Plan For Tomorrow; Live In Today
“There are 1,000 things that have to happen in order. We are on number 8 — you're talking about number 692.” -Jim Lovell, as played by Tom Hanks, Apollo 13
I’ve always been someone who likes to have a plan. I like the feeling of knowing when things will happen. Also, where and when I need to be and what I need to do when I get there. I even like planning for the long-range future. My wife and I love talking about what we will do when we retire. Planning for the future gives me a sort of comfort, even if I know it can change at any time.
I’m the same way with work. I love knowing what’s coming up in the near future and being prepared for it. I also enjoy creating strategies for the long-term future. I especially like being able to help my clients with their strategic planning. As a leader, being able to plan for your team’s future and create a strategy for how to get there is incredibly important.
You must remember that you will never be able to predict all the variables for the future but having a plan can help your team get to where it needs to be, even when navigating through tough times.
However, there is an inherent danger in living in the future without worrying about what is happening right in front of you. In a former position, I worked with another leader who spent almost all of his time focusing on where his vision would lead our teams.
The positive side of this trait was that whenever I brought a suggestion to him about a project for the team, he would always immediately be able to tell me whether or not it fit into our future vision — and if it didn’t, he would tell me not to pursue it any further.
The negative side of this trait was that whenever I brought a suggestion to him about a project for the team, he would always immediately be able to tell me whether or not it fit into our future vision — and if it didn’t, he would tell me not to pursue it any further.
Did you catch that? Yes, the positive and negative were the exact same thing, verbatim. But why?
Let’s start with the positive. When you have a vision cast for the future of your team or company, it means that you can usually answer the question: does this new idea or project help in achieving our goals? I believe if you can answer that question honestly, then you can ignore a lot of ideas that turn out to be nothing more than rabbit holes that don’t lead you where you want to go. Instead, you can focus on what really matters. That idea is of course rooted in your ability as a leader to fully understand the scope of how new ideas will affect the journey to achieving the team’s goals. This can be difficult because we sometime fail to see how small changes now can largely affect outcomes later.
Which brings us to the negative… and here I am going to use a very specific example that happened to me with the leader I mentioned earlier. He was very excited about where our team would be in 3-5 years. So excited that on several occasions when I would pitch ideas about how to give the team some simple efficiency boosts by adding some relatively inexpensive technology, he denied it.
Why? Because that technology would be replaced 3-5 years down the line, and therefore in his mind, wasn’t worth spending money or resources to get it up and running because it didn’t directly move us towards our goal. This led to several tense conversations over the course of a few months where I tried to explain that the team was struggling now and needed help. Tried as I might, we could not align on how to move forward. Until finally I said to him, “I understand that we have a great plan for the future and I respect that, but I need the team to be able to do their jobs today and you’re not letting them do that.”
In that conversation, it finally clicked and he understood where the team was coming from and why we needed to be able to make changes that made things better now, even if someday those changes would be overwritten for newer changes.
What we cannot forget as leaders is that when you make a change for your team today — even if that change will later become obsolete — it doesn’t mean that the initial change wasn’t worthwhile. If in the meantime it made the team’s lives easier and helped them accomplish more, then it still had value. I’d even argue that if it didn’t make their lives easier but somehow still boosted their morale for a short time, then it was probably still worth it.
It’s easy as a leader to be a general, directing troops from your position and watching what is happening over the entire battlefield. And for the record, sometimes that is exactly what is called for in a given situation. We cannot, however, forget what it’s like for all those troops who only can see from their own vantage points.
The point of view from the boots on the ground is equally valuable to that of someone looking down from a satellite. As leaders, we can never forget that. Listen to your teams. Empower them and make sure they know their points of view are valued!
-Jason