If you’re leading a team, there is only what the team has accomplished. There is no “I” that has been done. Everyone contributed in some fashion – whether freeing you up to do that work, doing the leg work for that work, taking on extra bugs so you could focus, or not disturbing you while you did all that work. They might not have banged out all the code, but what they did do is…
When the team knows the play, they know what to do without even thinking about it. If one person changes the play without letting the rest of the team know, the team is lost and doesn’t know what to do. Changing the play is good, but if you’re changing it all the time and not telling everyone, you’re not running a play, you’re simply running wild.
In every group or team, there are a set of leaders, we think they are the ones with the titles attached to their names, but they many times they are not. In these cases, you are going to have to hunt them out and find them. They might not know they’re the leaders either, they might resist at first and hold back, that’s good, that’s how it starts and that’s where you work with them…
If you want your team to change, you will need to lead that change. You will need to live that change before you ask them to do it. You will need to embrace it. Change doesn’t happen overnight, but it also doesn’t happen when you are not committed to seeing it through.
When the house is on fire and the team is sweeping floors, they are working on the wrong thing. Instead of figuring out how to put the fire out (the hard thing), they are working on the thing that makes them feel comfortable (the easy thing), safe and secure. The problem is, the floors don’t need to be swept because the house is burning and will eventually burn down because we didn’t stop the fire…