Are You Playing Defense or Offense?: 3 Things to Watch and Listen for Now

Especially for Visionaries: Your team needs you to help them make some critical shifts

Over the last few months I have found myself repeating the same question:

“When you look around the organization, do you see the team playing more defense or offense?”

One thing I have observed in some organizations during the onset of the pandemic, was a shift of things like cash, PPP, employee safety to the top of our list, and things like lead generation, client check-ins, and many of the activities that drive sales and deeper customer relationships stopped.

As the visionary for your organization, I challenge you to do the following 3 things over the next few weeks:

1. Watch the organization (including your own activities): Do you see more defense or offense from the team?
2. With your Integrator (at your same page meeting), take a look at your leadership team: Which departments are working well together and which ones actually had more communication/coordination issues over the past few months? Get it on the issue list and let’s work to solve it.
3. Take a look at your accountabilities as the visionary: Are you spending enough time doing these? If not, put it on the issues list and IDS it with the team so that you can get back to the big things your organization needs from you to grow and thrive. If they see you playing offense it will help them find the time and courage to make their own shift.

Spend the next few weeks really watching and listening to your organization. Put some time in your clarity break to do some thinking about the culture and future of your leadership team and organization, and challenge things that need to be challenged. That is what the visionary does, and the organization needs you to put some of these unique abilities into action.

Ongoing insight: As I reread these words in July 2021 two things hit me:

1. Whenever the organization hits a crisis like economic downturn, cash crisis, customer crisis, or a pandemic, the result is often an organizational shift to defense. Every visionary should do this activity one or two times a year as a habit.
2. A key question for any visionary: What are the key activities you do that help you listen to: 1) Your team  2) Your customers 3) The general market? Your team needs you to help them hear things they are going to miss in their busyness.

What’s Next?

Should you need help from an experienced implementer, please don’t hesitate to reach out through my EOS page.