Simple

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

Steve Jobs

To lead a team successfully requires you to be conscious of the input that each member of the team can offer.

Every member of the team will come with their own expertise and experience. These shape their decision-making and let them find unique solutions.

On the flip side, designing a plan with your team will likely result with at least as many variations of that plan, as number of people on the team. Even writing this sentence sounds complex.

Complexity is a killer for good communication and successful teamwork.

But how does a leader value the uniqueness of each team member, where possible incorporate their input and still end up with a simple plan to follow?

First of all it is re-assuring to know that most plans will go through different phases. We start out with the problem we want to solve, we gather all the info, we assemble all the different ways of accomplishing the mission and then we need to simplify. We diverge and then we converge.

The solution to how we simplify a set of complex ideas often reminds me of a piece of advice that I got from a professor back during my Undergraduate degree.

When you write an academic paper, you often start off with a simple idea and often you know already what you want your paper to proof. Academic writing requires the researcher to provide an accurate context and background of where your paper sits with current findings in your area. Reading relevant papers to include in your research ends up providing a vast amount of interesting discoveries which often pull you away from your initial simple idea. I remember starting to read up on fiscal policies for the Eurozone but then end up engrossed in a fascinating paper on the Revolutionary War. Really cool stuff, but nothing to do with my initial idea.

So what did my professor tell us to do?

Write the main idea of your paper in as few words as possible on a post-it and stick it next to your screen. Then, every time you open a new potential reference as well as when you sit down to write your paper, check the post-it. Does your current work match up with the intention of your paper?

How does this relate to business leadership?

Use your mission statement, the purpose of your company, as that post-it. When you have your complex plan, look at your strategic purpose. Which variation of your plan adheres to that mission the closest? Which one uses the language of your mission statement? That is the one you should go with. This often requires getting rid of really good ideas for your plan. But if the plan ends up too complex, no one will know what it is that they should do.

Simple means Success.

Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash