Nobody told me my first job wasn't about design
A real situation from my first month as a manager, what it revealed about the direction problem, and one thing you can do differently this week.
My first month as a manager, I ran three workshops.
The team needed better critique culture, I thought. They needed shared vocabulary. They needed to understand what good looked like. So I built sessions. I prepared frameworks. I showed up with energy and a deck full of frameworks and the kind of ambition that comes from finally having a platform.
The workshops went fine. The team was polite. A few people said useful things. And then we all went back to work and nothing changed. The next critique was exactly as messy as the one before. The next review surfaced exactly the same arguments about the same unresolved questions.
It took me another two months to understand why.
The problem was not the team's craft. The problem was not their vocabulary or their feedback skills or the structure of the session. The problem was that nobody, including me, could articulate what we were trying to build toward. Every decision was a negotiation from scratch because there was no shared answer to the question underneath all the other questions: what is this team actually here to do?
The workshops were a solution to a symptom. I had skipped the diagnosis entirely.
This is the most common mistake I see new leaders make, and I made it myself. You inherit a team, or you build one, and you go straight to the work. You improve the process. You tighten the craft. You build the feedback loops. All of it is real and useful, and none of it sticks until you have answered the direction question first.
You cannot run a team that does not know what it exists to do. You can run a busy team. You can run a stressed team. Those are not the same thing.
What this revealed
Direction problems disguise themselves as execution problems. The critique culture was not broken. The critique had no foundation to stand on. Every session was asking the team to evaluate work against a standard that had never been written down. Of course it devolved into taste. There was nothing else to evaluate against.
The moment I understood this, I stopped running workshops and started asking a different question. Not "how do we improve our feedback?" but "what are we trying to build toward, and does everyone here have the same answer?"
They did not. The room had maybe six people in it. I got six different answers.
One thing you can do differently this week
Ask your team, individually and without warning, to complete this sentence: "This team exists to..."
Do not prime them. Do not share your answer first. Just ask. If you get different answers, you do not have an execution problem. You have a direction problem. And now you know where to start.
A question to sit with
What is the one decision your team made in the last month that would have gone differently if everyone had been working from the same direction?