Don't Announce the New Direction. Lead the Team to It.

"Never lead with the change," Mike Dalton of Guided Innovation said near the end of his session at the PDMA summit in Atlanta this October. "You lead people to the change."

He was talking about something specific: getting leadership teams to accept limits on how many projects they run at once, which is a hard sell because it means saying no to good ideas. His approach is to get agreement on the problem first, then on the direction, and then let people find the holes in it themselves. The tool he's found works best for that isn't a slide deck. It's a simulation, where leaders play through what happens to their pipeline when they say yes to one project too many.

I think that line applies far beyond portfolio management. It describes something I see constantly in organizations: a direction that's told to people instead of built with them, which fails before anyone has done anything wrong.

Announcing a direction gets you compliance

Here's the usual version. A founder spends a few weeks thinking hard about where the company should go, maybe with the leadership team, maybe alone. They write it up, and on Monday they send it to everyone, or present it at an all-hands. It's a good direction. People nod. Six months later, the team is still making decisions the old way, and the founder can't understand why nobody's following the strategy.

It's easy to see why it happens. By the time the founder announces the direction, they've lived with it for weeks. They've weighed the alternatives, argued with themselves and gotten comfortable with the tradeoffs. The team is meeting it for the first time, in a single meeting, with none of that context. Announcing feels efficient, because the thinking is done. But it's only done for one person.

The direction was told, not built. A lot of us learned somewhere that you can write a vision and a strategy and then simply tell people what it is. That premise is misleading. Vision and mission and strategy aren't commands you give to a computer program. They're supposed to inspire people, give them direction and help them make decisions when you're not in the room, and they only do that if people have some skin in the game – if they feel it, not just know it.

Participation isn't a soft skill

This isn't a new finding. In 1948, Lester Coch and John French published a study from the Harwood textile factory in Virginia, where workers were frequently transferred to new jobs and output, morale and turnover all suffered with the changes. They tried changing jobs in different ways. One group was simply told about the change. Others were brought into planning it. The groups that participated recovered their productivity faster and showed far less hostility toward management, and the principle that came out of it has been in management textbooks ever since: resistance comes from the context of the change, and the way through it is participation, not imposition.

There's a psychological piece to it too. Researchers Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely called it the IKEA effect: people value things they helped build far more than identical things they didn't, and in their experiments people rated their own amateur creations about as highly as experts' work. A strategy the team helped write is, in a very real sense, worth more to them than a better one you hand over.

How I build direction with a team

So when I work with a team on its direction, I don't hand them a statement. I have them build it, and the whole first day of my workshop is spent on that.

It starts with ten minutes of silent writing, where everyone writes down their own work values, whatever they genuinely hold. Then people come up one at a time and share, and everything goes on the board. When several people wrote the same thing, we mark it with a plus for every echo, which surfaces what the group already shares. Then we do the same thing for the team, looking forward rather than back: what do we want this team to be and act like? Then the company, where I ask people to be realistic, because a team usually can't change the whole company.

With all of that on the board, we circle the words and phrases with the most agreement or the best discussion, and the vision gets written out of those circled words. Then the team works out the mission together. After a break, we define the statements properly and start on strategy, so the second day opens with the team developing the strategy themselves instead of receiving it.

Ten out of ten times, the team gets it and rallies behind it, because the vision is literally composed of words they said and agreed on. It's their values. I didn't have to sell it to them, because they already own it.

Leading isn't the same as leading questions

There's a trap in "lead people to the change," and it's assuming that means asking questions until people arrive at your answer. That works when people already have the concepts they need. It breaks down when the change requires seeing something they've never been able to see.

A team that's never thought in systems can't be questioned into thinking in systems. They don't know what they're missing, so no leading question lands. What works instead is drawing it: map the systems involved, show how they connect and draw the arrows of influence between them. That's usually where the light bulb goes on, and then you keep drawing it, over and over, until people start doing it themselves.

That's why Dalton's simulation works. He isn't asking leaders leading questions about pipeline bandwidth. He's letting them watch their own cash flow drop when they say yes to one extra project a quarter. Nobody has to be persuaded of something they just watched happen.

Dalton's order still applies

For a founder rolling out a new direction, I'd borrow his sequence almost exactly. Get agreement on the problem first, and don't rush it. If the team doesn't share the problem, nothing you propose will make sense to them. Then build the direction with them, using their words wherever you can. And then invite them to find the holes in it, out loud, before you commit. The holes they find are cheaper to fix now than after the roadmap is built on top of them. And when someone does find one, change the plan where everyone can see it. A team that watches its objections reshape the direction learns, faster than any speech could teach them, that the direction belongs to them.

For people who join later and didn't get to help build it, the job shifts to hiring. You can't give a new hire the experience of writing the vision, so the interview has to be about values, making sure they're aligned with what the team already holds.

A strategy the team built is one they'll defend when you're not in the room. A strategy they were told about is one they'll wait for you to enforce.