The Four Ways Most Teams Fail
Nearly 60 years ago, NASA achieved the seemingly impossible goal of landing a person on the moon and bringing them safely home. It was a task that required the cooperation of thousands of scientists, physicists, engineers, aviators, administrators and more. It’s as lofty an accomplishment as humanity has ever had.
So why do so many organizations struggle to achieve their goals? It can’t be because the goal is too ambitious. Instead, most teams fail because they don’t have a reliable system for execution. Goals and priorities drift, and people get busy. It all adds up to failure.
More specifically, most companies and organizations today suffer from four major struggles that cause them to miss out on their full potential.
- Choppy Seas
Imagine you and the people in your company are out on a little boat in a big ocean. The waters are rough and the market is changing fast — but not everybody in your little boat is rowing in the same direction. In fact, your two or three strongest leaders might be rowing like mad in two or three completely different directions. Others on the boat are looking at the disconnect and wondering if they can even help. This lack of vision and cohesion can literally steer teams in the wrong direction.
2. Overload
In small businesses, there might be one person charged with leading both sales and marketing. This person is working hard, but it’s near impossible to keep everything going strong simultaneously. Or, possibly in larger teams, someone feels a lot of pressure to get results. They’ve tried to delegate, but they haven’t been able to get what they need from the rest of the team so they end up doing things themselves.
Either way, the weight of everything becomes too much. Worse, they’re in so deep that it’s hard to keep leading at a high level.
3. Reactivity
People and teams like to try new tactics, read about the latest trends, integrate the latest tech tools, etc. But inboxes and social feeds are full of even more ideas they haven’t tried. As soon as they roll out one thing, they start feeling anxious about ten other things they aren’t doing. Chasing shiny objects, or the lack of a common focus and discipline, can lead to spending time and effort on things that don’t achieve core objectives.
4. Flying Blind
Sometimes people and teams make decisions based on gut, opinions, or feelings. Other times, they struggle to measure and track what matters most because they either don’t have data or (more often) they’re absolutely drowning in data. They have pages of reports chock full of metrics from a variety of sources and it’s just a mess.
When finding the insights that teams need to be successful feels like they’re searching for a needle in a haystack, it starts to feel like their best bet is to ignore the dashboards and just fly the plane based on gut. This seems like a good idea until the storms roll in or the plane runs out of fuel or they realize they’ve been pointed in the wrong direction altogether.
Instead of succumbing to these struggles, we need leaders who can leverage their skills, instincts, and experience to point our communities and industries in the right direction and then lead the best way forward. These are exactly the kinds of scenarios in which our Wayfinder Framework delivers optimal results. I encourage you to read more about it – and become the kind of trusted guide your organization needs to be successful.
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Be the Wayfinder, by marketing agency founder and CEO Jeremy Harrison, contains a wealth of information about the Wayfinder Framework and how to master it, adapting to change, using the latest technology to be successful, how to overcome common struggles and much more. It also will help you develop these skills through first-hand, real-world exercises. Go to https://www.jeremyharrison.com/book/ to purchase and/or download your copy.