One of the biggest challenges and the biggest opportunities in organizations is dealing with people. The conundrum is that people have free will. They choose what they want to believe and only they can choose to what they will give their energy, drive, passion and commitment….and as a leader you don’t have any control over that.

In a traditional, hierarchical management system what you have is the illusion of control. In the end, you can coerce people to do certain things –ultimately through the threat of being fired…but that is not the same thing as commitment. Real power comes from people who are committed to the goals of the organization because they have decided to do so of their own free will – they are “all in”.

Will you get everyone to commit? In short “no”… but that is OK because you don’t need everyone. However, your top leaders and their top leaders do need to be all in. So what is the cornerstone of building to that?

Of course there are several pieces to solving this puzzle and include trust, consistency and demonstrated behavior – they all play a factor. What we are going to explore in this post is the concept of having a real voice.

Typically, goals are delivered down from on-high. “Here are your targets – go get them”. Top leaders will argue – we really think it through, we debate, and we are realistic about what the business needs and what is expected. However, there is rarely a real conversation with the operational leaders to actually change the goals and therefore the trajectory of the organization. Remember – it is the operational leaders who have to actually achieve the results.

Sometimes growth will come at the expense of required investment of infrastructure, methodology development, or systems required for the next stage of growth. The people who will have to actually implement solutions to customers never get a chance to voice the trade-offs especially in terms of the human impact. What you rarely, if ever hear, someone say is:

“Yes we can make the numbers but we will also damage the home life and personal lives of our employees and will see significantly higher attrition in 18 months – but we will hit this year’s numbers”

If you want someone all in they have to be able to push, challenge, contradict…everything…in a safe space. That doesn’t mean they get what they want but they have an opportunity to challenge, honestly, what the organization is doing and how that will play out.

If you set goals in this fashion, and get leaders comfortable really speaking the truth and really connecting the dots, you will typically get a committed team focusing on goals they believe they can really hit…and then they will often outperform. The reason for the outperformance:

When you feel respected and when you feel heard…. honestly – you will bring more of yourself to the work and the combined energy is powerful.

What is crucial for the top leadership to understand is that this can’t be a check the box exercise – you have to mean it. You must, at a deeply felt level, really believe in and want your team’s commitment and be patient and focused on uncovering the truth until the resonance is achieved.

This brings us back to the overall theme of this blog and this approach. Top leaders must do their inner work and really understand what they truly believe – not just what they think they believe. People feel before they think. Your team will instinctively pick up the difference between what you say and what you actually believe. It is only when there is a coherence between what you say and what you do that committed goal setting and solid performance can become a consistent reality.