There's a huge difference between telling a team what to do and getting them to understand what they're trying to achieve.
A few years ago I was leading a team that was trying to automate an important part of how the company operated. From the outside it looked like a fairly technical problem, but in practice it was a lot more organizational. There were different areas with different goals, people defending their territory, incentives that weren't always aligned with what was best for the company, and discussions that looked technical on the surface but in the end weren't that technical at all.
At some point we put together a huge roadmap with everything we thought we needed to build. We presented it.
"We don't need this."
"Not this way."
"There are more important things."
"Let's not get into that yet."
"You're thinking too far ahead."
Some of the criticism was valid. Some of it had more to do with different priorities. But after a lot of discussion inside the team we reached a conclusion: we were still convinced there was a direction worth exploring, even if it wasn't yet a priority everyone shared.
The problem was that this discussion wasn't going to happen once. It was going to happen every week, in different meetings, with different people, and most of the time without me in the room. If every time someone pushed back the answer had to come out of my head, we weren't going anywhere.
So we did something that, looking back, I think was what changed the way that team worked more than anything else. We stopped talking only about tickets, milestones and deliverables and started talking about the game we were playing.
- What the problem we actually wanted to solve was.
- Why certain decisions moved us closer to it or further from it.
- What constraints we had.
- Where we couldn't afford to fail.
- Where we could push our vision and where we had to adapt.
- And what our thesis was about how that operation had to work in the future.
The team knew the whole context. Not just "what had to be done", but why we believed it was worth doing.
And that's when the magic happened: I no longer needed to push every initiative.
It happened often without me. Someone on the team would walk into a meeting I wasn't even attending, another area would ask for a quick fix to get through the week, and that person would explain why it would leave us worse off three months later and propose something else. They were exactly the decisions I would have made, and most of the time I found out afterwards.
People started defending that direction on their own and finding opportunities to move forward.
We had built a shared narrative: we're here, we want to get there, these are the forces at play and we believe this is the path.
That's where I learned that a big part of leading is doing exactly that. We often talk about giving context as if it were simply sharing more information, and it's actually quite a bit more than that. Giving context is helping someone understand what game they're playing.
Giving real context means also sharing what you'd rather not tell. That we weren't the company's priority. That there was politics involved. That our thesis could be wrong. Most of the time we give a filtered version, the nice one, the one that doesn't raise hard questions. The problem is that a team that only gets the nice version can't make real decisions, because it's missing exactly the facts that make a decision hard.
Because when a person only knows the task, they can execute well. When they understand the goal, they can make decisions. But when they also understand the tensions, the history, the constraints and why that goal matters, they can start to feel it as their own.
That team didn't move because we explained the task better. It moved because we stopped telling them only the task.
If you want someone to play the game with you, first they have to be able to understand it.