Imagine you could call on your own private think tank or brain trust of global talent to help you keep challenging projects on track or guide you through tricky leadership decisions.
How about the counsel of a woman who spent three months rowing solo across the Atlantic on how to maintain motivation every day?
Maybe you need to hear the wise words of a veteran US Navy SEAL on how to plan and prep for complex projects with challenging objectives?
Or perhaps a few practical tips on what leaders can learn about engaging and persuasive communication from digital marketing gurus like Jay Baer or Lee Odden?
There’s sound advice from 30 business leaders, adventurers, academics and futurists in a new book called Done Right: How Tomorrow’s Top Leaders Get Stuff Done, by Workfront CEO Alex Shootman.
The collective insight across the book spans everything from how to give work meaning — even mundane tasks — to whether leaders are measuring the things that really matter.
But there are three concepts that really stood out to me: commander’s intent as an organising principle, how questions around the best next action can help maintain direction and momentum, and the power of empathetic listening:
1.Commander’s Intent
US Navy SEAL Commander Mark McGinnis is a veteran of military operations around the globe and now advises businesses on how to improve the performance of managers and teams. What does Commander McGinnis describe as “the single most powerful leadership concept”? The answer is commander’s intent — a mechanism that gives every mission, campaign or project clarity of purpose. You, the leader, need to articulate the end goal.
In his interview for Done Right, Commander McGinnis says: “As a leader I’m going to communicate the purpose of the mission: what we’re trying to accomplish, the ‘WHY’ and what the battle space is going to look like when the gun smoke settles. I will also define our left and right lateral limits. I’m going to educate you to the highest possible level of understanding about that purpose and those limits.”
The leader sets the goal and the parameters set boundaries for what can and can’t be done. That might be resources, timeframe, or the potential to adapt a product or service to the circumstances.
But Commander McGinnis adds an important caveat: “How we accomplish it, I don’t really care. I’m going to get out of your way and let you figure out how we’re going to get there. You’re the expert.” In other words, commander’s intent is not about micromanagement; it’s about respecting the expertise within a team and giving them a chance to show what they can do and shine.
Commander’s intent acknowledges what is easy to overlook when you’re leading a team: you don’t need to have all the answers. You just need one clear answer: what you’re trying to achieve.
2. Best Next Actions (BNA)
The concept of best next actions is central to steering complex work to successful completion. Let me tell you a secret: it was also the working title of Alex’s book as he was writing it. It’s about a leader having a bias for action. Leaders have to be strategic and ideally creative too. But it’s essential that they focus on achieving things and completing things. Day-to-day, Alex advocates asking two questions to identify BNAs:
“What are we going to do next?”
“What’s the one thing we’re going to do within the next two weeks that will take us closer to a milestone?”
It’s not about considering multiple possibilities. It’s inviting a team to identify practical actions that need to be done now or next. Always thinking about the BNA is a neat way to prioritise work and always keep things focused on the ultimate goal.
3. Empathetic listening
The third key concept, empathetic listening, might sound like it runs counter to the other two. But it’s another vital attribute of any leader. If commander’s intent is about clarity of goal, and BNA is about prioritising action, empathetic listening is about being sure that a leader truly understands what they hear. And it’s about truly understanding the people leaders are working with and see things from their perspective.
In his interview for the book, Brian Carroll, founder of Markempa and author of the best-seller, Lead Generation for the Complex Sale, says that most leaders make the mistake of tuning in for about 18 seconds to what someone is saying to them. They’re always looking for a shortcut to making whatever decision needs to be made as quickly as possible. But tuning out quickly leads to misunderstandings. Key points gets lost. Opportunities are lost to “read” someone’s body language — their “non-verbal cues and microexpressions,” as Brian calls them — that can reveal a colleague’s or team’s mood and morale. He suggests that a far more effective leadership style is to “stop listening with the intent to reply, and start listening with the intent to understand.”
As a practical step. Brian suggests that leaders should get into the habit of asking a simple question to check they’ve understood correctly what they’ve been told: “So, you mean this …”
There’s an added reward for leaders who are empathetic listeners. As Dale Carnegie, author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, suggested, people are far more likely to listen to you if you listen to them. It’s a simple lesson: empathetic listening will pay off for leaders when they need to get their own message heard.
These are just three of the keynote concepts from Done Right; each chapter offers insight and actionable advice into a different challenge future leaders will face as they strive for exceptional performance and results. All too often, the conversation about future leadership is dominated by the question of how new technologies will create new ways of working and new efficiencies. It’s an important question without doubt. But Alex’s book is a timely reminder that the real challenge for leaders in the 21st century is get the very best performance from all of the people they are working with — whatever tools and technologies they are using.
