I also didn’t appreciate that if you ask ten questions and make ten suggestions, people may take them less seriously, even if they’re all equally good. If you have only two issues or questions, people will take your two more seriously than they may take any of your ten. During my first hundred days in the Harvard presidency, I could have had things I identified as success and could have signaled that it was a new day without dissipating as much goodwill capital, if I had been smarter.” - Lawrence Summers.

With his approach, there was a constructive, always-moving-forward element to this discussion, with no looking back. So the headset was, we had to figure this out, we had to go forward, and it didn’t matter who had put the plan before.” - Jim McNerney.

Read recognized the critical point that even if the organization had the wrong priorities, he had to be accepted and fit into the culture before he could start transforming it. “I think I was right in very quickly making some visible changes to the national office to bring spending and staffing into alignment with its means,” he says. “There were a couple of people here who had been in place for a long time and needed a change. Their departure reinforced the message that changes in Outward Bound were needed and would start here.

“Decentralized organizations like ours generally don’t react well to directives,” Read adds. “It’s more of a cat-herding exercise than command and control. I went to business school to learn how to keep the club in the closet until needed. In this job, there’s no club and no closet that I can locate, so it’s more a matter of organizing the data to make visible what the problems are, so the people who have the authority have no resources but to face up to the real issues. In this kind of culture, expressing the facts with data succinctly can drive action.

High-performing professional thrive on this kind of information and context so that they can understand how their own responsibilities fit into the border progress of the organization. It also creates a productive way to solicit feedback from your team.

If your people don’t know what the direction is, they won’t know where to go. The result: Energy dissipates, momentum slows, morale plummets, and the company drifts. It’s not a pretty picture. Making sure everyone sees the same picture and then understands what that picture means, Parson says, requires “more contact with people, more opportunities to meet them, and more communication.