Fill The Vacuum! - Communicate Your Vision - Chapter 1

Summary

Podcast Summary: Manager Tools — "Fill The Vacuum! Communicate Your Vision - Chapter 1"

Date: April 20, 2026
Hosts: Sarah and Mark

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Episode Overview

This episode of Manager Tools centers on one of the most fundamental — and commonly neglected — management challenges: what to do when there’s a void of higher-level communication or clear organizational strategy. Sarah and Mark outline how frontline and middle managers can (and must) "fill the vacuum" with their own vision and communication to align and motivate their teams, even in the absence of complete guidance from above.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Recognizing the Communication Void

• Many managers operate without clear direction from higher-ups.
• Lack of strategic communication is the norm, not the exception.
• Managers at every level experience the frustration of "unconnected deliverables" and projects seemingly unrelated to broader goals.

“If your folks say they don’t know what’s going on strategically, operationally, that is as a manager, your fault.”
— Sarah (00:33)

“There’s a vacuum of information about what the company, what the division, even sometimes with vice presidents or senior directors or something like that, even what the departments are doing.”
— Mark (01:58)

2. Filling the Void: Your Responsibility

• Managers must adopt ownership of communicating strategy, even if it means creating or inferring it themselves.
• Do not wait or complain about a lack of direction—fill that vacuum decisively.

“If you and your team don’t know what your corporate or division strategy is, that is your fault. And it sounds harsh.”
— Sarah (07:07)

“It’s responsible, not fault… The lacking clear guidance from above means you can set your own vision, your own strategy, doing your best to keep it in line with what you understand.”
— Mark and Sarah (07:31)

Addressing Cynicism and Risk

• There is risk in guessing incorrectly what upper management wants—but there’s also risk in doing nothing.
• Even top executives can be wrong 50% of the time; what matters is choosing, executing, and adjusting.

“A good strategy violently executed today always beats a perfect strategy delivered next week.”
— Mark quoting Patton (11:45)

3. Outlining Your Team Vision and Culture

• Don’t worry about crafting the perfect mission statement — start simple; iterate.
• Consider what kind of team and culture you want. What do you want your team known for? Timeliness, communication, performance?

"You don’t have to figure out the corporate strategy. If they don’t give it to you, just decide."
— Mark (15:59)

• Challenge outdated or pointless work (e.g., legacy reports no one reads) and redirect effort toward your own team's goals.

“What reports are you sending that you’re pretty sure no one’s reading?”
— Sarah (17:03)

“Get in trouble for not doing that report that really no one’s reading anyway… you probably won’t get in trouble for not doing that report.”
— Sarah & Mark (17:52)

4. Find Out What You Can from Above

• Be proactive: ask to see decks, review calendars, attend conferences ("Swimming Upstream").
• Use available tools (including AI) to help draft or refine your team vision.
• Leverage Manager Tools resources, podcasts, and community tools for broader perspective.

"Ask to see strategy decks… Ask for access to their calendar... We teach you how to swim upstream.”
— Sarah (27:16)

5. Communicate Your Vision Relentlessly

The Power of Repetition

• Mark restates his classic "Horstman’s Law of Organizational Communication":
  • “Say something seven times and only half of your people will report having heard it once.” (30:04)
• Leverage all communication situations — staff meetings, one-on-ones, skip-levels, town halls — to tie work back to vision.
• Your people only start to “get it” when they begin to tease you for being repetitive.

“You’ll know when your people have actually heard you and therefore they can act upon it when they start complaining about how sick they are of hearing about the mission statement and vision.”
— Sarah (34:50)

Practical Ways to Communicate

• Start every staff meeting with a review of projects tied to your vision.
• In meetings, always connect specific work back to a bigger picture.
• Consistently reinforce how tactics support strategy.

“Start every staff meeting with a review of your key projects that support your mission, your vision. Connect the work to the bigger picture as best you understand it.”
— Mark (31:09)

• Discipline yourself and your team to focus on what’s mission critical. If something’s not connected to your stated direction, deprioritize it.

“How does that relate to the mission? That really doesn’t. Okay, we’re not doing it.”
— Mark (35:31)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Purely human. Always.” — Sarah, on Manager Tools’ "crafted by humans" philosophy (00:34)
• “Rumors… play a pretty big role in lower level managers trying to deduce what the divisions, strategies or plans are… that’s a failure on the part of your bosses.” — Mark (05:11)
• “Futurologists… they’re wrong 50% of the time.” — Sarah and Mark, on the folly of getting strategic bets exactly right (11:36)
• “Come up with some basic principles you wish your team to live by. Talk to your number two, get her impressions… and iterate.” — Mark (25:39)
• (D-Day example) “You can endeavor to do great things… and still have a mission statement that can be only 50 words. If you’re running a team of 10 people. You may not even need 50 words at all.”
  — Mark (25:36)
• “Ask us. We can help. Even if you’re not [a licensee], we’ll help. Why? Because we were there one day and nobody helped us.” — Mark (26:37)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:12–01:43: Episode setup and framing — why managers must fill the communication vacuum
• 03:22–05:11: Common experience of lack of direction from above; commander's intent
• 07:07–08:16: Accepting responsibility vs. blaming senior leadership
• 10:27–13:21: Risk in choosing your own vision vs. doing nothing; even senior execs get it wrong
• 15:17–18:01: Practical first steps for creating your own team strategy/culture
• 20:09–22:55: Story about eliminating pointless reports and redefining job roles
• 23:47–24:11: Iterating your team’s mission—keep it informal at first
• 25:36–26:37: WWII and D-Day as an example of a simple, clear mission statement
• 27:16–30:00: How to proactively find out about upper-level strategies
• 30:00–32:44: Organizational communication—why and how to repeat your message
• 34:50–36:17: Measuring progress—when your team teases you, you’re doing it right
• 36:17–end: Final encouragement—create your own alignment, communicate it relentlessly

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Actionable Takeaways

• Stop waiting for clarity from above: Use what you know and what you can discover to create a team vision.
• Communicate repeatedly and relentlessly: Over-communicate your mission/strategy until you're tired of hearing yourself say it.
• Take risks and iterate: Any action and direction you set is likely as good as (or as fallible as) what the C-suite creates.
• Challenge useless work: End or question tasks that don’t add value or align with your team’s direction.
• Actively seek out information: Don’t just accept the void—look up, ask questions, and equip yourself as much as possible.

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Tone and Approach

Straightforward, practical, and encouraging. Mark and Sarah reinforce that it's normal and expected to operate with incomplete information—but it's not acceptable to let that paralyze you or your team. The episode is a blend of realism, proactivity, and empathy for the struggles of frontline and middle managers.

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For further action:
Manager Tools will be continuing with additional chapters and more detailed guidance on communications plans and vision setting in upcoming episodes.

Visit manager-tools.com for resources, conference schedules, and more podcasts.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to Manager Tools.

[B]

This is Sarah and I'm Mark.

[A]

Today's podcast, fill the Vacuum. Communicate your vision, chapter one, part one of one.

[B]

As always, our content has been crafted by humans, in this case actually me, and is now certified by Proudly Human. The questions this cast answers are, what if my team doesn't get higher level communication? What if my boss doesn't have a strategy or plans? Can I have my own strategy or plans separate from my boss's?

[A]

If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening. I gotta be straight with you folks. A lot of career advice flooding the Internet right now was not written by a human. At Manage youe Tools, we've made a deliberate choice to keep it purely human. Always. Every episode you listen to, every recommendation we make, every piece of guidance we share, it comes from real people with real careers and real experience helping professionals just like you get ahead. Purely human. Always. Visit us at manager-tools.com to learn more. So folks, we're talking today about communication, a team communications as it pertains to the folks on your team. If your folks say they don't know what's going on strategically, operationally, that is as a manager, your fault. And even if the organization isn't going to take responsibility for these communications, we would recommend that you, the manager, step in and fill the void with your own vision and your own communications. That's what we're here to talk about today.

[B]

Yeah, even if you don't have a clear sense of the mission or vision, because it's not, it's been, there's a void above you. I think we call this fill the vacuum. Right? The vacuum above you. Well, the solution is to actually fill it with your own stuff as opposed to waiting and complaining that the people above you didn't. Look, if folks, if you're at the top of an organization, you know what the organization is trying to do. You have input into it. It's almost all you talk or think about. You don't actually deliver the results you align and communicate to and motivate the people who actually deliver the value that your organization creates for society. But down at ground level, if you're at the top, 5, 6, 7, 10 layers below you, there's an enormous void. There's a vacuum of information about what the company, what the division, even sometimes with vice presidents or senior directors or something like that, even what the departments are doing, and what most senior people won't tell you at the lower levels or don't tell you is that even without knowing what is going on you actually have great latitude in terms of how you run your part of the organization. You can fill the void of strategy and planning by delivering your own strategy and planning and mission. We even said vision. I think we say vision a few times in this cast. Most longtime listeners know Horsemen and Manager Tools don't like vision, but it could all be wrapped up in vision as an idea. You can do it. You can fill the void. You can fill the vacuum.

[A]

Absolutely. So we have a pretty straightforward outline today, folks. Three parts. First, fill the void, then find out what you can, followed by communicate your own vision relentlessly. So let's start with the beginning of this, which is fill the void. Now, folks, this is a Manager Tools podcast. So we assume that if you're listening to this, you have leadership responsibilities, whether you're a frontline manager, even a senior manager, sometimes even up in more higher director levels, like senior manager could even be vice president.

[B]

It occurs to me, Sarah, we should be sensitive to the fact that there are directors who are probably thrilled to be doing Career Exec Tools, but maybe they're not keeping up with Manager Tools. And this would be a good one, because I know there are directors. I talked to a director this week, earlier this on Monday, that literally didn't know what was going on. And it wasn't about a layoff. It wasn't about something emergent. It was about regular stuff and the people above him weren't communicating to him.

[A]

That sounds right. I mean, folks, this is a very common experience. If you're experiencing this, you're not alone. It's one of the lack of clear direction from above. And it's pretty. I mean, I hate that I say this. It's pretty common in organizations. While you're sure as you can be that somebody up there is doing the planning and has a strategy, surely those plans and strategies probably don't trickle down to you in the form of anything other than deliverables and projects which seem somehow unconnected for you because you're not experiencing an individual who's got that strategy tying them all together for you.

[B]

Yep, we talked about this. In fact, I should link to it in the show. Notes about commander's intent about explaining to people, this is why we're doing what we're doing. So if you need guidance, if you're wondering, here's the intent, if you're off track or you've got a question in your mind, go back to the commander's intent. And that's what we want you to do. We want you to start filling the Void with commander's intent. But you even being more specific that with vision, values, so on. Frankly, it's worse than that. In a lot of organizations. It's been our experience and other people's experience in our community that rumors, literally things that other managers tell you about, things they heard from someone else from a meeting they weren't in, that rumors like that play a pretty big role in lower level managers trying to deduce what the divisions, strategies or plans are. And look, let's be clear, that's a failure on the part of your bosses. Now you can complain to your bosses, you probably won't get very far. And in fact, what they will say is, young man, young woman, when I was at your level, we didn't hear anything either. There's strategy and then there's tactics. Your tactics let me worry about strategy. And that's shameful. It's wrong. In really good organizations, people are aligned because they've been communicated to about how to stay aligned because. But organizations have not invested enough in the cultural aspects, the behavioral aspects of a culture that aligns people around the mission and it frustrates enormously. Senior people come down and visit and they say, what are you working on? And somebody says, well, we're working on these three projects and says, how does that tie into our, you know, our, our new direction? Says, I'm not really sure, sir. I don't. We've been doing this the last year and then that manager gets in trouble, as opposed to the six managers between him and the CEO who should have been saying, I'm going to carry the water. My people are going to know why they're doing what they're doing.

[A]

Yeah. And folks, if you are one of these lower level frontline managers, which I'm assuming you are, if you're listening to this podcast now, you probably don't know this, but what is absolutely true is if you and your team don't know what your corporate or division strategy is, that is your fault. And it sounds harsh.

[B]

That sounds so terrible.

[A]

Oh, it does.

[B]

We should have said it's your responsibility because we don't like talking about fault here at Manager Tools. It's responsible, not fault.

[A]

Yeah, it is and it sounds harsh and I don't like that it sounds harsh. And we're not actually blaming you, the individual, but really what we're saying is that the lacking clear guidance from above means you can set your own vision, your own strategy, doing your best to keep it in line with what you understand. The non communicated strategies from above are they're not going to give it to you. You're responsible for discerning what you're hearing and creating a vision that aligns with what you're hearing from above.

[B]

Yeah, that's the whole point of fill the void, fill the vacuum. Yeah, Right. Yeah. Now look, cynical readers and listeners. I say readers because now we're emailing show notes. If you're a Manager Tools licensee, you can go to your account on our website, click on Communication Preferences.

[A]

I think it's mailing list preferences.

[B]

And you can click on emailed show Notes. And every time a show comes out, in addition to the letting you know the audio is available and it'll tell you what it's about, you'll have the entire show notes there in your email. It should make it easy for you to share it with your directs and potentially a couple of friends who you want to turn on. Demand Tools or people that you think might be interested. We would encourage you to abide by the fair use principle. But. But definitely you can share them with your directs. I certainly would. I want my directs to know what I know. I'll never forget, this is nearly 20 years ago. Somebody wrote in and says, I'm having a crisis of conscience. I am learning so much from you guys. This is when we first started. I kind of want to tell other people, but actually I don't because I'm in competition with them. And so is it okay if I don't tell people? And my answer was kind of like, well, yeah, if you, if you want to be that guy. If you want to be that guy and get promoted, fine, but why wouldn't you want to help a buddy out? I don't know. Certainly with the Rex you'd want to do that. But look, cynical readers and listeners might immediately point out that there is risk with this approach. And folks, we're not going to argue with you, you're totally right. But that risk of choosing wrongly, of maybe not fully understanding what's going on above and still creating your own mission, your own strategy, your own vision, whatever, that's just a different form of risk. Your risk. Now, not truly understanding what's going on above you and being able to keep your team in alignment leads to all the problems you're presently familiar with. Sudden changes, fire drills, last minute requests, projects starting and stopping would appear on a whim, or projects that aren't stopped, but no one asked any questions about it anymore.

[A]

Absolutely frustrating. Incredibly frustrating. But there is also risk in all strategy and all planning, folks. Too many organizations try to be everything to everyone. And it leads to spreading your resources too thin and losing the chance to align people with excitement toward limited goals. Sound like where you work? Yeah, it probably does. It probably does. Even top executives experienced in strategy know that the strategy that they choose, that they. They design, they point their organization toward, could be wrong.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

They could choose to invest in the wrong markets. They could choose the wrong pricing strategy. They could choose the wrong customers to go after the wrong product lineup. And the advent and speed of AI makes this even more true. Who even knows what a successful strategy would be? What is it, Mark? What are those people called that Predict the Future? Futureologists.

[B]

Futurologists. You can get a PhD in futurology.

[A]

Yeah. And they're wrong 50% of the time. They have a PhD in predicting the future, and they're still wrong half the time, which is basically flipping a coin, folks. Basically.

[B]

Yeah. And actually, the executives that I've known, loved, respected, admired Jamie Dimon, Larry Bossity, Jack Welch, US Presidents and so on, they all knew something. And Patton said it best, most colorfully, which he says, a good strategy violently executed today always beats a perfect strategy delivered next week. Right? You have to make a decision. You have to go in a certain direction. And executive leaders that I know all the time are like, we generally believe this is right. We may find out we're wrong. And there are all kinds of stories and strategies and missions and visions being wrong. But by gosh, pretty quickly we're going to figure that out and we're going to adjust. And so they don't fall in love with their strategy. They're constantly testing it against the market to see whether or not it's working or it's not. And the folks I respect the most wants to say, okay, we decided to raise prices, in fact, in light of the oil embargo or who knows what else, that was the wrong strategy, and we need to come back to the drawing board and figure it out.

[A]

I think that's a huge lesson, actually, Mark, and I'm sure it's one we've talked about before. But, folks, if you as an individual manager, let's say you manage frontline folks, in your organization, your strategy, the one you choose now based upon all the information you have, could be just as right or just as wrong as if you were the CEO of the organization. So don't be afraid to choose one. There's risk in both options, and it's not like the people at the top who've chosen the strategy that you wish you knew, but don't know, have it right anyway, necessarily.

[B]

We actually have a podcast about this in Executive Tools about the new mode of executive failure. I think it's called the unseen or hidden mode of executive failure, where you're not going to be given much guidance at all and you're going to have to chart a path. And you may choose the wrong path and deliver it perfectly and end up as an executive getting fired because you didn't deliver. Or you choose the right path and you don't execute effectively. I mean, once you're given more degrees of freedom, you end up with more risk associated with being wrong. But what we've learned over the years is choose your path, execute it violently, pay attention to the feedback you get, and then adjust and you'll be fine. But if you don't choose a path, you're not going to be seen as a leader. You're not going to be seen as somebody who's ready to go to the next level. But look, why not learn now as a frontline manager or senior manager or director about how to plan a strategy or a vision, and we'll be talking about that in Executive Tools. We can't put it all in manager tools. We've got. There's too much. So, you know, we encourage you to sign up for Exec Tools. But we do use the term vision loosely, by the way, I mentioned that earlier. We're not fans of corporate visions. But every human organization that is highly effective has a clear mission and has clear plans to achieve it. It doesn't just happen. They say we're going to do X and then they do X and the market rewards them. Even if it doesn't get down to the lowest levels, even if you're only an unwitting accomplice by doing your deliverable, the project that got dropped in your lap and you don't really know why you're doing it. And your boss should have told you, and his boss or her boss should have told you all that stuff. Even if it doesn't get down to you, successful organizations have some sort of mission, some sort of compass needle pointing in certain direction, west, northwest, south, west, southwest, whatever, and then they execute on it and deliver it.

[A]

Now, folks, you're a manager. They don't make an individual who has no idea where we should be going as an organization the manager. They pick somebody different. They pick somebody else who's got the ability to chart a path, to know what direction, at the very least we should be going. So instead of wallowing around in secondhand knowledge and Trying to infer direction from a rain of what appear to be uncollected deliverables and projects. Instead, we would recommend that you come up with your own direction for your team and then fill the void above you with your own direction for your team.

[B]

And you don't have to figure out the corporate strategy. Okay? If they don't give it to you, just decide. What kind of team leader do I want to be? What type of manager? What type of senior manager do I want to be? What kind of culture do I have? What is your team's mission? Do you not have one? You could start there. It's not that hard. If you need help, we have guidance. We'd bet your boss hasn't even given you the mission for her team, which includes yours. Does your team know your priorities or do they just know what they're working on? Have you connected their work streams in a way that helps them make decisions about their own priorities, a la the leader's intent or the commander's intent? Are you measuring everything, everything, everything, or have you figured out that it'd be way smarter to only measure the things that align with your vision so that people don't worry about having to be embarrassed that they missed a measure on something that isn't aligned? Everybody measures everything because it's possible to measure everything. What you should be measuring are the things that are important.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. Folks, what reports are you sending that you're pretty sure no one's reading? I mean, we've all got some of those, right? We know what are the important reports like. If we miss that deadline, it's going to be a big deal. And which ones, if we didn't send, wouldn't be that big a deal. So why not stop sending those reports and see if, as it has happened thousands of times in the manager tools community, no one even notices. Suddenly. We now have report creation time that is free for you to marshal in service of your team's mission. We said this before, right? Do you want to get in trouble for not doing the important things? No, you don't want to get in trouble for not doing the important thing.

[B]

That's the one thing you don't want to get in trouble for.

[A]

Yeah, you're going to get in trouble for something. So get in trouble for not doing that report that really no one's reading anyway. Because, let's face it, you probably won't get in trouble for not doing that report.

[B]

I have to make an aside here, Sarah. We're recording this on a Wednesday, only four or Five days before this cast is going to go out because we've been so busy and Things We Think We Think went out this week. I think we're in our 19th year of things We Think We Think, if I'm not mistaken.

[A]

Sounds right. I'm not sure, actually the launch date. And I should know that.

[B]

Yeah. And folks, if you're listening and you're not a licensee, we encourage you to be a career Tools Manager. Tools executive tools licensee, because you'll get access to Things We Think. We Think. Which is maybe our most beloved offering, even though it came on a whim, when I said to Mike one day, you know, I've got these little bits and pieces of stuff that I like to share with people. They don't always align with a particular podcast theme. And so maybe what do you think? Would our audience like a weekly email from me called Things I Think. I think? And then when I retired, we changed it to Things We Think We Think. And he said, yeah, I think so. And we started doing it. And now a couple of weeks ago, this is April, I think we released some bonus content. Yeah, bonus content. I said, hey, bonus content. Folks, we've decided to shutter Things We Think. We Think. And we had fooled many, many me. I got over a hundred texts or emails from people.

[A]

You know, Mark, I just got a note actually on that theme from John

[B]

Nuttall earlier this week, one of our most beloved.

[A]

It was actually in response to your Things We Think We Think this week. No, actually, it must be last week. Your Things We Think We Think last Week. And you'd mentioned in that that we are looking at moving what is now bi weekly every second week, Executive Tools to Every single week.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And John wrote me a note and said something to the effect of, I'm still burned from the April Fool's joke. And I don't know whether or not to take you seriously.

[B]

So, you know, I should write that down and I should put a special note. Folks, for those who don't know, John Nuttall is one of our most beloved members of the community. I believe that John personally has been to more Total Manager Tools Training deliveries than any other person other than me and Sarah, Kate and Amanda.

[A]

Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure. Yeah.

[B]

He sends. He sends two or three people every time. And he's always there at AT&T. And he's always there checking on whether they're learning and encouraging them and so on. So the point I was going to make was years ago, we told the story of Mike Leaving MCI and going to work at Ball Atlantic. This is, gosh, this has got to be 2000 or 1998 or something in there. So, you know, 25, 30 years ago, and he came across what is known as, what used to be known as green bar reports. Some of you probably recognize the phrase green bar. That computer paper that was particularly wide and it was belt fed through and it was, it had perforations in it and so on. And there were tons of them in his office when he took over at Bell Atlantic and he started asking around, what is this stuff? He says, well, we prepare this report every week. And then he started talking to people who the port went to and none of them read it because it was, it looked old and it wasn't valuable. So he just stopped doing it. The reason the people who, three people who spent time on that, creating that report every week, the reason they didn't want to say, I'm not sure anybody's listening or reading it because they don't ask any questions about it. The reason they didn't is job security. I mean, yeah, that's a really good reason not to tell anybody. So he went down and said, I promise you, you're not going to get laid off or fired. We're going to get rid of that report. I'm going to find something else for you to do. And they were delighted because otherwise were just driving down a dead end really fast in a Maserati. Wasn't, wasn't very good. So that's sort of the original example of stuff that reporting that doesn't work and isn't valuable. So look, you should ask yourself, what culture do you want for your team? And for those of you who are licensees, there are a couple of podcasts about culture that we have linked to at the bottom of these show notes. If you're listening and you're not a licensee, you can go to the webpage for this page and you can click on those links and learn more about them. Remember, culture is behavior. How do you want your team to behave? Do you want timeliness? Do you want more communication or less communication? You're crazy if you want less. Do you want decisions made rather than people constantly asking you for guidance? We certainly hope you'll want a culture that includes performance. That is the ultimate culture, and that means behaviors that meet the goals and deliverables of the team. But these are the kind of questions you should be asking yourself about what kind of team you want to be, what kind of vision or mission or values or Strategy do you want your team to have even though you don't know what's happening above you enough to deduce what yours should be because it's been waterfalled. All that top level stuff is in waterfall. Waterfall to you. Appropriately, Absolutely.

[A]

And don't think folks that the task is too daunting. Just start with a small part of the mission. You don't have to sit down and figure the entire thing out in one sitting. We'll be adding to this guidance in the months ahead. This is, as you can see, a chapter one, so pay attention to future releases. And folks in today's world, we can say just ask AI to help you create your initial mission. Give you a draft one. Ask it about other teams, missions, people that do things that you do. Feed in your deliverables and your job descriptions and what you know about your division or department. And folks, don't spend a bunch of time and a bunch of hours making it fancy. That's where people get ahead of themselves. Don't just write it all down, don't make it fancy.

[B]

It's not a vocabulary exercise.

[A]

No. And it's not a beautification effort either. Your, your very first mission doesn't have to be in this beautiful document that you could hang up on the wall, be poster sized because it's gorgeous. You're going to iterate on it. Your first draft, your second draft, heck, your 10th draft, aren't going to be your final draft. So keep them in a way that's easy to change, easy to iterate and update.

[B]

Yeah. Speaking of missions and having a beautified or not, when the US and England and with the help of France and Australia and New Zealand and many other allies invaded Europe on d Day in 1944, June 6, 1944. The mission that was given to General Eisenhower, the American general who was the supreme Allied Commander of Europe. Sakur. The mission statement that he got from Prime Minister Churchill, I don't know what Joseph Stalin's title was, Premier, I think. And the President, United States, FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The mission he got was 50 words long. It was something like, you will land on the continent, you will engage the enemy forces, you will defeat them. You will destroy Germany's ability to prosecute an army and you will capture Berlin. It was literally that. Now the reams of papers that came out of that, the millions of papers, in fact, if I remember correctly from reading the Guns at Last Light, which is a famous famous book about World War II by a Pulitzer Prize winning author, I think they said they shipped 14,000 typewriters to France shortly after D Day.

[A]

What? 14,000?

[B]

Yeah, you've got, you've got, you know, half a million men over there and they all have, you know, company clerks and battalion clerks and brigade clerks and so on. 14,000 typewriters. I could be wrong if somebody could sharpshoot me, but I'm not off by an order of magnitude. It's not 4,000 and it's not 400,000, it's not 100,000, but 14,000. So my point is, you can endeavor to do great things, to reach for the stars and still have a mission statement. If you want to boil it down to that, that can be only 50 words. If you're running a team of 10 people. You may not even need 50 words at all if World War II can be ended. Starting with D Day based on a 50 word mission. Look, come up with some basic principles you wish your team to live by. Talk to your number two, get her impressions, her ideas, and as Sarah said, iterate. And folks, also, people don't do this as much. Ask us. Yeah, we can help.

[A]

Send it over.

[B]

We've consulted with this. We'll take a look, we'll make suggestions. Happy to do it. We want to help you be better managers and we'd like you to help us by becoming a licensee so we can fund the mission. But even if you're not, we'll help. Why? Because we were there one day and nobody helped us. And we don't want the world to be that way anymore.

[A]

Hey, folks, as the token Canadian over here at Manager Tools, I want to let you all know I'm going to be up in Canada with two upcoming public conference events and I would love for you to join me. I'm going to be In Toronto, that's May 6th and 7th for the effective Manager and Effective Communicator conferences. And then the very next week, that's May 12th and 13th, I'm going to be in Vancouver and I would love to have any of my Canadian friends, all of my Canadian friends, that is. Join me there so you can check it out online. [e-mail] Register to join me in Toronto and Vancouver. I hope to see you there next. Part of our guidance then is find out what you can, folks. We encourage you to do all that you can to learn what you can about the mission and direction of your boss and their boss and their boss. Ask to see strategy decks that they've been given. Ask for access to their calendar. You can come to our effective Senior Manager Conference where we teach you how to swim upstream. And folks, there is a podcast, a Manager Tools podcast called Swimming Upstream. And again in our ESMC you can learn about the sources and causes of the reign of your projects and deliverables and we're going to be releasing that guidance in an Executive Tools cast soon as well. If you're not an Executive Tools licensee, now might be a good time to subscribe. As I mentioned earlier, we're going to be beginning weekly casts soon. We think that's going to come around in about June. Right now Executive Tools is presently bi weekly but based on demand. We're going to speed it up to delivery every single week.

[B]

And for our friends in the UK that means Executive Tools is fortnightly one of my favorite words in the English language. Also, if you're a licensee you can use a new MT community created AI tool known as the Black Widow Mistake Correction Tool. Now, if you're not an exact tools listener, you don't know what the Black Widow mistake is. But we've talked about how people, when they get to more senior levels, they actually start narrowing their focus when in fact they should be broadening their focus. It was invented entirely for situations like this where you want to know more about what's going on, quote unquote above you. Kreslov Babinent, a Ukrainian working in Poland for Siemens who is also an executive coaching client of mine, has created an industry tracking tool with an instructional video to help you start to understand what happens outside of your organization. And we're going to have more guidance about this, about learning more about swimming upstream in the months ahead as well.

[A]

All right, that takes us then to the last piece of our guidance. Communicate your own vision relentlessly. And folks, most frontline managers are only on the receiving end of Horstman's Law of Organizational Communication. You've heard this one before. Say something seven times and only half of your people will report having heard it once. Less you misunderstand. The other half of the people are going to tell you they've never heard it at all.

[B]

As I've said before from my experience in politics and writing speeches and campaign speeches and so on, politicians give the same speech over and over again. And right before they go on stage they ask their assistant, what town am I in? So they make sure they change it from Fremont to Oakland to Detroit to Alpharetta to Fredericksburg to Edmonton to wherever. Probably not Edmonton, but it's just an example of a city. Well, no, no, no, probably not Edmonton because a politician wouldn't campaign in Edmonton. A rock band might go from Detroit to Chicago to Edmonds.

[A]

Yeah, I was thinking it was a musical artist. I'm sorry, I didn't hear the politician reference.

[B]

Oh yeah, the musical bit. I think on YouTube you can go and find videos of people saying hello Detroit. And they get booed in Chicago.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So that's the last thing that frontmen or women do before they what city am I in? And if you want even a better story of that, read or listen to Jackson Browne's song the Loadout and stay where he talks about that very thing. I don't know where I'm going. I don't know where I've been, but I know I'm on the road. Look guys, there are some simple things you can do. It's not rocket science. And by the way, we're not going to give you all things we can do. As I said, this is chapter one. There's more to come. Start every staff meeting with a review of your key projects that support your mission, your vision. Connect the work to the bigger picture as best you understand the bigger picture during one on ones. Start with mission related issues, not just a random order of whatever you've written down. During the week, do some strategic thinking for 30 seconds. I mean it only takes you 30 seconds before each one on one to make sure you give pride of place. What does my boss talk about first? He talks about mission stuff. Okay. And vision essentials. Kick off your skip level meetings with a mission and vision review. Kick off your town halls with a mission and vision review. And if you don't have it from above, okay, fine. Keep working on getting that swim upstream as best you can. But you owe it to your people, if you don't have it, to tell them what your vision and mission is, what your culture is.

[A]

And folks, we're going to keep coming out with guidance to help you get in this vein. Like for example, an upcoming Manager Tools podcast will be how to create and deliver a communications plan and it's going to be made specially available to all Manager Tools listeners. Your communications plan is going to have regular reviews of things like in this case, mission and strategy and tie projects and activities back to in order to make sure it's done. Frequently you have those communications, those conversations, keeping it top of mind for the folks on your team.

[B]

And the reason that's in this particular cast, folks, is because I've intending to write this communications plan guidance for 10 years and haven't gotten to it yet. So I'm going To get to it. And we've now committed.

[A]

You've now committed. It's like when you go on a diet and then you tell your friends you're on a diet and then they make sure you order salad.

[B]

Yes. Yeah, exactly. So here's how some of these communications might sound in your day to day. And what we're trying to suggest to you is rather than only talking about tactics, you connect your tactics back to your vision, back to your mission, back to your strategy. With things like this, we're doing this because the company is doing so and so. And this is how that connects. This is important because we support the sales team and their new outreach to mid tier firms. This is a priority because revenues are flat and this is connected to a new revenue source. Or we play an important role in this because our governmental clients are doing their end of fiscal year spending that happens in the US Every year in September, before the fiscal year ends. People want to spend all their budget so their budget isn't cut the next year and companies respond to that. Companies have divisions and departments that support the government or the military, Both, same thing. And people should know, and they should know that there's a time limit on this project because we have to capture the spending before the end of the fiscal year, September 30th.

[A]

And folks, lest you're worried about Horseman's law of organizational communication, you'll know when your people have actually heard you and therefore they can act upon it. When they start complaining about how sick they are of hearing about the mission standard and vision. Everything they say is about the mission and vision. Exactly that. That is the standard. That's the level of frequency and repetition it's going to take to break through everyone's assumptions that they don't know anything about the mission and vision. You have to keep talking about it, constantly talk about it, then they will figure it out.

[B]

Yeah, and look, here's another example. I gave you some examples of things to say. Here's another example. Somebody suggests, well, we may want to consider doing this. And you can say to them, how does that relate to the mission? That really doesn't. Okay, we're not doing it. Put it aside. We could talk about it later. Maybe it will relate to our mission at some point. Somebody says, I think this might be something interesting to do that might help us. Okay, is that primarily secondary or tertiary related to the mission? Tertiarily, we're not doing it. Secondarily, we're not doing it. We don't have enough people as it is now folks. So we're not doing it unless it's primarily related to the mission. And as a boss of mine once said at Procter and Gamble, when you get known as the mission slash vision boss by your people, you're on the right track.

[A]

That's absolutely it. So, folks, to wrap it up, you don't have to live with a strategic mission void that exists above you in your position. You can fight to learn more about what's going on above you. And even if you know very little, we urge you to fill the void above you, create your own mission and communicate about it until your directs start making fun of you because you are a broken record. If you want your team aligned, you have to give them something to align to and that's your responsibility to do.

[B]

Yeah. Great one. That was a lot of fun.

[A]

That was really great. Thanks so much for joining us folks. We hope this helped you. Now help us help others and tell your friends. And of course follow rate and review our podcast. And remember, five stars only, please.

[B]

Thanks everybody. See you in a week. Sa.