Gain enrollment

Chris Lacey
4 min readAug 13, 2018
Photo by Max Bender on Unsplash

The person sitting next to you in the team has been frustrating you for the last few months. They arrive to work late occasionally and then proceed to spend the next hour having breakfast, getting a coffee, and having a general chit chat with the team.

They haven’t been meeting their deliverables and they always have an excuse. Yet they never stay back late to catch up or stay back to get ahead. They continuously have breaks, they don’t show any urgency in their work and they lack focus. This person is sitting in your team right now! They sit next to you every day, and you haven’t done anything about it.

It’s time to make a change. You need gain enrollment.

As a Leader in the business your job is not to be a Manager. Managers are out there ensuring that tomorrows output is a little bit more than yesterday’s. As a Leader your job is to make change happen. To paint a picture of a better future, and to take responsibility to lead your team there. That person sitting next to you each day doesn’t believe in a better future. You need to change that and change it urgently!

Great change happens when a passionate group of people come together to make it happen. So, the key part of your job as a leader is to gain enrollment on this journey.

An enrolled team is one that is passionate about the change you are leading. An enrolled team is driven by the mission and committed to the cause. It’s team that feels the bigger purpose in what you do.

Enrolled, driven, and motivated people are the key to leading great teams.

Enrolled people stay back late to get extra work done, they are focused. Enrolled people put time into self-learning outside of business hours and are passionate about delivering great work. They care about meeting their deliverables. They want to share their work with the world, and continuously strive to improve and be their best.

That person in your sitting next to each day doesn’t strive for excellence, is disinterested, cutting corners, and lacking focus. My question for you as the Manager is what have you done to gain enrollment from this person? Have you passionately engaged with this person regarding the change you are wanting to make? Have you resonated with them to enroll them on the journey? I bet you haven’t!

Your job as a leader is to tell a story about the change your trying to make. To tell the story of the future you want to create, and to tell it in a way that resonates with the people that are there to hear it. Investing time into the way in which you communicate that message is key if you want to gain enrollment from your team, and to deliver the change you want to make.

Stop what your doing, take that person sitting next to you into a room, and talk to them about the change your trying to make. Paint the picture of the new world looks like and find a way to resonate with this individual.

This is urgent! Make it happen, that person sitting next to you needs you to do it for their own sake.

Others have written great work on the topic including Seth Godin, Simon Sinek, and Derek Silvers. Links to these superstars are below.

If you want to read more from me, here is a link to other work I’ve done on the topic:

Great work from others below!

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Chris Lacey

Sharing some thoughts and a few observations along the way.