“Share with people the wonders of the ocean, they will build the boat.”

As leaders we are often time conscious and project driven. We delegate responsibilities to our team members, we assign specific tasks to those we know we can count on and we recognize that we are the ultimately responsible for the quality of their work.

What if we coupled inspiration with delegation? What if we shared our reasoning along with assignments? What if we tied the smallest duties to mission, every task to vision and our trust to accomplish the job to the personal worth of a team member? How effective would our teams, companies, organizations become?

This shift in leadership would take our influence to an entire new level with our team members. There is no doubt in my mind that it would require a huge amount of work, intentional thought and shifting of our own mental processes.

Here how:  Fill your mind with positivity, there can be no room for negativity in this mental shift. Think about each of your team members that directly report to you and their responsibilities. Write out how what they do matters, impacts the mission and the logic of why they are serving in the position they currently have. Do this with them regularly, do it in sit down meetings, do it as you walk slowly through the room, discover those ‘teaching’ moments and remind them why they matter.

The need for accountability, time sheets and governance is all but gone in our shop. The team members have responded to the ‘bigness’ and ‘importance’ of the mission. They hold one another accountable, they inspire one another to press on, they support one another when some project goes off the rails.

Tying who we are as a work culture, what we do every day and the importance of our work to the people who are actually doing the work, only makes logical sense. Defining reality may be the first responsibility of leadership, but ‘connecting the dots’ from the ‘who’ to the ‘what’ to the ‘why’ is a close second.