In her April 4 “Your Best Next Move” video, Bobbie LaPorte covers the second consideration when you are dealing with an “existential curveball” and unsure about what’s coming next: building strong relationships with your boss and your peers. You need to fight the urge to just hunker down and go it alone. Instead, consider it part of your job to include others as you make a plan to move forward. You might be surprised at how helpful that can be to you—and to them.
Your Best Next Move: What to do When Goals Are a Moving Target
Hi everyone, Bobbie LaPorte here again with my weekly leadership tip for your Best Next Move, where I help you see continuing curveballs as an opportunity. We’re done reacting to them, or pausing, waiting for a new kind certainty to return. This year I will help you actively use your personal agency to accelerate what you want to accomplish in 2022.
In last week’s VLOG, I introduced the idea of an “existential curveball”, that big “what now” uncertainty that seems to persistently hang over you.
If you work in a hyper-growth, fast-changing environment like many of today’s leaders, you probably recognize that feeling. And for many of you, that often means that the critical work of leaders – establishing a vision, setting strategy and bringing people along can be very challenging – since the end goal is often a moving target.
I also shared that I believe there are three things you need to consider to keep making progress and adding value; to counteract those little curveballs of doubt that keep pinging you in the face of kind of vague uncertainty.
Last week I covered the first consideration: how you lead your team. This week we will cover the second one: the critical importance of building boss and peer relationships as you work to move your agenda forward.
In today’s uncertain world, many leaders understandably lack confidence, and when that happens, we tend to hunker down, to take a go-it-alone mentality for fear of people will find out we really don’t have a plan. Like “maybe if I just keep my head down everything will be fine” type of thinking.
But this is exactly the opposite of what you should do.
Even while your plan is clearly a work-in-progress, you need to share your plan and thinking with your boss and key peers/stakeholders to get their input; to show that you have confidence (even if you don’t really feel it) in where you are headed. Remember – it’s about the direction, not the destination.
Here’s my tip when goals are a moving target:
Have a somewhat formal outline of your plan and make it part of your job to include others in your thinking, to understand how what you are planning possibly impacts their success. They are also likely to have visibility into what’s coming/changing in other areas of the organization that you do not – things that may impact your plan – so you can adapt and adjust.
Finally, how you “sell” your ideas, how you promote yourself and your team is an important part of your leadership focus in a changing dynamic environment.
That’s my tip for this week. I’ll cover the third and final consideration in next week’s tip.
In the meantime, more help on using your personal agency to make uncertainty a part of your success strategy for 2022 – my new leadership book, “When the Curveballs Keep Coming: A Leadership Playbook for an Uncertain World”, and my new online course – “Leading Through Uncertainty.”