Raising the Bar

Moving from Impossible to Possible

by Jim Solomon with Bruce LaRue

“You never know how far you can reach until you stretch.” 

— Steve Finkelstein

Raising the Bar

Are you limiting your organization to what you as a leader already know? Are you asking questions as well as providing the answers? Is the bar set at a level that you can already achieve?

For organizations to improve, leaders must set a direction that will stretch them. This leads to greater individual and team motivation, engagement, and ownership. According to  researcher, executive advisor, and best-selling author Liz Wiseman, “organizations are stronger and smarter when challenged.” When leaders and teams are limited to what they know, they are limited to achieve just that, what they already know.” At best this leads to maintaining the status quo.

We’ve found that the leaders Wiseman describes as “multipliers” have many of the same characteristics to what we have coined as the Integrator Leader. Wiseman describes a multiplier as those who “serve as the challenger, by setting the direction – they use what they know to stretch and challenge their team, not limit them. They don’t limit their team to what they themselves know but push their team beyond this by asking questions and providing a stretch.”

Steve Finkelstein suggests that “It is the leader’s responsibility to support the continued growth and development of the team, provide them the support and self-confidence to stretch, and challenge them to try new things. Raising the bar provides an opportunity to assess their job responsibilities and identify the urgent from the important, the value versus the non-value. It forces employees to focus on the highest priorities.”

Stretch Goals

If you’re the kind of person who consistently hits 100% of your goals, ask yourself—are you challenging yourself enough? You can only achieve true progress if you set at least a few goals outside of your comfort zone. These are called stretch goals.

Stretch goals should be deliberately ambitious to push you and your organization beyond its norm. They should move your team to higher attainable levels than where you operate today, enriching individuals, improving team performance, and achieving greater outcomes. Stretch goals should be tailored to fit the team. Moving outside their comfort zone isn’t for all, but for those successful teams who want to achieve more, this is for them. For other teams who may be building, but not quite at their optimum, this can be the boost they need to get them to where they want to be.

Besides improved overall performance, to include innovation, productivity, commitment, and drive, leaders who inspire their team with stretch goals raise the potential for greater success in today’s highly competitive landscape, no matter the sector.

Helping your team to visualize the outcome of these goals may require teaching them to see in new ways.  The first step in this is to set a clear direction.

Set the Direction

Leaders do not need to have all the answers. If this was the case, why have your team? And when the leader doesn’t know the answer, it’s not up to her to find it. The leader does not have to be the smartest one in the room, but rather should provide their team direction and know how to bring out the best in them, how to energize them to find the answer, to develop new and innovative approaches, and to see things in new ways.

“Once a leader accepts that they don’t need to provide the answers to all of the questions, they are freed to ask bigger and more provocative, and more interesting questions. They can pursue things they don’t know how to do”, advises Wiseman.

It’s not the leader’s role to tell others what to do, a leader’s role is to ask. They set an azimuth and serve as a resource for their team, while influencing and integrating.

Leaders should ask bold questions, then provide assumptions and ask their team if these assumptions are even correct. Leaders must create a culture of feedback where questioning is not only acceptable but is rather expected. They encourage the team to look for logic flaws, vulnerabilities, and outdated assumptions. They ask the team who else is needed to make this most successful. They encourage the team to think and operate cross-functionally to enrich the thinking and to develop systems that can ultimately support organizational goals.

Liz suggests that people and their team become smarter and stronger when challenged. She says as they embrace challenge, their intellect and confidence grow, and then “the impossible begins to look possible.”

Prison of the Known

If leaders are responsible for asking the question as well as finding the answers, Liz says that “leaders will limit themselves to asking questions they already know the answer to”.

To take an idea from concept to reality, leaders must help their team see things as they could be rather than how they are. This includes moving from doing things “because that’s the way we’ve always done it”, to imagining a future with fresh new ideas. This essentially helps their team escape the shackles of their past by developing a new vision for the future with a compelling rationale as to why change is both necessary and desirable.

To focus the attention of your team on the future, you must first guide them out of the prison of the known. This prison is where our individual favored ways of seeing become ways of not seeing. If we are not careful, we see our future in terms of the past.

We all exist to some extent inside a prison of our own making. The walls of our prison cell can best be thought of as our basic assumptions. To become an Integrator Leader, you must first become self-aware, meaning that you clearly perceive your own basic assumptions and learn to consciously modify them where necessary. Skilled leaders can comprehend multiple points of view without being tied to any of them. This is the difference between “assumptions that hold us” and “assumptions we hold”.

In this regard, we do not want our standard operating procedures to become substitutes for thinking and straitjackets that limit our ability to think and act creatively. We need to stay out of the prison of the known by continually looking for new and better ways to meet our mission. Rather than focusing on following a process, the attention must be on the outcome we achieve.

Integrator Leader Reflections

• Are you asking your team questions that you can already answer?
• Do you expect your team to challenge assumptions?
• Have you helped your team to escape their “shackles” breaking out of the “prison of the known”?

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