it with your friends and colleagues, and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. While you’re there, consider leaving us a review. When you’re ready for more podcasts, articles, case studies, books, and videos with the world’s top business and management experts, find it all at HBR.org.

This episode was produced by Mary Dooe and me, Amanda Kersey. On Leadership’s team includes Maureen Hoch, Rob Eckhardt, Tina Tobey Mack, Erica Truxler, Ramsey Khabbaz, Nicole Smith, and Anne Bartholomew.

Music by Coma Media. Thanks for listening