By Cheryl Detrick Founder & Strategic Navigator, Detrick Strategy
In the movie Deep Impact, Robert Duvall’s character, Spurgeon Tanner, says, “On the Mississippi River in Mark Twain's time, there were riverboat pilots who only knew a few miles of the river. I mean, conditions changed so much, you couldn't know the whole trip. Floods, sandbars, fallen logs... all a riverboat pilot could do was to know his little piece of the puzzle.” Yes, another Sci-fi movie analogy, and, yes, once again the Earth is in peril from a comet. Heroes, assemble. (Sorry, mixed up movies.)
Navigate is about having the discipline to stay in touch with reality while keeping your eye on your True North after saying “go” and launching into transformation.
Your Design is live and in the wild. Now you must stay close enough to know what is happening, trust the people who are piloting their little part of the river, and when conditions truly warrant it, adapt the route. It is also time for the courage to hold steady even if you feel you may have been wrong.
Navigate can be very hard on leaders. Most leaders get energized from visioning the outcome and creating the plan. For many, implementation can feel less exciting. For visionary leaders, it can be very tempting for them to get the launch off the pad and then to move on to build something new. The high of the next challenge. Let’s face it, by Navigate, much of what has been Envisioned, Designed, and Aligned is now in the hands of your team. As a leader, the challenge is to remain engaged without taking the controls.
This point in the Detrick Compass™ is strongly about trusting, supporting, and coaching your team. You want to give them ownership without them feeling abandoned. Each one pilots of the riverboat through their section of the river, but you keep the destination in sight.
Relationships matter here because you need to know what each member of your team needs - and when. Do they need light coaching, assistance with barrier removal, reassurance, a challenge, or simply room to steer? Too little from you can make them feel on their own and too much can feel like you have no confidence in them.
A question I try to remind myself to ask is, “What do you need from me right now?” Most leaders are problem-solvers, but make sure they need you to solve their problem before you jump in. They may be venting or thinking out loud and need a sounding board; they may need a decision only you can make or they may truly need an intervention. Navigate requires knowing when to act and when not to.
Most execs are leading leaders who are leading others. Good coaching should flow through an organization. A leader who is coached instead of saved is more likely to coach instead of rescue. Unless you want to have to solve it all, be cautious of often you rescue.
A cautionary note about leadership relationships. Strong ones are important, but they can have a dark side. Sometimes, people can get so worried about “disappointing” their leader that they may soften bad news or wait too long to talk about it. Make sure you make space for both loyalty and candor by making it clear that while bringing you a problem will not cause you to lose trust in them, hiding one can. Your team must be able to say truths to you: this is not going the way we expected; I made the wrong call; my team is struggling; I need help. I have often said, “I can’t fix it if I don’t know it is broken.” Leaders need unfiltered reality in order to Navigate. Yes, more brutal truth of the reality in front of you. Fixing it together is part of the trust relationship.
I had a mentor who said, “for every solution, there is a brand new set of problems.” In this case, candor can also have a shadow. First, as a leader, if you ask people to bring problems forward, you must respond when they do. Having said that, responding does not mean giving the person the exact solution they want. You aren’t Santa. You have many things to balance. It does mean giving them the respect of listening, understanding, deciding what action is appropriate, and communicating what will change or why it will not. The person who came to you also has a responsibility to acknowledge that they were heard, what has changed - or why it has not - and then let it go and move forward. Otherwise candor can turn into a repeated pattern of chronic “candor grievancing” and leaders can develop complaint fatigue. Yes, “grievancing” is a Cheryl-ism, not a real word.
You can also end up with both parties hearing their own story: “I told the truth and was punished for it” and “I listened and responded and nothing I do ever counts.” In the earlier points of the Detrick Compass™ framework we talked about psychological safety being important to truth-telling. Accountability cannot mean punishing people for raising concerns, but psychological safety cannot be turned into a permanent license for grievance. Truth has to stay in the current time.
Remember the work you did in Design and Align to anticipate barriers and craft plans to address them? Plans, meet reality. Are your mitigation plans working? If not, why not? What barriers appeared out of the clear blue sky? Which of your assumptions were just plain wrong? As your team is piloting their section, you have to be watching the full field. You have to keep your eyes on your people, production/operations, customers, internal and external economics, technology, competitors, any changing regulatory or political conditions, and timelines. Yes, you are likely getting the information from your team, but you have to absorb and understand all of it. As much as I love it when a plan comes together, sadly, reality gets a vote.
Make certain you aren’t just defending the original plan simply because a tremendous amount of work went into designing it. Adjust - or change - people, resources, processes, timing, tactics, assumptions, or even parts of your Design when conditions warrant it. Keep your non-negotiables in mind, but be willing to change the route when needed as long as you keep True North front and center in your mind.
Now for the truly difficult part. Sometimes the best Navigate decision is to stay the course. The water being choppy is not necessarily evidence that the plan, or the enterprise, is off course. There can be lots of chop: a dip in numbers, a messy launch, a delayed decision, customer hesitation, a key staff departure, or even plain ol’ fatigue. Times may be difficult ,but that does not invalidate your strategy. First, ask yourself: Is the destination still right? Are our assumptions still largely true? Are the indicators showing failure, or are we experiencing a difficult stretch? Constant course correction can create more instability than the original problem. Sit with the discomfort long enough to determine whether it is a problem—or simply discomfort.
P.S. I am not good with this part. I am a problem-solver. So, I know this is hard.
Of course, you want to make this journey as easy as possible. But you will not anticipate every bend or sandbar in the river. The goal is to stay capable of responding when the river changes. One definition of leadership is diving into an uncharted section of the river with only your compass and the faith that you will eventually lead your team through it - or lead them out it and onto land.
You may hit a barrier and the only answer is to get the boat to shore, get everyone off and together carry the boat overland past the barrier, and then put it back in the water to begin piloting again.
Along this journey, you will come to milestones, and that is where Measure comes in.
Next time, we will dive into Measure, the final point in the Detrick Compass™ramework. But measurement is not the final step after the work is complete. It is part of Navigate. Leaders need meaningful indicators that show whether the organization is moving, whether the strategy is working, and where attention is required. Navigate and Measure don’t create a linear path; after Design is launched, they become a dance. Navigate → Measure → Navigate → Measure. Do. See. Measure. Evaluate. Adjust (or deliberately do not adjust). Rinse and repeat.
Navigate continually asks: What does reality say today? Measure responds with the indicators for context and decision-making. Measuring without meaningful navigation is just reporting and navigation without meaningful measurement is miscellaneous movement. Yet, the goal is not to Measure everything. It is to Measure what helps people understand progress, make decisions, learn, and stay accountable to the outcomes that matter. It is to ensure each member of your team can get the boat to their destination point and then turn the wheel over to the next pilot.
In the meantime, have a thought, question, or perspective this raised for you? I’d love to hear it.
If you are reading this article and want more in the Detrick Compass™ framework series, explore The Birth of the Detrick Compass™ , First, We Orient; Envision, A Future Worth Choosing, and Design, Now We are Making It Real, and Go or No-Go, Align Time