Of course there are times when you don’t know what you don’t know.

The trick is to recognise the feeling – when you’re out of your depth, out of your experience, seeing things you don’t recognise, working with luck and blind faith, floundering not only with the terminology but with the concepts that drive it, smiling or frowning when you’re not sure why.

Recognise you’re deep in the woods with no path to follow.

Recognise the feeling and do something with it.

Before the next step: put edges around the problem and shrink it to size. If you’re relaxed about timescales, read a book (or ten), catch some training, do the research. If you’re in a hurry or not a book learner, call for help.

Whatever your method, find some expert knowledge and tap it for the good stuff.

Skippy strategy: When you don’t know, find some help.

Let’s say there are two kinds of people.

One is the kind that’s inclusive.

They may have idiosyncrasies and peccadilloes – the things that make them them – but at their centre, they’re interested in going on a journey in the company of others. They share, they listen, they pinball their way from the thoughts that are entirely in their own head to a collective and coherent hive mind with their team.

The other kind is exclusive.

Allowing for their own set of individualities and distinctiveness, deep down inside they’re a one-man-band. They believe in their own world view, their personal vision, their singular understanding of the one truth. When they engage, it’s often only to prove they are right or to understand where you are wrong.

They (you) may be right, but teams get more done than solo-artists.

Skippy strategy: When you’re building a team, build it with team players.

There’re two sides.

The headline side, you set the agenda: you prioritise the big things and bring everyone to the same page and point everyone in the same direction. Of course, your day-to-day agenda mixes with the corporate, your personal priorities fit the organisations priorities and you emphasise thing that show everyone else where their emphasis should be. Of course.

The other side: you’re the dust buster: you blow through obstacles, make connections, you let Slot B know that Tab A is coming over, and sometimes you even get involved in driving them together.

It’s the unglamorous side of running the agenda.

The side that says … we’re all working on the same goals and if anyone is struggling to get cut-through, if anyone is failing to get attention and make the necessary connections, then I’m here to break down the barriers.

Skippy strategy: Find the blockers and make the connections. 

It’s a reasonable assumption that everyone on your team needs to do good work.

It’s also a half-reasonable assumption that they know the conditions they need to do good work.

Their personal amalgam of: security, interest in the work itself, a great team around them, clear direction, enough autonomy to get on with things, a belief in the mission and their contribution towards it, and to be recognised non financially (and financially) when they do, indeed, do good work.

If you ask them right, it’s also likely they can tell you what’s in the way – generally, specifically, structurally, personally – of them doing good work.

Blowing past the occasional interpersonal, erm, friction, it’s entirely likely that when they tell you this stuff, they’re pretty much on the money.

Your job is simple-not-easy: listen, enhance the good conditions, remove the blockers.

Skippy strategy: If only you knew how to make a difference. Oh!

At one extreme, we run gung-ho into the fray.

We know where North is so let’s get on with it, no planning needed – and we also know we’ll spend most of our time thrashing around in the undergrowth trying to work out where we are.

At the other extreme, we’d drill-down to ever greater levels of detail until we know and have mapped every-single-tiny-weeny step of the way. It will be the best prediction ever written – and we also know that it won’t survive first contact.

In the pragmatic middle, enough of a plan to be clear, and no more.

A lumpy plan.

We’ve worked out the objective and the major hurdles and milestones we’ll pass if we’re to get where we’re heading. It’s the bones of a plan. An outline. And a bit more detail at the front end.

Now what? Adjust-along.

Skippy strategy: Plan enough so you know the plan.

When dealing with another organisation – buy side, sell side or partner – we like to know the agenda, where we stand, and what’s scheduled to happen next.

When dealing with our boss – or their boss, or their boss’s boss – we like to know the agenda, where we stand, and what’s scheduled to happen next.

When dealing with our team – inside the organisation or with outsiders – we like to know the agenda, where we stand, and what’s scheduled to happen next.

So it’s no surprise that when they deal with us, our team, colleagues and external organisation all like to know the agenda, where we stand, and what’s scheduled to happen next.

Maybe it’s a comfort thing, maybe it’s so we can all coordinate our actions and manage our expectations … maybe it’s just polite.

Skippy strategy: Be as clear as possible – the agenda, where we stand, and what’s scheduled to happen next.

It’s extremely compelling to believe that every tactic takes us one step closer to our strategic imperatives.

And tactics themselves are extremely compelling – compelling in the sense that they urge attention, compelling in that we’re drawn towards them.

What’s not so compelling … evidence that those tactics do indeed take us where we want to go.

Just look back at the busy-ness of your week. How much of what you’ve done is tactical manoeuvring in service of the week itself, and how much genuinely moves the stick even a half degree in the direction of your transformation goals.

Not so much, right?

We absolutely have to deal with the reality of the day-to-day, but we need to have the discipline to not let it overwhelm the strategic swings we’ve set our year on. At least, not every day.

Skippy strategy: Make room in the tactics and allow the strategy to breathe.

One of life’s greatest frustrations is waiting for other people to do the things they’ve agreed to do. Some things just take time, some things are hard, sometimes there’s a delay because someone in the chain is blocked for entirely reasonable reasons. OK. Sometimes it’s a lack of attention, or available time, or prioritisation, or just plain laziness. Either way, you’re left dangling.

And dangling …

ain’t …

…

comfortable.

So you have choices.

Follow up, absolutely.

Volunteer to help, maybe.

Let the frustration get the better of you, never.

When things aren’t rolling and it’s out of your control, the only thing to do it take action.

No moaning. No venting. No anger.

Just get on with something else, something you can control – like following up, like volunteering, like moving on to the next thing on your list.

Skippy strategy: Don’t waste time or energy on the things you can’t control.

When you ask someone to do something for you, you either hand over a step-by-step they should follow to do things exactly as you want, or you delegate the authority so they have the freedom to do it the way they want.

Sure, you can talk them through your thinking, your normal practice, give recommendations, but after that point – unless you’re an over-the-shoulder micro-manager or they’re inclined to ask for help – they should pretty much be off and running.

Assuming you’ve chosen your help wisely, all should be good with the world.

What happens next?

You could get on with the rest of your day/month/year and assume everything went as well as you hoped. Or you could ask, holding them accountable to the instruction or the outcome. 

Living on assumptions means you probably don’t care, accountability means you do.

Skippy strategy: If you care, you should ask.

Imagine an organisation entirely without order or management. In this world, everybody knows what the organisation is about and everyone makes an entirely personal decision about what they’ll do and when they’ll do it to achieve the goal. Not so much a self managed team as a self determining collection of individuals.

What’s your prediction?

Mine?

There will be good days and bad days but that even on the best of days the whole will be less than the sum.

Not because people aren’t amazing and shiny, but because organisations exist to do things together that they couldn’t do apart.

It takes teamwork.

It takes coordination.

Beyond a certain size, it takes structure.

To achieve consistency, it takes process.

The managers job: to drag a magnet through the randomness, to get everyone pointing in the same direction and exerting their force together.

Skippy strategy: Drag a magnet through it.