How To Synthesize The State Of Your Team and Inspire Confidence

Read Time: 3 minutes 21 seconds

Greetings from 35,000 feet!

A common mistake that leaders make which undermines their credibility is delivering a confusing synthesis about the state of their team.

Some will give a general summary that lacks richness and suggests they don't know what's really on. Others will dive deep into the details, which might hint that they can't separate the important from the unimportant. The worst culprit blends the two haphazardly, leaving the recipient at best confused and at worst alarmed.

Why alarmed?

Because our words betray our thinking.

And if you can't explain clearly how you're organizing your people to deliver on their goals successfully, chances are you aren't doing a very good job leading them actually to do it either.

So what are the ingredients to a confidence-inspiring synthesis?

• Structure

• Judgment

• Data

• Honesty

Let's take them one at a time.

Structure

If you weren’t a McKinsey consultant or haven’t heard of the Pyramid Principle and SCQA, you might as well start here. Putting these pieces together will serve you well in almost any circumstance.

For specifically telling the story of what’s happening on my team, I tend to lean on a systems-thinking framework, something I call the "Anything Factory."

I believe anything can be simply explained through the lens of a factory.

• What output is my factory designed to produce?

• Is it producing it at that desired quality, quantity, and cost?

• If not, what are the key problems preventing that output?

• Do I have a plan to solve those problems?

• Is that plan on track?

It follows a similar headline-key drivers-evidence setup, but answering those questions goes deeper inside the factory to show that I know what’s producing those outcomes.

Let’s try an example.

“Our sales team is tracking to meet our sales target for 2023. This is due to stronger-than-expected new sales offsetting slightly worse-than-expected customer retention. There are two problems contributing to our retention issue: 1) We unexpectedly lost our top customer success representative for Platinum accounts, and 2) The new software release was delayed by 1.5 months. We have promoted our top customer service rep to backfill the Platinum role and believe they’ll be fully up to speed in 3 weeks. The delayed release has now been deployed, and we’ve seen retention rates recover to forecasted levels since.”

While it might feel a bit structured, trust me that this little additional context is better than the headline alone or diving straight into the problems.