You often spot it sitting quietly in a meeting as you listen to others.  It starts well, and your encouraged.  But it doesn’t come together.  The discussion loses focus, drifts somewhere else, and now you must decide whether to step in to bring it back on track.  

You can have a clear strategy with an aligned leadership team and still see misalignment.  Alignment doesn’t break down because people disagree.  It breaks down because they’re working from different interpretations of the same results.  This is where leaders should step up.

Teams don’t set out to pull in different directions. You’ve set them up with a clear direction and even translated that into the specific work of the teams in your business. They’re working hard and making reasonable decisions for their remit.   

But then it happens and you start to sense a gradual drift in execution.  Pockets of results and behaviour start to feel off. And then it begins to accumulate.  

Each team sees results and reads the feedback it’s giving them. They may be doing this well. But if left to only tell the story of their team, it’s incomplete.  What’s missing is the interpretation. Interpretation is about giving it greater meaning by understanding the consequences of the result.  

Interpretation looks for consequences through the different frames of your strategy.  It looks for the impact to the customer and the business.  Is this something we want to keep doing, stop or adjust?  Together, this gives us the ‘so what’ of the result.

This is what leaders guide.  More fundamental than setting the direction, it’s about deciding how the business interprets what it sees.  The responsibility is to deliver an integrated and holistic view of the business.  Is the story of this business being told as we want it to be?  The only measure of your success is not in the clarity you give, but the clarity you get back. That’s the spot where leaders have no choice but to sit, because it’s a place our teams are unable to occupy as they execute their specific responsibilities. 

I worked with a founder who invested considerable time building an understanding across the whole team of the vision, direction and priorities.  We had clarity, engagement and actual inspiration. Then we came to the phase where everyone applies the direction to their own work.  The next thing I knew, my client tells me with frustration in his voice, “but I’ve said this so many times already.” 

Each time you explain what the feedback means at the next layer, you are adding leadership value to your people.  Your real work as leader is taking the work each person does and showing what it means for the business.

Leaders don’t just set direction, nor just review results.  They define what both means.  

This thinking builds on my earlier article, The Drift You Don’t See.