Vision Drift Doesn't Happen All At Once

Episode Three is not about the explosion.
It is about the drift that happened long before anyone noticed the fire.

Vision drift rarely announces itself. It starts with small compromises, quiet exhaustion, lowered standards, delayed conversations, and leaders who slowly stop protecting what mattered most. Nobody wakes up one day and decides to lose the culture. It happens one unchecked moment at a time.

In this episode of The Ember Well Leadership Movement, we confront the subtle erosion that pulls leaders, teams, schools, and organizations away from their original mission. We talk about the warning signs, the rationalizations, and the dangerous comfort of “good enough.”

Because drift does not happen all at once.
But restoration can begin the moment a leader chooses to see it.

Protect the vision. Strengthen the people. Guard the culture.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to the Emberwell Leadership Podcast, where we protect the vision, strengthen the people, and guard the culture. I'm Ian Sharman. And if you're leading in a world full of pressure, noise, and reaction, you're in the right place. Welcome to the Emberwell.

SPEAKER_02 0:18

Hi, my name is Ian Sharman. Welcome to the Emberwell Podcast. I am here with my friend Judy Schwaggerly.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Hi, Ian.

SPEAKER_02 0:24

We're excited for another great episode today. Today we're going to be talking a little bit about vision drift. Vision is something that you have to keep alive and keep moving and keep exciting, or it eventually ends up drifting. And some people believe that vision starts to just go away all at all at once. And that's really oftentimes not the case.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Yeah, if you think about the airplane analogy, if you're off by just a degree over a long period of time, it takes you farther and farther from your uh wanted destination.

SPEAKER_02 0:55

Yeah, and that becomes a problem, right? Especially if you're thinking uh you're going somewhere warm and you end up in Alaska. Not a good way to spend your vacation. Um or you end up in Michigan the way our weather's been here lately. So vision drift happens usually a lot slower than that, right? Vision drift happens when we start to compromise things, when we start to tolerate distractions that shouldn't be there, when we're putting out mixed messages and priorities end up getting replaced, and before long, there's like lots of movement going on, but there's nothing productive. And this is what I would call vision drift. Judy, have you ever experienced this before?

SPEAKER_00 1:29

Yes, I think about like in a classroom where, oh, that's no big deal, we'll just let them do this, and then the the next day they expect, oh well, we get to just do that again. And pretty soon you're like, wait a minute, here's the rule, here's where we're at. They aren't anywhere near each other.

SPEAKER_02 1:42

Not even in the neighborhood. Nope, totally gone. So in this episode, we want to help you be able to spot vision drift a little earlier, name it, and hopefully have some tools to lead courageously so your team gets really good um at fixing it before we are totally in the different direction. So let's jump in. A vision drift, like we said, it's not a major dramatic event. Um, it it's something that happens. You know, teams I've yet to see a leader stand up there and say, you know what, we're gonna we're gonna get rid of our vision and we're throwing the mission out the door today. Judy, have you ever seen that happen before?

SPEAKER_00 2:16

No, not that extreme.

SPEAKER_02 2:18

Yeah. So usually this is a a slow thing that happens over the time. You know, a lot of times they'll say things like, you know, this is a temporary thing, you know, we've got X, Y, and Z happening, we're short staffed right now, we're gonna get back to it later, or this is what people need for the second. You know, we don't we're not called to lead in the second. We're called to lead in um we have to make decisions that impact the moment, but ultimately we're called to achieve a larger vision.

SPEAKER_00 2:44

Right, and oftentimes it it doesn't come from a place of bad intent. It's one of those we really did intend to get back to it, or we really thought it was going to be something temporary.

SPEAKER_02 2:54

Yeah, you know, leadership and many organizations come with a tremendous amount of pressure, and you know, we're not trying to we're a lot of times this happens when we're responding to the pressure and we don't end up recentering. So next I want to take a look at how does drift actually happen. Um, Judy, drift is one of those things that you you can start to feel it after a while.

SPEAKER_00 3:18

Right. It's those little small things, but then pretty soon you realize wait a minute, this small thing plus that small thing plus that small thing is no longer a small thing.

SPEAKER_02 3:27

No. I'm a math person, and yeah, once you start adding all those things up, you're adding up disaster. Um, small misalignments. That's the first one I want to look at. You know, little decisions that don't match the missions. Judy's example about the classroom I thought was great because as teachers, we end up we realize that students are having bad days and need some help and need some extra grace some days, but ultimately we have to make sure that our classrooms are running and students are learning. Tiny exceptions, they start to become the new norm and with small misalignments, and then leaders are letting things slide because they seem minor, but um I like to tell my students in my classroom little things are big things because little things add up to big things.

SPEAKER_00 4:09

Right. I think about a minor thing, you know, oh I'm only a couple minutes late today, and then tomorrow you're a couple minutes late, and then somebody else realizes hey, they come in a couple minutes late, I'll be a couple minutes late, and pretty soon everybody's a couple minutes late impacts everybody around them.

SPEAKER_02 4:24

Yeah. Um mixed messages, you know, leaders say one thing but reward another. One of the things leaders I think will do this oftentimes will say they value people, but what they're actually really valuing is results. Judy, have you seen that before?

SPEAKER_00 4:37

Oh, definitely.

SPEAKER_02 4:38

Yeah, and better off just saying what it is that you value, and if you need to focus on something, you know, explain it as an aspirational value, something you're trying to get to, but you're not there yet. Because those mixed messages, they not only erode vision, they also start to erode trust, which that's one of the most dangerous things you can have happen in an organization.

SPEAKER_00 5:00

Right.

SPEAKER_02 5:01

Unclear priorities, that's another third one I want to take a look at. You know, everything feeling important. We've talked about this in some of our other episodes, right? No one knows what the first thing is. Everybody starts to become reactive and overextended, and just lots of frustrations that don't need to happen on the team, and business starts masquerading as faithful. I'm laughing about this one because we will often see that at school, right? With with in in education, you can seem very busy, but not often productive. Um, I think that's that way in a lot of organizations. We can find a lot of ways as people to busy ourselves, but is the mission actually getting fulfilled? Um tolerated distractions. That's the last one. You know, side issues start stealing a majority of the energy. Um, emotional noise becomes the direction and things start to happen. Next, I want to kind of look at uh what we call the dangerous lie. You know, as vision starts to erode, as we started to go through some of this drift, um a lot of times leaders will tell themselves this lie that this really isn't a big deal. This is a huge deal. You know, one-time compromise isn't often catastrophic.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

But it's when those compromises become a pattern and you start saying everybody starts to expect the pattern, and then those expectations set your culture.

SPEAKER_02 6:20

Yeah, we compromise cannot become a lifestyle choice within your organization if you want to see it be successful. And that starts to become the expectations, and what people's expectations are eventually starts to become the culture. I kind of look at this as a sequence, you know, tolerated compromise becomes repeated behavior, repeated behavior becomes the new normal, normal becomes the culture, and once it becomes culture, correction starts to become a lot more difficult.

SPEAKER_00 6:47

Yeah, and I just think in the classroom trying to bring everybody back, you know, if you correct those little things along the way, it makes things a whole lot easier than letting everything go off the rails and trying to make a big shift back to where you want to be.

SPEAKER_02 7:01

Yeah, I always say protecting the vision doesn't have to be this huge dramatic thing. Um it doesn't have to be like a big speech or you know the leader getting up there and pontificating all the things that they know or some major rebranding or 27 consultants and a TED talk. Doesn't have to necessarily be that. A lot of times what it needs to be is just clarifying what matters most.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

Correcting that misalignment early so it doesn't get way far away.

SPEAKER_02 7:27

Yeah, repeating the mission for your team so they see it over and over and over again. I always say that if your your team gets tired of hearing about the vision, that means you're doing a good job because it's fresh in their minds. And refusing to let those little things become the um central work. So real leaders don't just cast vision, they keep resetting it. You know, they have to name what matters most, to notice what's drifting, say the hard thing, and make that course correction so they don't need large interventions because those always come at a cost later. As leaders, you know, as we get busy, we can miss things as things start to drift. So I want to share with you a few warning signs that we have to deal with in that. First one, your team is busy, but the core is weaker. If you see your team moving around in that and your results aren't happening and the team is weaker, that's a big warning sign, wouldn't you say?

SPEAKER_00 8:20

Yeah, definitely. One of the best pieces of advice I got when I was a principal, one of my previous principals had said, make sure that the things you're doing are the things that really need to be done. And he gave the example of a report that would take him hours and hours to do. He said one month he didn't have time to do it and nobody even noticed it was missing. So then he's like, Why am I spending hours writing this if nobody wants it? So making sure that what you're doing is actually something somebody needs or wants.

SPEAKER_02 8:49

Yeah. So then, you know, another warning sign: your secondary things are getting more emotional energy than the primary things. I'm not talking physical energy, I'm talking emotional energy, right? If you're being awake at night by a problem that has absolutely nothing to do with your vision, your people, or your culture, that's a problem because that's not what we're we're needing to be focused on.

SPEAKER_00 9:10

And I think about those things leading to meetings and meetings and more meetings that you end up with. Meetings about the meetings. Yes. You end up paralyzing your organization because all we're doing is meeting.

SPEAKER_02 9:21

Yes. Um, you know, another warning sign, people are unclear on what actually matters. If there's a lot of confusion going on or if nobody knows what's what the important thing is, that's a problem. Warning sign number four. If you keep repeating the same confusion over and over again, fact, do you have a problem?

SPEAKER_00 9:41

Yeah, I think about it again in the classroom where, okay, if a whole bunch of people are asking the same question, somewhere along the line we didn't explain this well. So we need to back things up and make sure everybody's all on the same page.

SPEAKER_02 9:53

And just like in teaching and leadership, that can be the same type of thing where it's not necessarily a big thing that you missed. It could be a little detail that they're getting confused on. And once you clarify that thing, everybody's off and running at that point in time. Then you feel internally uneasy, but keep postponing correction. If you're waking up at night going, man, there's something not correct. Something's off about the culture, something's not right in the results, something's not going right with the people. That's your inner voice, and you need to listen to that.

SPEAKER_00 10:28

Yeah, I think about the musical Annie, tomorrow's uh always a day away if you don't address it. And well, tomorrow will be a better time to take care of that, or tomorrow will be a better day, or tomorrow will be a better day. The longer you wait to address it, the farther the drift will get for you.

SPEAKER_02 10:44

Yeah, I saw a wallpaper on a cell phone one time that said, you know, yesterday I said tomorrow. And it's like that's so huge because we'll put those things off that are the hard things to do because it's difficult, but it it does not get us to a good place when we're going to do that. So, next thing I want to talk about is, you know, we we notice these things, these warning signs are there. What do we do next? Well, the first thing I I think you really need to do is recenter yourself before you repair. So sometimes it's just taking a deep breath, closing your laptop, and saying, okay, what is really the first thing that needs to be done right now? What is the most important thing within my vision?

SPEAKER_00 11:25

And I think that sometimes is tough for us as a leader because we want to believe that everything we're working on is important, but not everything is equally important.

SPEAKER_02 11:34

I know. It's like we're just not that important sometimes.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

Really?

SPEAKER_02 11:37

It's it's tough, but you know, that's just reality. What has quietly become too central? What is the issue that that's taking too much, and how can we we solve that? Where are our messages and our reinforcements misaligned? Where are we a walking-talking contradiction and how do we fix that?

SPEAKER_00 11:55

Um and that's important because when people either can look at what you're doing or what you're saying, you know the part they're believing is what you're doing.

SPEAKER_02 12:03

For sure. And then what uh needs a small correction now before it needs a major correction later? What conversation are we uh delayed? What are we resetting? What needs to get re-centered this week? So, you know, we've talked about this on here before. We believe in high challenge. So we're gonna leave you with a challenge today. If you want to protect your vision, stop waiting for drift to become overly obvious. Um, because by the time it's there, it's usually been rehearsed over and over again. You know, take a look at some things. Look at what you're rewarding, look what's stealing your attention, and look what keeps getting tolerated because it's easier than to correct. What we have allowed to become normal is it no longer serving the mission. And lead there. Not loudly, not theatrically, not you know, from a podium or through a rebranding or 17 consultants. Lead there clearly, consistently, and courageously, because most teams don't lose their vision in one big moment, they lose it one tolerated compromise at a time. Protecting the vision's not about the big speech, it's about the faithful corrections that um take place before the drift becomes a culture. All right. If this episode has given you language to something you um haven't named yet, share it with another leader. We'd love to have more people involved with the podcast. Um, and if you want some practical tools to go with this episode, head to emberwellleadership.com under our resources tab, and we'll have a lot of resources to go with today's conversation because leaders don't just need inspiration. We need language and tools that still show up while we're under pressure. Leaders, keep leading strong. Thanks for joining us. We would love to hear more about you and what's going on in your organization. To connect further, please uh check in with us on Facebook or on our website, Emberwellleadership.com.