Spreading leadership traits in your organization

Ok, so let’s say you are already a team leader, or even a senior level manager in an HPC company or center somewhere. You’re interested in this leadership thing, but you recognize that you’re going to have to do a lot of culture changing to enable leadership to grow at all levels of your organization. What, specifically, can you do to ignite that change?

I think there are three big things that you have to start doing right now to encourage leadership growth in your organization: communicate, create teams of stars, and help people own their projects.

It all starts with communication

But probably not how you’re thinking. I’m not talking about communication plans, consultants, press releases, or those awkward monthly “Hey, I’m the CEO but I’m really just one of the guys” emails to the troops.

What I have in mind takes actual personal courage. If you are trying to build an environment that encourages leadership, you need to tell your staff that that’s what you are doing. Then go further, and tell them why you think it’s important. What do you mean by leadership? What are you trying to accomplish by encouraging it? What values are you trying to build, and what do they mean for the organization’s future?

This is surprisingly hard stuff to do, because you don’t get to hide behind the curtains pulling levers and setting of balls of flaming gas. This is really putting yourself out there. You’re saying “I believe in this, and as a result I’m trying to create something new.” You are of course risking public failure. But the irony is that if you don’t tell people this is what you are doing—if you don’t talk about what’s important and why—then the odds of you failing to actually build a leadership culture are (at least anecdotally in my own experience) dramatically higher.

Find starring roles

The next thing you need to do is to discover what your team members are good at, and what they are passionate about. As you create project teams, articulate their goals clearly, and work with your team (or the team leader) to craft assignments that match people and their passions as nearly as possible to the tasks to be done. You can’t always do this, and even when you can the delightful assignments will probably have more than a tinge of drudgery. But the goal is to build teams where everyone has a starring role. These are teams where everyone is going to naturally assume leadership on their part of the project.

When you have people who aren’t performing, don’t just ignore the problem or shift the work to a star. Find out why they aren’t meeting expectations then remove the obstacle or find them another role where they can be a star.

Help people own their projects

This falls under the heading of “empowerment,” a buzz word I hate to use because it has been so abused.

The reason the term has become a source of cringing and ridicule is that too often some manager somewhere will say “You are empowered to make decisions,” and walk away expecting you to take charge and do great things. The only thing missing is the magic wand.

What empowerment is all about is distributing the workload. You push decisions as far out to the leaves of the tree as you can, leaving the internal nodes (a delightful euphemism for managers, don’t you think?) free to think about higher level problems. This also allows the organization to capture the innovation and creativity of its entire workforce, instead of simply relying on a few key decision makers for all its insight.

This is a great concept, and we do this in code every day in our profession. The gap between theory and implementation most often arises because managers don’t actually take the time to each their team members how to make decisions that the organization can support.

When you are making big decisions you need to include your team in your thought process. Think out loud through your own process, identify the issues of concern for you, and encourage your team to address each in turn. This will teach them your decision process, and prepare them to make the right decisions after you have empowered them with your shiny wand.

Taking these steps can help get you and your team well on the way to creating a culture that encourages individual leadership and creativity.