Quick question for you.
If I asked your team what the priorities are for 2026, would I get one consistent answer, or five different ones?
If it’s the latter, keep reading.
Over the holidays, I caught up with a friend from college. We hadn’t talked in a while, so we did the usual thing. We checked in on families, work, and life, and then we started reminiscing. We talked about the good old days and laughed about our college crew.
Those were fun times!
And then, out of nowhere, we both started laughing about Dr. R – a professor we had had in our freshman year.
The guy was a riot.
He called our class Varsity Rhetoric because he wanted us to feel special and couldn’t stand the blandness of English 101.
I think that is what made him great.
He was smart, quick-witted, a little mischievous, and every once in a while, he would call us out in a way that got our attention.
One morning, he asked a few easy questions as class started.
- How was your weekend?
- What did you have for lunch?
- What did you think of the Patriots game?
Then he asked about our goals for the 2nd half of the semester, and the conversation crashed.
We had no idea where we were heading or what we wanted to accomplish.
He smiled, shook his head, and said:
“You guys are like a bunch of tumbleweeds, blowing around in the wind.”
At the time, it was funny, but the metaphor stuck with me. This is exactly what many teams look like when managers don’t set a clear direction.
- People don’t stop working.
- They don’t disengage.
- They don’t suddenly lose capability.
They drift, and you can spot it pretty quickly if you know what to look for:
- Priorities change week to week
- Meetings end without decisions
- “Urgent” starts to take precedence over “important.”
- Goals exist, but no one can name them without pulling up a slide
This doesn’t happen because people don’t care. It happens because the direction hasn’t been clearly set and reinforced.
I see this far more often than most managers realize, and the consequences are real.
- Targets get missed because effort is scattered.
- Burnout creeps in because everything feels important.
- Politics rise because people fill the vacuum with their own agendas.
No one wants to create these outcomes, but our lack of intention allows them to creep in.
So let me ask you directly:
As you look at 2026, do you have a clear plan?
Have you communicated the direction your team should be heading in?
