By Joni Peddie, CEO: Resilient People #BounceFoward™
Read your people before you read the strategy deck.
STRATEGY is 90% execution. And 90% of that execution is people. You already know this. We all do. It’s why we spend enormous amounts of time, energy and money putting our strategies together through workshops, offsites, decks refined until every arrow points the right way. But here’s the question worth sitting with: what do we actually do, week in and week out, about observing the people who are meant to execute all of it?
Because a strategy doesn’t fail on the PPT slides. It fails in the gap between what leadership plans and what the team actually executes.
Businesses are run by people and people only align with a strategy when they understand it and feel genuinely part of it. Yet as leaders, we plan, then spend half the year fighting fires and rewriting those plans because of macroeconomics, supply issues, new regulations – the list is endless. Somewhere in all that firefighting, the observing stops.
So, here’s what I think we need more of as leaders navigating a world of unprecedented change and turbulence: we need to be mindfully present and really observe who needs what? This isn’t a box-ticking exercise at your weekly check-in, where you ask everyone how they’re doing and half-listen to the answer. It’s observing the genuine differences in style and personality among your key players. (Using the Enneagram system can make this a lot easier.)
Being an inspiring, dynamic, change-fit leader means not just having the mental sharpness to read a market, but the same sharpness turned toward the humans standing in front of you.
We often forget that our people aren’t one uniform mass of “resources.” On any given team, we’ve probably got:
- The ones who need a two-minute nudge, not a lecture.
- The ones who need a clear boundary and something worth walking toward.
- The ones who need to be heard, listened to, and not necessarily helped. They’re often the verbal processors. They aren’t rambling, they’re thinking out loud, and once they’ve been heard, they get on with it.
- The quiet achievers who’ll never ask for recognition, but need it. If they aren’t recognised, they often quietly start looking elsewhere.
- Gallup’s research backs this up in a wonderfully unglamorous way: managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. Not the strategy deck. Not the org chart. The managers, and how well they actually see their people.
Here are five practical ways to start reading your people properly:
1. Observe before you plan
Ten minutes, no agenda. Notice who looks steady, who looks stretched, and who’s gone quiet, before you open the strategy doc.
2. Ask instead of assume
“Do you need a push, some space, or just an ear today?” is a two-second question that saves a week of misreading someone.
3. Name the boundaries (and the carrot) out loud
Boundaries without a reason to move toward feel like punishment. Say both parts.
4. Build recognition into the routine, not the review
Quiet achievers won’t ask. If you wait for the annual review to notice them, you’ve already waited too long.
5. Check your read against theirs
Ask your team, occasionally, whether what you think they need matches what they actually need. The gap between the two is where the real leadership happens.
I know relationships and trust don’t get built in one sitting. But the noticing can start today.
Who on your team needs what and have you actually asked them, or just assumed?
Build change-fit teams. #BounceForward™ together.
T: +27 82 490 9975
E: joni@resilientpeople.co.za
LinkedIn: Joni Peddie
