Everything Speaks

Seth Godin is one of my favorite bloggers, writers, influencers.  Yes, I am part of his tribe. This week, he wrote  a post titled, “Type Tells A Story.”  In it, he points out that the style of font you choose communicates a lot about you, and it often provides one of the first impressions you make.

People will pre-set their thinking about WHAT  you are communicating, even before they READ WHAT you are saying.  Your communication actually starts before people read a word you have put on the page.  The type, or style of fonts you select, influences the reader’s perception  and sometimes whether or not they even want to read what you have written.

What does it say about you and your organization?  Does it represent who you are?  Does it tell your story?

This is true across all of the choices you make regarding your communication – your web site, the paper you choose, the images you select, the color, the consistency?  Does they reinforce your brand? (Have you defined your brand?)  Or does it change on a whim, or when someone in a department of the organization wants to do something fun or new? (I was on a font website the other day and they featured a “font of the moment” – not a good idea if you are building your brand!)

Do an audit of your communication strategy and the tools you use.  What are you saying?  And do you reinforce it regularly?  Remember, everything speaks.

In the previous post, we looked at a possible cause of  leader “burn out.”  If you polled your leaders and discovered that your leadership style was propagating amotivational syndrome - a condition of apathy or unwillingness to work, what steps can you take to reverse the condition?

Marcus Buckingham, whom most of us know as a champion of “working from your strengths,” promotes the value of unlocking the value of each person as being critical for organizations to be their best. Why? Because the point leader releases and empowers others to thrive and contribute at their best and they are freed to lead as they are gifted. What emerges is Motivated Moxie — courage combined with inventiveness inspired by vision.

If you are not already, here are three ways for you snuff out the burn out.

• Use a respected personality assessment tool to discover each of your leaders strengths so you can work together to develop them (Oak Hills Church in San Antonio has each staff member and every new elder completes an assessment with me and they integrate training into their culture)
• Create a leadership development process that multiplies and empowers leaders (check out Auxano’s November issue of Insights for highlights on leadership development)
• Do some self-assessment. Discover your strengths, Empower others to do what you do not need to do. And focus your attention on your strengths– that will free you to personally thrive as you lead your organization into the future.

Invest in people and you will invest in the future. And free yourself to lead at the same time.

This week Rick Warren posted this on twitter: God puts people around you to help you. But if your insecurity won’t let them use their gifts you’ll burn out! Ex.18:13-26

So true.

Yes, you will burn out.  Yes, you can be a roadblock to vision momentum. And yes, you run the risk of burning out the people around you as well.

When I was doing graduate work in psychology, I was introduced to the term, “amotivational syndrome.” It means: a condition of apathy or unwillingness to work.  While it is a reference to the result of drug use, I think this term can also be applied to what happens to people when they are in a role where they are neither encouraged to nor given the opportunity to contribute to the organization’s vision using their gifts and strengths. As a result, they begin to see their work as a job, they wait for the next task, they go through the day lethargically and they become less concerned about results. Burned out. Uninspired.  Amotivational syndrome.

Most of the time, I suspect, this happens not because the leader is a control freak, or that he does not trust his people, but he or she has developed a pattern of driving for results, striving for excellence, running with ideas, seeing the picture painted his way without thinking about what happens to the culture this creates. While his candle is burning bright at both ends, the flame of many of his leaders dims.

Ask yourself if you may unknowingly be propagating  burn out.  Consider getting a pulse on the perception of the people you lead.  Ask them if they feel empowered to contribute and lead from their strengths.  Be prepared for honest feedback.  If the answers tell you that your team exhibits signs of the amotivational syndrome, good catch!  Just by initiating the conversation, you open the door for reigniting your leaders.

“Too many people lack the power of conversation, but not the power of speech.”

Following tweets yesterday,  I ran across this quote from George Bernard Shaw by way of Mark Clement and Phil Cooke.  It made me think about how much time leaders spend speaking without taking every opportunity to have their vision drip into the culture of their organization.

It seemed very timely to read this quote as I prepared to launch this blog.   We often forget the power of intentional communication – across all platforms.  In the white noise of day-to-day chatter, we often miss the opportunity to create a culture in which vision washes every leader, conversation, environment and communication.

Yes, everything speaks – your words, your team communications, if and how you develop leaders, your environments, your presence, your brand (yes you need to brand), and your clarity or lack thereof.  Every day you have the opportunity to communicate vision.  I’m not just talking about what you say, it’s every choice you make, what you do and what you choose not to do.

Why is it so easy to overlook these opportunities?

1. Because we often don’t realize the impact of every nuance
2. Because we become distracted from our focus, or..
3. We never found or took the time to discover and define what our focus should be.

More often than not,  the third reason is the root of the problem.  It’s not that people lack the ability to communicate well,  but they have just not spent time necessary to find their unique vision, leaving them like a rebel without a cause.

So, you may know you have a cause, but have you found how to communicate it with stunning clarity? What can you start doing today?  At Auxano, we are driven by the understanding that clarity isn’t everything, but it changes everything.

1. Begin by taking time to clarify your vision. (check out Will Mancini’s helpful post on clarity - he lists 6 tips for achieving clarity)
2. Stay unwaveringly focused.
3. Begin honing your skills to cast vision.
4. Challenge yourself and your leadership team to look for every opportunity drip vision into every thing you do.
5. Set milestones for integration of your vision
6. Join Open Source Vision Casting #visiondrip This is a collaborative community of leaders sharing their best practices for integrating vision into your culture. (you can follow on twitter #visiondrip, or through twubs with the link provided)

Being intentional is worth the effort and very freeing.  Remeber – everything  speaks.