When leading teams, the obvious isn’t as obvious as you think

My daughter, Ivy, recently joined a swim club. As a former competitive swimmer, it’s been a delight to witness. Every time I take her to practice, I feel a wave of nostalgia that reminds me of all the many years I spent in the pool and all the many teammates I collected along the way. It excites me to think that she, too, will have her own experiences and life lessons, just as swimming taught me. But something peculiar struck me as I watched her practice: 45 minutes of their one-hour training was spent on the basics. Kick drills. Pull drills. All the essentials about swimming that we don’t think very much about, the foundational techniques that make for a good swimmer.

When I think about my time as a swimmer, I don’t remember that part very much—the boring basics. Yet, like Ivy, I most certainly spent an exorbitant amount of time developing those fundamentals in the early stages of my swim tenure, the parts of swimming that I took for granted, i.e., the obvious stuff. The same applies when it comes to our organizations; far too often, we take the obvious parts about leading people for granted. With the growing complexities of shepherding modern organizations, we tend to forget about the basics—the obvious stuff.

Purpose, mission, conviction

For instance, intuitively we know that people are more engaged when they feel connected to something with greater meaning, call it purpose or mission. I like to think of it as conviction. Regardless of the nomenclature, this meaning gives the organization a strategic North Star to guide its way and a reason for being that people can buy into, giving their labor more meaning.

However, many businesses rely on external incentives, like the carrot and stick of promotions, and superficial metrics like stock prices and productivity as the primary drivers of work motivation. But people want more from their organizations than the transactional exchange of labor for wages—a transaction that, in itself, seems unbalanced these days on account of burnout and quiet-cracking. No wonder workers in the United States are increasingly declining promotions on the job; “moving up the ladder” is no longer seen as the ultimate reward of work.

People want to belong. They want to feel safe. They want to feel appreciated. They want their labor to matter. This is all basic stuff, right? It’s obvious, and that’s the problem. The obvious nature of “the basics” can cause leaders to inadvertently ignore them. In doing so, they subsequently foster environments where people feel disconnected and detached from their work. And no one wants that.

Back to basics

So, what are we to do? Our conversation with Nadia Kokni, vice president of global brand marketing at Puma, for the latest episode of our podcast, From the Culture, provides a clear recommendation: Get back to the basics. Get back to the obvious stuff that isn’t so obvious until someone points it out to you. That is to say, we have to remind ourselves of all the things we inherently know but have forgotten along the way amid the onslaught of information life presents us with on a day-to-day basis. When the foundation begins to break down, so goes everything else.

Take music acts, for instance. When a band loses its way after a successful run of album releases, what do they do to rekindle their good fortune? They go back to basics. They reunite with the producers and songwriters from the first album. They go back to the studio where they first recorded. They try to summon the spirit that got them into music in the first place. They hearken back to all those things that got them where they are—the foundational things they likely took for granted on the road to their ascension.

Now that I’ve gotten back in the water as a fortysomething-year-old, attempting to stick to a New Year’s resolution to live a healthier life, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Ivy’s practices. During my morning workouts, I’m much more conscious of my stroke technique and foot placement while kicking, making adjustments here and there to be better. Despite all my years of swimming, I’m still working on the basics—and the same goes for how we think about our work.

When things get off course, you have to go back to basics. If we aim to improve how our organizations function, perhaps we should start with the deceptively simple things that we know but often forget. I know it’s obvious, but the obvious typically isn’t obvious until someone points it out to you. And that’s the point.

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