Tag: leadership

Supporting Your Team

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

So often we are confused by what it means to lead a team.

We think it is about fiery big speeches, painting a picture of the future, rallying the troops to scale that next mountain.

And yes, there are those days and those moments.

We all need to be reminded of our “why” and see ourselves in the great deeds of others, so we can push to new places.

But most days, what matters more is deeply paying attention to people, and turning that attention into actions that further their success.

Noticing what they said, and what they didn’t say, to learn what they need.

Being available for a task that might seem small but that we know is significant.

Anticipating an issue they may not have seen coming, and helping them head it off at the pass.

Continuing to think about them after they’re out of the room, and, later, saying things like, “You know that hard thing we talked about? Can I help you with it?”

Lending a hand to take their 75% chance of success and turn it to 100%—even and especially if doing so doesn’t make “sense” according to your and their job description.

People feel supported when they feel noticed, when they see you devote time and energy to their success when you’re apart, and when you take actions that make them shine.

Talk, in the end, is cheap…and actions, well, there’s a reason they speak so loudly.

The One Non-Negotiable Trait of Great Team Leaders

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At a workshop I facilitated a few weeks ago, we asked everyone to share, in small groups, the characteristics of the most effective leader they had ever worked with.

The most common behavior they mentioned was: this is someone who always has my back.

It makes sense, and aligns with Reed Hastings’ / Netflix ideas about how to think about our working relationships: we are not a family, we are a high-performing sports team. From the Netflix Culture page:

A family is about unconditional love. A dream team is about pushing yourself to be the best possible teammate, caring intensely about your team, and knowing that you may not be on the team forever. Dream teams are about performance, not seniority or tenure. It is up to the manager to ensure that every player is amazing at their position, plays effectively with others and is given new opportunities to develop. That’s how we keep winning the championship (entertaining the world). Unlike a sports team, as Netflix grows, the number of players also grows. We work to foster players from the development leagues so they can become the stars of tomorrow.

The best teammates, and the best bosses, are the ones who make you better, the ones you can rely on, the ones that will back you up if someone comes after you and catch you if you fall.

The story could end here, but it doesn’t.

Back at the workshop, we moved from small breakout groups to the full group.

In the report out, the “someone who has my back” headline subtly got transformed into “someone who protects their team,” and not everyone noticed at first how different these two things were.

Yes, great leaders protect—give cover to—their teams. But that is hardly enough.

“Protection” and “having your back” are not the same thing.

When I have your back, that means that I am there to support you, to be your advocate, to ensure that you are operating in a context where you can always succeed.

And that also means that, in private, I am telling you the hard truths, sharing where I think you have more to give, expressing to you what I know is possible for you and for us. I’m a coach, to be sure, and I’m one who tells you the whole story.

That’s a much broader remit than someone who only protects her team. Someone whose headline is “protection” is prioritizing safety and may be shying away from productive conflict and from the messages that need, over time, to be heard.

You can see this distinction play out in Google’s lessons from how to create great teams, based on research they conducted over two years looking at 180 teams.

The five characteristics Google identified as mattering the most were:

  1. Dependability: I talked about this in Teamwork, partnership, culture, and passing the ball
  2. Structure and clarity: well defined roles and goals
  3. Meaning: “the work has personal significance to each member”
  4. Impact: “the group believes their work is purposeful and positively impacts the greater good.”
  5. Psychological Safety: “A situation in which everyone is safe to take risks…A culture where managers provide air cover and create safe zones so employees can let down their guard.”

Someone who protects their team is likely providing psychological safety, and that’s important enough that it makes the Top 5 list. But limiting ourselves to “protecting” team members means we’re playing a narrow role, one in which we’re more likely to see ourselves as a filter or a buffer between what we see and what they see.

That’s certainly helpful some of the time: when a team member lacks confidence in certain tasks; when they are newer; when the team is forming and the bonds between folks, and the resilience of the team as a whole, is low.

But in the long run, protection alone is not enough.

We have each other’s back by buffering sometimes, filtering others, but, also, by providing real clarity of role and expectation, of potential, of upside.

And, most of all, we have each other’s back by communicating our clear conviction that we know this person can be great, and that we will walk with them down the path to greatness.

What Work Should I (and only I) Do?

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

A while back, I wrote about the Six Stages of Kevin Kelly. It’s a reflection on an essay by Kevin Kelly with leadership lessons about what you spend your time on over the course of your career The hierarchy he presents goes like this:

Stage 1: Don’t Screw Up. “When you start your first job, all your attention is focused on not screwing up.”

Stage 2: Learn New Things. “At this stage, working smart means doing more than is required.”

Stage 3: Exploration.  “Working smart here means trying as many roles as you can in order to discover what you are best at.”

Stage 4: Doing the Right Task. “It takes some experience to realize that a lot of work is better left undone.”

Stage 5: Doing things well and with love. “At this stage, you can begin to do only the jobs that you are good at doing and that need to be done.  And what a joy that is!”

This seems like a natural-enough progression for the motivated, reflective self-starter who wants to learn and be useful. It evolves from fear of messing up to pushing past our comfort zones to playing around with what work we do and do not do to have the most impact.

And, wouldn’t the pinnacle of that evolution be “doing only the jobs that you are good at doing and that need to be done?”

Alas, no, that too is just the penultimate step.

There’s a step beyond that that is about doing the jobs that only you can do. Not all the jobs you’re best at; not all the jobs that need to be done…but just the jobs that you and only you can do.

I’ve sat with this idea for a while as I’ve become more senior. It’s not an easy one to implement for a lot of reasons, not least of which because of how satisfying it is to do important work that needs to be done: this is meaningful work that creates value for everyone…and Kevin’s saying that this is work that we should NOT be doing, because someone else can do it well.

Sticking with the things that ONLY you can do is different: it means spending more of your time dancing with uncertainty; more of your time trying to figure out what to do; more of your time willing to be wrong, willing to do things with uncertain payoffs, willing to do things that are hard(er) to measure.

And here’s the kicker: even these goalposts keep changing. Because your organization’s competence keeps changing, the people around you keep changing and growing, and, over time, the things that only you could do well become things that others around you can also do well.

What a gift that is, and what a challenge.

It means that, if we’re doing this right, our jobs never stay static; the role our organization needs us to play keeps on changing.

It means that, the moment we really, truly figure something out is probably the moment when we should teach it to someone else.

And it means that the moment we are really comfortable, something about our mindset or our team’s growth has gotten off track.

No time to be comfortable, but comfort is overrated.

 

Doing the High Value Thing Quickly

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This is one of the unspoken skills of highly effective people.

It’s a skill of identification and of action.

Both of these require excellent diagnosis, pattern recognition, and confidence.

To be clear, the diagnosis is two-fold: when to act, and when it’s your job not to act or let someone else act.

And the confidence is paired with humility: not “I believe in myself the most, always” but, “I know this is really important. I’m confident, based on my experience, about what needs to be done. And I’m willing to be on the hook for the results.”

Supporting skills include the ability to task switch when necessary; comfort with risk; the willingness to act with incomplete information; and the discipline not to procrastinate.

Fast and Now

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With seniority comes the opportunity for leverage. Our rate-limiting factor is no longer what we, personally, can do; it is what we, the collective, can do, and our job is to maximize that.

I’ve written before about the three jobs of any leader: making decisions; making the people around you better; and doing stuff.

Counterintuitively, the first two are the most important because they are much more scalable than “doing stuff.”

The question then arises: what does it look like when someone does this effectively?

The senior leader is faced with the following question in every moment of the day:

Of the million things that are going on right now (that I’m aware of) which of these needs my attention and my voice right now?

What does it take for this person to successfully answer this question day in and day out?

To makes sense of this, consider: her job is not just to make decisions; it is, more importantly, to quickly and effectively decide where to weigh in. To do this, both her decision-making and her meta-cognition need to operate at a very high level.

The only way she can survive and consistently add value in this maelstrom is if she:

  • Has easy access to the right information (from dashboards; from colleagues; etc.). She is IN the information flow and has open, trusting relationships with the right folks in the organization.
  • Processes all of this information quickly and acts decisively (“I can ignore all of these things, and these things need my attention right now.”)

Her job is to constantly be getting new information and successfully deciding: where to act; how loudly her voice should be heard; when to ensure that things are continuing or accelerating; and when to redirect or even stop.

There’s no way she will pull this off if she is not both fast and deciding now.

I often remind myself and my team that, to make lasting change, our work is a marathon, not a sprint.

However, the requirement of “fast and now” brings to mind the capabilities of a soccer player, not a marathoner.

As leaders, we need to be able to accelerate quickly for a short distance, over and over again. This skill allows us to achieve a high throughput on all the inputs we see, so that we can add value when and where it’s most needed.

Conversely, if it takes us a long time to process and decide—if we’re slow to get to maximum velocity and then to act—it will be harder for us to consistently add value in the way that we want and that our teams need.

There’s likely no shortcut to developing this ability, but we can keep an eye out for the things that slow us down. Things like:

  • Putting off the hard decisions until we have “enough time” or our to do list is clean.
  • Being unwilling to take a stand based on what our experience and pattern recognition tell us.
  • Feeling the need to weigh in on every important decision.
  • Not trusting our team to make tough calls.

Being unwilling to create clarity in the face of dissenting voices, for fear that someone won’t be happy with our decision.

It helps to remind ourselves that most of the decisions we make are Type 2 decisions—they are relatively easy to reverse—and that the enemy of progress is lack of clarity and the unwillingness to take a stand.

Leaders Operate in a Low Gravity Environment

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For years, I thought of myself as a flat-organization person.

After all, I value what each person has to say.

I know that good ideas come from everywhere, and the best ideas rarely come from the top.

I want to have genuine relationships with the people around me.

And I don’t want these relationships to be impacted by our relative positions of authority in the company or organization we work in.

But what I want is not the same thing as what is.

The reality is that each person comes into each organization with an inherited orientation towards authority.

And it’s the job of the person with authority to understand this and act accordingly.

That means that, if you have authority, you have to remember how amplified each of your actions is: the more authority you have, the further your words carry, the more likely it is that they will land with a bigger impact than you intended, the greater chance that what you do and don’t say will be noticed by more people than you expect.

I find it helpful to think of myself standing on the moon: each step is much bigger than it would be on earth.

And every leader operates in this sort of low-gravity environment.

Adjust accordingly.

What Implementation Really Means

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

My first job, in the mid 90s, was as a management consultant. Though I was often working 70+ hours a week, on some level I knew the job was easy:

  1. Gather information, from inside and outside the company we were working with
  2. Understand client needs, and trends in the marketplace
  3. Talk to folks who knew what was going right, and going wrong
  4. Do a bunch of data analysis
  5. Write it all down in a coherent story
  6. Present that story to the client
  7. Walk away

The job—at least how I experienced it as a more junior person—boiled down to synthesizing and collating what was already known. Often, the main purpose was to force a set of conversations within the client company, by laying out an existing, but murky, perspective clearly.

After that, our job was to walk away. We’d leave the “implementation” to the company, as if that were just the last, eighth step in the process.

Nearly three decades later, I find myself in a world where all the world’s information—and more, thanks to AI—is literally at our fingertips. Everywhere we turn we find versions of 10 Tips to Be More Effective, 8 Ways to Inspire Your Team, 12 Steps to Driving Your Strategy Through Your Company.

The catch is this: it’s one thing to consume all of this information, to reflect on the gaps between what’s described and what you see in your organization.  And it’s another thing entirely to turn awareness of these gaps into real and meaningful change.

The “implementation” is not a small part of the overall job. It is often the whole job.

The job of making change happen with and through people, given all the existing constraints—culture, customers, expectations, old habits.

The job of doing it in a way that makes everyone empowered and excited, that treats them as part of the solution.

That’s the hard part, every time.

By all means, be curious and active in consuming information about better way to do things. We need that curiosity and external focus, always.

But also remember that there are few stances that are safer than that of the person who sits on the sidelines, like I did when I was a management consultant, describing what could be, and leaving the “implementation” to someone else (or, worse, sitting on the sidelines with arms crossed, saying to anyone who will listen something like, “If only they would [blank] then everything would be better.”)

There are few stances than are easier and safer than describing what needs to be done, and placing the weight of inaction at someone else’s feet.

And there are few stances more courageous than putting yourself on the hook, getting your own hands dirty, and walking the path from idea to implementation.

That’s called leadership.

The Three Jobs of Any Leader

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

If you are a senior person in an organization, you have, at most, three jobs.

  1. Make decisions
  2. Make the people around you better
  3. Do stuff

Make Decisions

Seth argues that this is our most important job, and I agree with him.

In an information economy, decision-making happens constantly: the decision about what to do with the next hour of our time; about whether we’ll serve this customer or that one; about whether our product needs this new feature or that one.

The act choosing of whether we’re doing A or B, whether we’re going here or there, creates forward momentum.

And yet, most people, regardless of their role, avoid making decisions. Making decisions means being willing to take a position, to put ourselves on the line, to have a point of view. Terrifying indeed. Because of this fear, decision-makers are few and far between.

This means that no matter our organizational structure, anyone who regularly chooses to make decisions is a positive outlier with outsized influence on our direction of travel.

Making decisions quickly, and often with less information than we feel like we need, defines a culture that doesn’t have time to waste, because the work is both important and urgent.

And, like all things, the more often we – individually or collectively – make decisions, the better we’ll get at it.

Make the people around you better

Whether defining culture, cheering people on, removing roadblocks, coaching, or empowering others, the highest-leverage job we have is to find great people, bring them into our organization, and do everything we can to help them succeed.

The ability to attract the best people is a superpower. Talent attracts talent, and great attitude is the ultimate multiplier.

If we’re lucky enough to have great people, our main daily obsession, beyond making decisions, is to create an environment in which they can do their best work.

This starts with tons of communication: describing, over and over again, our ‘why;’ articulating where we are heading; making it as easy as possible for people to connect the dots between what they are doing and the big picture.

It requires individualized coaching and mentorship: skillfully deploying situational leadership so that our team has the right balance between supportive and directive oversight, so that their skills and autonomy develop over time.

And, ultimately, it is about standing side-by-side with people as they chart their path and, in so doing, move your whole organization forward.

Doing Things

This comes last on the list, and it may even fall off the list over time.

This might be counter-intuitive. How could “doing things” not be important, especially for your most senior people?

It’s true that most senior people became senior people because of their exceptional ability to do stuff: analyzing, building, visioning, strategizing, organizing, selling, and executing are the foundational skills that got us where we are today.

And yet, deploying these skills is often a low-leverage activity.

At worst, a leader who only ‘does stuff’ might be hiding from her two more important jobs of deciding things and making others better.

And, hiding aside, the act of “doing” too much runs the risk of creating dependency on this leader to do these important tasks.

Our success as leaders in organization, then, requires three things of us:

  1. Making decisions, as well and we can and as quickly as we can
  2. Helping others thrive, and diving into this work every day
  3. Leaving a small space for the jobs that we are uniquely suited to do….and then consistently, actively, giving those jobs to others over time.

The Expert is Not In

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There is definitely someone out there who knows better.

Someone with more expertise.

More experience.

More know-how.

More perspective and wisdom.

Sadly, she’s not available right now, and won’t be for some time.

We don’t need her, we need you, today.

Your best judgement.

Your informed opinion.

Your willingness to take a position.

Your stance that invites input, conversation, maybe even disagreement.

Your bravery that takes us forward.

Time is On Your Side

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Making a good loaf of sourdough bread takes about 24 hours. There’s no way to rush it, but the good news is most of the work happens by itself.

The ingredients couldn’t be simpler: flour, water, sourdough starter, and salt. You make it like this:

At about 8am, you feed your starter with 75g of flour and 75g of water. This takes about a minute, maybe two.

At noon, you mix together your flour (1kg) and water (770g) by hand. This might take five minutes.

An hour after that, you add starter (150g) and salt (30g) and mix again. Another 3-5 minutes.

Then, every half an hour for the next three hours, you stretch and fold the dough a few times. Call that two minutes each half hour plus an extra minute each time to wash your hands.

Then you let the dough rest for five hours (rest = do nothing), and then you shape the dough. Shaping takes 10 to 15 minutes assuming you want a clean counter at the end.

Finally, you put it in your refrigerator to proof overnight.

The next morning, at around 8am again, you bake the bread. This requires 10 total minutes of activity and a bit of hovering (500 degree oven preheating for 45 minutes, then 20 minutes baking covered and 25 more uncovered).

At the end, you have hot, delicious, fresh bread. I always make two loaves and the first one is gone, every time, within an hour.

The point, besides demystifying sourdough, is this.

So much of the important work we do with people involves a bit of effort and attention up front and then letting the things we’ve set in motion—ideas, suggestions, words of support, challenges—evolve over time. Our job is to remain present and available, but we don’t have to do all the work.

The two mistakes to avoid are:

  1. Putting off having that first, foundational conversation, because then we lose the power of time being on our side.
  2. Thinking that the entire problem needs to be solved, today, by us, right now. More often than not, for important things, we can’t force it. Ideas need to take on a life of their own. People need time to work through their reactions, emotions and fears. Important things take time to process. Plans have dependencies and interconnections.

Great outcomes happen when we set things in motion early, remain available and present when needed, and let things run their course (with a few adjustments, based on our care and our experience, by us when needed). Nature, and time, are on our side.

And, for those who are just here for the sourdough, all I did to learn how to make amazing bread was to follow every instruction in this one video, 15 Mistakes Most Beginner Sourdough Bakers Make, from Mike Greenfield at Pro Home Cooks.