Idea, Suggestion, Directive - How to Help Your Team Stay Focused

It's taken a number of years to realize this. And it took working with founders cut from a similar cloth to finally come to this realization. Looking back, there have been many moments in my University of YouTube, Business Degree that have hinted at this concept.

• Chris Do talking about how he prefers being a solo founder because he often makes decisions quickly and often gives a co-founder "whiplash".
• Jeff Bezos' famous thoughts on focusing on making a small number of high-quality decisions, rather than making thousands of decisions every day.
• Zach Perret talking about how he learned to express a level of "care" when telling his team what they can do

The lesson is that when you say something, people will just go and do it.

Whether you like it or not, when you're the leader, your words start to matter a lot more than you may initially realize. Even in environments where people are empowered and able to speak up, they are likely to trust, listen, and act.

In fact, when you hire excellent, high agency staff with a bias for action, they will hear what you've said and then run with it.

Which means, when you were simply brainstorming a "silly" idea that you yourself may not have even taken that seriously, your staff may have rotated the ship towards that direction.

It takes a very well seasoned staff member to hear what you've said and apply a level of doubt. And often, it requires that person to have worked with you long enough to get an understanding of how you are and how they should approach it. Last thing they may want is to incur some unnecessary CEO wrath.

And I see this happen with founders and their teams all the time. You may have also experienced some of these moments:

• A CEO drops a thought inside an engineering Slack group chat and everyone rotates to address it before a product manager can step in to realign priorities.
• A startup CEO dreams up a new (and very compelling) idea for a campaign or feature and the team is roaring to go on this new skunkworks project.
• A "but you said we were doing X last week" moment when a CEO has changed their mind the following week back to the original plan.

The thing is, it's because it's usually not a bad call. It's usually exciting, urgent, or important and they may have delivered it with a level of certainty or inspiring bravado that everyone is inclined to now do.

See this clip where the (narcissistic, problematic) Creative Director distracts his art team with yet another idea. The talented artist then executes on a proof of concept and has, unfortunately, won his entire team another sleepless night of extra work.

So what can you actually do about it?

Recently, I had a chance to flag down a CEO, founder, and friend that I've look up to. I told him how I was learning the weight of my words. And like a wise sage, he offered the suggestion to prefix everything with an "idea, suggestion, or directive".

• Idea: I don't care if you take this, I'm just saying things out loud. I want feedback into what you think about it.
• Suggestion: I have some level of confidence around this and it may help add some context to what you're thinking. But ultimately, you make the call.
• Directive: Do this. Probably do it now.

I've started to practice this where I can and it's honestly transformed how I lead.

So, directive: start doing this with your staff.