Are you leading from reality?

Sugarcoating reality undermines momentum.

THINK ON IT: Are you leading from reality?

This week’s question is a challenging one: Are you leading from reality?

Pushing for an accurate, unabashed, view of reality from our team is one of the most important—and often neglected—tasks of a strategic leader.

You can have a strategic goal and a plan to get there—but if your team thinks everything is just fine as it is, there won’t be any urgency to meet that goal. If they portray right now as better than it is, they wipe away some of that strategic tension you’ve worked hard to build. 

Remember, strategic tension is what drives your organization to achieve great things. Don't let your team diminish its power by "painting a better picture." 

Or even worse: don't paint it for them. Don’t sugarcoat your organization’s flaws or knowingly underestimate the effort an initiative might take. Don’t be tempted to brush off criticism from within or from those outside of your organization. 

“It’s not that bad.” 

“It won’t take that long.”

“We gotta make it work. We’ve invested so much already.” 

“I don’t think that’s a problem at all.” 

Those sentences and others like them can be blinders for leaders that don’t want to see their organization for what it really is. Since they can’t see what’s right in front of them, they can’t commit to doing the hard work to take their organization where it needs to go. 

Reality is your friend. It provides an accurate assessment of where your organization is, even if that reality is hard to see. 

The beauty of a hard reality is that it inspires us to move beyond it.

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