“You will not believe how long it takes to turn the supertanker,” Â Otellini recalls. “When you’re the third-line manager, you say ‘let’s go left’ and people move. When you are running a 100,000-person organization, it takes a long time for the back of the supertanker to catch up to the bridge.” Which was frustrating for him. “It means you have to repeat where you’re going and why a thousand times”
– From the Fast Company article on Intel CEO – Paul Otellini
I met with a national director with CCC last week and in the course of conversation he learned that I had never heard of my job description (listed here if you’re interested).
In his words: “I find it disturbing that you don’t know your job description.”
Obviously there’s a disconnect, a break down in communication, between HQ and the local level if I’m unaware of the 5 things I’m supposed to be about.
It made me wonder how many times I do that – assume that my team, that students understand what we’re about. How many times I assume that just because we’ve talked about something for months as a staff team that our students somehow magically know the new direction we are now heading in.
We so often forget to communicate – and to communicate in multiple, varied, repeated ways.
And as the quote above alluded to, the bigger your staff team gets or the larger your movement becomes, Â the harder it is to keep on course. I’ve found that the larger the movement becomes, communication is more strained because there is no longer a personal connection – there is less trust to grease the wheels of communication. You can no longer communicate to everyone at once. Because even though you’re speaking, they’re not listening (because of the lack of relational equity).
What do you do to repeat (in varied ways) where you’re going and why a thousand times? What are the primary channels you communicate the where/why thru – discipleship, small groups, weekly meeting . . . ?
photo courtesy of Terry Wha