If you’re the leader of an organization or team right now, you don’t need anyone to tell you how uncertain the environment is in which you seek to lead. What you do need to call out, however, is that you’re allowing that ambiguity to become your undoing.
The new abnormal is your obsession. You don’t mean to, but you’re allowing it to dominate – so much so that there’s a good chance that you’re no longer a leader; you’re a firefighter — not the heroic version, but the kind endlessly saying, “If I can just address this distraction first, then I can get back to the big picture.” It’s a slow burn. And once it takes hold in you it signals your team: this is our new cultural norm. It starts externally, but ambiguity becomes the enemy within, raising foundational questions in everyone about everything. “What do we stand for?” “Why do we do what we do?” “What’s the right way to do it?” There’s a question however, that you ought to ask ahead of any of these, and it’s this: What is our single point of failure?
The power of a single point of failure
A single point of failure may sound like a narrow focus. In truth, it’s a siren call to stop looking narrowly and instead look system-wide. What it asks you to contemplate is the single point at which, if failure occurs, it will cause the entire system to fail.
Chances are, right this moment, you’re madly scanning your brain, wondering if you know what that point is. The odds are even higher that you’re looking at the wrong things. The key thing you can do – right now, not after you attack the next fire – is to understand where not to look and where you should instead.
Points of distraction
A key error many leaders make in looking for that single point is to look at symptoms of failure rather than the source. Three usual suspects stand above the rest: the bottom line, the leader and the outside world. The bottom line nearly always comes first. Seeing it shrink, leaders try to fix it in a panic. They look to sales and expenses and for quick ways to shore up one and reduce the other. Yet, rather than the source, these are outputs of something far more significant. They are measures of success, not the single point of success or failure.
The second most looked at reason for failure is the leaders themselves. Despite the mythology, the senior leader is rarely, if ever, the single point of failure. It’s indeed our frequent default to cry out, “Why didn’t you know? You should have known,” and to boot the person at the top. Ironically, those at the top of the organization chart are often the last to see or understand the actual reasons for failure. Most often, it’s those closest to the work who know, the ones we tend to ask last if at all, the threats and opportunities. To be sure, the senior leader is linked to why failure occurs and encourages or discourages its warning signs from being voiced. They are rarely, however, the sole or singular source of failure.
The last of the three usual suspects is the outside world and its pressures. It’s such an easy target, especially right now, to point blame outward. But the search for the single point of failure is inherently inward. Failure is inevitably linked to an organization’s ability to detect, adapt and leverage ambiguity – or not. If these aren’t where leaders should look, where then should they be?
The most important point
Especially in uncertain times, the greatest point of failure, bar none is culture driven by a clear shared purpose. Leaders near universally concur culture is essential. And yet, they repeatedly conclude that this life-giving point of connection and success just sort of happens. As a senior leader, if you don’t know that culture is your single most significant point of failure or success, your odds of giving it the priority and care that it deserves are negligible. Moreover, if you aren’t communicating that point’s priority to everyone in your organization, then you are unknowingly forging weak links in the chain that allow your organization to weather change, adapt and thrive. You can imagine what these things do to your odds of success.
I once asked Russell Shaffer, then the senior director of global culture, diversity & inclusion at Walmart, what culture is. His answer is the only guide senior leaders need to know what their single point of failure is and to have the incentive to attend to it. “Culture is what we are doing right now,” Shaffer said, “every person, every decision, every day. It’s not what we used to do, not even what we aspire to do.” It’s what we’re doing right now, and whether it’s working, he told me. “Culture,” Shaffer warned, “is a perpetual litmus test of success or failure. For some, it’s a reckoning.”
If you believe in the single point of failure concept, and you should, it’s time to stop putting culture on the back burner while making the endless fires of the moment the priority. As the leader, rather than your burden, a culture driven by a clear shared purpose is the greatest insurance and assurance of success for you, your organization and every person in it. Don’t let it be your point of failure.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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