Chapter 1:
The Principles of Enlightened Leadership
Your life and career don’t wait for milestones. What you are doing now—and what you will do next—is happening because of what you have done up to now. Your career doesn’t start when you finish your degree and get your first job. It started with your first chores around the house, and your first homework assignments. The attitude, work ethic, and approach to life that shape your future are being molded by all the events you experience now, or have experienced, and by your reactions to them. That includes reading this book.
You probably will not become a leader. That’s because you probably are a leader. Right now you are influencing the behavior, thoughts, and actions of someone around you. It doesn’t matter whether you are reading this book as a first-year student in college or as you are starting your supervisory job at a multinational technology firm. Right now, somewhere, somehow, you are probably leading. Without position or title, probably without money or fame, and without anyone calling you “ma’am” or “sir,” you are leading.
It’s a big responsibility. How are you doing?
This chapter will introduce you to the philosophy, the general principles, of enlightened technology leadership. We’ll cover the basic concepts that govern enlightened leaders in their daily interactions with those around them. Some of the core concepts will be obvious, some not. The challenge is to make each of them an active part of your life, to internalize them. Put another way, you need to “heart-learn” not just “head-learn” these concepts. When you heart-learn these concepts they will shape your attitudes, choices, and actions automatically, without your having to think about them. It’s like the difference between reading about how to fire a gun and spending months on a range firing thousands of rounds. At the end of your time on the range, you can fire without needing to think about it. If you’re a police officer, heart-learning can save your life. If you’re a leader, heart-learning can save your organization.
This process takes time. Adopting these concepts is a big learning process. I’m still going through it, and as far as I can tell this is something we’ll all work on for the rest of our lives. But it is good work, and work that will pay dividends far beyond what you’ll recognize at first. By becoming an enlightened technology leader you’ll work from a position of abundance looking for ways in which everyone can have a starring role in his or her own life. The biggest impact you’ll have will be in setting an example for others to follow, and in teaching them how to look at the world through your eyes. Enlightened eyes. If you take care of leading in your corner of the world, and the people you know are inspired to lead the enlightened way in theirs, imagine the difference we can make together.
The only essential trait of a leader
One of my mentors frequently reminds me that the only absolutely essential trait of a leader is that he or she has followers. As I said above, leadership does not come from position, power, money, or fame. Certainly being a leader doesn’t guarantee those attributes, either, although leaders often find that they are blessed with at least some of them. You cannot be given leadership in your personal or professional life. You are leading, as indicated by the observation that people are following you, or you aren’t leading. If you haven’t yet developed leadership traits and qualities, this book may be able to help you do so.
Look at your organization and the power structure. By virtue of being a part of management, managers are in charge, and the workers in the organization do have to carry out the manager’s wishes or seek employment elsewhere. But managers aren’t necessarily leaders. The terms leader and leadership are often used interchangeably with manager and management. This is actually quite common, and certainly it is desirable to have your managers be leaders, but management and leadership are not the same activity, and it is all too often the case that managers are not leaders.
The difference between managing and leading people is essentially a question of motivation. People follow leaders; they move of their own accord in the direction that the leader has set out for them. When people are managed they aren’t led anywhere, they are pushed. A manager who is in charge but not leading is pushing, and pushing is a miserable way to manage. In fact, it’s what makes management hard and something to be dreaded. Pushers must constantly apply energy, time, and resources to herding an uncooperative, unmotivated workforce toward the organization’s goals.
A leader, by contrast, applies a lot of energy at the beginning when she or he communicates the vision, articulates the goals, and creates a vibrant team in which everyone feels a part of what’s being done and wants to succeed not just for the organization, but for himself or herself. The successful leader then applies a little energy periodically along the way to check the pulse of the project and make sure everyone is on track toward the vision and goal. When individuals are led, they feel that their personal goals are inextricably linked to the organization’s goals.
An organization with pushers may still achieve its goals, but usually it will fall just short of them. The reason is simple: as a pusher, you cannot make people care; you can only make them comply. Caring about something is a voluntary action that comes from the inside of what makes people, well, people. Put more practically, you can usually only hope for 70% by the whip. To get 110%, you have to have the heart.
Be an enlightened leader, not a pusher.
The principal principle
Leadership starts with adherence to the principal principle: be great at what you do.
It doesn’t matter what you do. It doesn’t matter where you do it. Some are called to be great in a field that changes the world, and are recognized with Nobel prizes. Most of us are not given such high callings or such tremendous talent. But each of us has the opportunity to be great at whatever we are called to do. Be a great accountant. Be a great writer of technical manuals. Be a great spouse. Be a great boss. Be a great teacher. Be a great leader.
Don’t be good. Don’t be adequate. These are wastes of time. Be great.
Being great doesn’t mean never failing, and it doesn’t mean changing the world. It means providing more than is expected when you do your job.
A leader who is only adequate at his job is doing a great disservice. People follow leaders. They set the example. If you are a leader then it is your obligation to the universe to set an example of greatness that others follow.
To be an enlightened leader, follow the principal principle: be great at what you do.
A leader at all levels
A leader has followers. This is a profound statement, and it is the central thesis of the entire philosophy of enlightened leadership.
It means, first, that no one can give leadership to any other person; you cannot be made into a leader by taking a new assignment or moving to a new position. You can be promoted into being a manager, a vice president, a president, or a dean. You can be elected to Congress, or to the governor’s mansion. You can start your own company, and make yourself chairman of the board. But you cannot make yourself a leader by giving yourself a title. I believe that you can, however, make yourself an effective leader by following the principles in this book.
Leadership is not about titles, fame, money, power, or position. It’s about followers. A person is a leader because other people follow the example he or she sets. Pure and simple.
The most important implication of this statement is that it demands the existence of leaders everywhere. They are all around you, at all levels of any organization, club, company, class, university, school, troupe, or collection of individuals. You are probably a leader in at least one sphere of your life. In your personal, professional, academic, or spiritual life, most likely others are watching what you do and say and following your example. You must accept the responsibility you have right now for influencing the actions and attitudes of those around you. Whether you are in school, at work, in church or synagogue or mosque, temple, or shrine, headed to happy hour, heading up a charity fundraiser, or just organizing a group of your friends to go to the soccer game, odds are you are leading and you don’t even know it.
To be an enlightened leader, start acting like one: take responsibility for the leader you already are.
Seek, and you will find: mentorship
If you talk to successful people in any walk of life, from authors to real-estate moguls to 7th-grade science teachers, and ask them how they became successful, almost all of them will include the contributions of one or more mentors in their list. One of the best ways to develop, to learn, or to do anything new is to work closely with someone who already has what you want and who is willing to help you achieve your goals: a mentor.
I have had many mentors both before and during my professional development. My parents were my earliest mentors, and set an incredible example of the work ethic, honesty, and integrity. Starting in college, one of the first people I recognize as having served as a mentor was one of my Electrical Engineering professors, Dr. James Bert Nail. In the first year of my EE classes I had a very difficult time; Dr. Nail’s class was one with which I had special difficulty. This was extraordinarily disconcerting to me, because I graduated from high school with a 4.0 grade point average, and because this was the classic “weed out” class in EE. Surely I wasn’t going to be weeded out! About halfway through the semester, I got desperate, and started hunting down Dr. Nail after class for extended help with the material. My technical abilities were slow to improve, despite the intense one-on-one teaching sessions. It seemed that I just couldn’t “think” like an engineer.
As the semester wore on I became depressed and disillusioned, and contemplated changing my major. Dr. Nail wouldn’t hear of it. He encouraged me to stick it out, told me I would get it eventually. I trusted him, so I stuck it out. He was right, though not in the way that I had hoped.
I got a C in his class—which pride compels me to tell you was my only C, that year or ever. That semester closed the year, and I got to go home and lick my wounds for the summer. The fall semester had more weed-out courses, and I was still struggling—and struggling nearly as hard. I was starting to think that maybe Dr. Nail had been wrong about me.
In the spring, though, the switch flipped. I passed some threshold in my learning, and suddenly everything started making sense. In retrospect what happened was that I had learned to think like an engineer. The whole first two years of my college was spent learning to solve one problem after another. This was the way I had “thought” in high school, and I had done very well. The change I had to make was to start learning the principles behind the problems so that, rather than just learning to solve the particular problem set in the back of the chapter and then being totally befuddled when faced with the same problems from a different angle, I could work out how to solve any problem that I was faced with. Its like the difference between remembering that sin(0) is 0, and then having to remember 100 other values, or remembering how to draw the sine curve and pick off the values you need. Scientists and engineers, and technologists in general, draw the curve.
That semester, and that C, was one of the most difficult times of my life. It was my first real challenge, and I didn’t exactly sparkle. Since then I have had a very rewarding career, and have gotten to do many fascinating things alongside brilliant and fascinating people. None of it would have been possible, however, without the mentorship of Bert Nail. From this story you’ll realize that he didn’t hand me the solution. I still struggled even with his help. But he kept me in the game, believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself, and bought me just enough time to get over the hump. Once over, I never looked back. That’s the power of having a mentor.
Since then I have had many mentors at all phases of my career. In every case my mentors have pulled my eyes up from the work at hand to see the big picture. They were on a different plane, and after spending time talking with and listening to them, I was able to pull myself up to that plane. Some of my mentors have been technologists, some managers, and some nontechnical people. My wife has been a mentor for me for almost twenty years. A few have been impressive leaders of large organizations, known throughout their fields. Most have been just regular folks who had been there before and wanted to share their experiences with someone who wanted to learn.
And that is the key to finding a mentor. In fact, I’ve never really “found”, as in set-out-for-and-tracked-down, a mentor. Starting with an attitude of curiosity and humility, an eagerness to learn from anyone who was willing to share, and a willingness to listen first, lured mentors to me, and it will work for you as well. Most people want to help those around them, and most people love to share their experiences; maybe its some kind of genetic parenting instinct that we all share. Whatever the reason, people who have already been down the road you are just starting on will want to see you avoid the hurdles they encountered, or at least they’ll want to help you handle them better than they did at the time. It’s why I’m writing this book, and it’s why all my mentors helped me.
Although it may sound a little odd, all of your mentors won’t be people. You can find good counsel in many different places. You may find a lesson in an encounter with nature, or in a car accident. You may find mentorship in relationships with superiors and subordinates. You may find mentorship in an experience, like raising a child or overcoming an injury or disability. And you may find mentorship in books, movies, or lectures. Learn from them all. Once you decide that you want to learn, once you start asking questions and start listening to the answers, at that point your mentors will find you.
To become an enlightened leader, seek your mentors.
Listen and learn
Everyone has something to say: listen and learn. Most of the success I have in dealing with people is in making them feel valued, helping them feel as if they have a meaningful role to play in what is going on around them. People in all situations feel valued when they feel they have impact or influence on their surroundings. I accomplish this by listening to them and acting on the good ideas people give me.
Before I make a decision about a change in some process or procedure, I talk to the people who will be affected by that decision. What do they think the problem is? How would they solve it? Does my proposed solution address their concerns? If not, how can we move toward the common goal in a way that leaves them more comfortable? What am I missing?
This approach accomplishes a great many positive things. I invariably learn something new about the situation, and often this new knowledge results in modifications to my planned course of action. With a solution that more completely addresses the problem, the organization benefits more quickly from my action. The people affected (the “stakeholders” in modern business parlance) get visibility into my decision-making process, and by so doing receive a little mentoring in the process. They also get to contribute their voice to the situation, and often they get to see their ideas incorporated into the solution. When the decision is finally made and the change enacted, they support it more fully because they feel that they were a part of the decision. Abundance everywhere you look!
No matter what your position is—the CEO or the janitor—you are only one person. Your ideas have holes in them. Solicit the input of other people. When you are exercising this skill, don’t present your solution first and ask for their input. Try to lead them through a collaborative discussion that focuses on how they view the situation and what possible solutions might be. Rather than saying “So, the polymerization process is broken. I think we should do X”, say something like “I’ve been looking into the polymerization process lately. It seems as if we could be getting more done here. What do you think? Can you think of a way to improve it?”
If you do have a solution already that seems to be more complete than what your partner has come up with, slowly work your solution into the conversation, and get feedback. When you come up with needs that haven’t been addressed, ask for input in modifying your proposal from those most affected and from those who will have to implement the change. The strength of your solutions will increase ten-fold, and the strength of your implementations will increase exponentially as all the stakeholders feel connected to and responsible for the solution.
This approach works as well on people as it does on projects and products. If you are experiencing a personality conflict with someone on your team, or if you are mediating a conflict between others, listen to other points of view first. Ask questions and probe for explanations before you hand out punishments or impose a solution. You will be surprised at how complicated seemingly simple situations really are: people conflicts are almost never about what they’re about. No one is really fighting over who does or doesn’t make coffee in the morning. The fight is really about one employee’s perception that another one isn’t pulling his weight on important projects. But you won’t find out if you don’t listen first.
Enlightened leaders listen before they speak.
Excellence
One of the most well known results of the research of W. Edwards Deming (1900—1993), the noted quality expert, is the 85:15 rule. Deming found that when the cause of a failure, either poor service in a restaurant or a defective radio on an assembly line, was tracked backed to its root 85% of the time that failure was due to a poor system. Only 15% of failures were attributable to a specific action, attitude, or inaction on the part of an employee.
People want to succeed. People want to excel. They want the acceptance and pride that come from doing—and being recognized as doing—an excellent job. Think about it and you’ll see that you have the same trait. We all do.
Most failures are the result of bad systems, not bad individuals. It is the responsibility of the leaders in an organization to build or refine the systems that will create excellent results.
Excellent results begin with expectations. As an enlightened leader, you must first expect excellence in yourself. When you are beginning your career, your expectation of excellence in your own results—in your personal corner of your organization—will lead to recognition and reward. It’s also been my experience that having a high expectation for yourself and your own work will raise the level of effort in those around you, even though they don’t report to you, or in some cases even work directly with you. An expectation of excellence is contagious, and it’s the kind of disease that everyone wants to catch.
And excellence gets noticed. It’s funny how this one item is the root of so many powerful behaviors. When you expect excellence in yourself you’ll learn to do it right, on time, the first time. This will in turn drive an awareness of scheduling and planning, and over time your desire to stick to your schedules will improve the accuracy of the schedules you help create. In creating and following schedules you’ll monitor your progress with an eye to critical obstacles, and you’ll work proactively to eliminate them before they become showstoppers. When faced with an obstacle you cannot overcome yourself (there will be plenty, I promise), you’ll be able to communicate your need for help before the whole project is sidelined. Now this is the kind of leadership I want on my team. Your peers will notice, your supervisors will notice, and most of the time you will be rewarded.
All this notice will usually lead to advancement, and you will find yourself with responsibility for a team running the next new project.
To become an enlightened leader, seek excellence in yourself.
Victim or victor: failure is the only path to growth
All this excellence-seeking will lead you square into the path of something that most of us will go to great lengths to avoid: failure. We’ll blame others, blame our circumstances, and blame the weather to avoid responsibility for failure. Most usually and tragically we avoid failure by avoiding those things at which we aren’t sure we can succeed.
Here’s the truth: if you aren’t failing at least occasionally, you aren’t doing anything of long-term value for yourself or others.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I absolutely want to avoid failure in everything I do. I work for success and I expect excellence in others and in myself. Why then do I fail? Why will you—and I mean will, not might—fail?
We are most vulnerable to failure when we are trying something new, in other words, when we are learning. The bigger the lesson, the higher the potential benefit, and the more dramatic the failure is likely to be. An Olympic hopeful learning a new vault is going to have some spectacular failures, and probably more than a few injuries as a result. But when she finally reaches the goal, in this case a new skill, her chances for gold are increased dramatically.
Likewise as you progress through your academic and into your professional careers, and even in your personal lives, you will be learning big lessons. Sometimes you’ll be successful the first time out. You will feel pretty good about this, but you will have learned only a little that you will be able to apply elsewhere. This is because you completed something that you were already equipped to do.
There’s nothing wrong with this. In fact, it can provide a healthy reminder that there are things you can do right if you’ve just had a series of failures. I love to snow ski. When I was learning to ski advanced slopes, and spending a lot of time on my face in the snow, it was heartening to do a few runs down beginner slopes and feel like the master of the mountain. But after a few easy successes, I was ready to try something where I wasn’t sure I could succeed. I wanted a bigger, more meaningful success. So I headed back for the advanced runs, and some more quality time with my face in the snow. Every fall taught me something new, though, and by the end of the season I was skiing advanced runs with confidence (if not with style and grace).
Think about your failures. A class you had to repeat. A power supply you never could get built correctly. A bacterial culture you couldn’t quite grow. Now think about your successes. In most cases I’ll bet you cannot remember a meaningful success—something that you can still bask in the glow of without remembering the failures that preceded it. Undoubtedly you were successful on any number of things the first time out, but you don’t remember them because they didn’t change you. Your head may have learned some new thing, but your heart didn’t, and the lesson got pushed away in the tumult of new experiences and lessons. Big failures mean you are learning big lessons: stick with it.
Old failures, new failures, and the mysteries of life
That said, let’s remember that failure is still unpleasant, usually for everyone involved, and in some cases is pretty costly. You may have to repeat a class, not get into a society or club you wanted to join, miss the production goal for that prize trip to Hawaii, or cost your company an important contract. After any one failure you cannot guarantee, to yourself or to others, that you will make your goal on the next attempt. But what you can, and should, expect is not to repeat the same failure twice. Big goals are achieved by mastering many smaller tasks or skills (around the office we call this eating the elephant in many small bites; definitely easier than eating one all at once!).
This is probably common sense, but the part of it that many of us don’t think about is that mastering these many smaller parts will in turn provide many opportunities for failure along the way. Try to learn each lesson the first time. Failure is a part of growth, and so long as you are failing in new ways you are still learning. When you start to repeat past failures—failing at the same place in the same way—you’ve stopped learning and you need to step back and figure out why.
The difference between a victim and a victor is that the victor recognizes failure as a lesson that brings him one step closer to success. A victim, on the other hand, feels stung or embarrassed and steps back from the lesson to choose an easier path. The victim blames others for the failure without looking for the cause in himself or herself. As a result of these destructive behaviors the victim never gets anywhere while the victor, (ironically) usually with many more failures than the victim, will eventually rise to success.
To become an enlightened leader, recognize failure as the currency of success, not as an occasion for undue recrimination and remorse.
Abundance
There is enough for everyone to have a fill of success, credit, happiness, fulfillment, and joy. These quantities do not obey conservation laws—they can be created without end. They can also be destroyed when you don’t seek opportunities for everyone to benefit from every situation.
Take every opportunity to move a situation forward in a way that benefits all parties involved. Look for the win-win solution in which no one has to lose—or even draw.
To become an enlightened leader, seek abundance at every opportunity for every member of your team.
Honesty
Be honest. Well, duh.
Here’s the thing about honesty: it can sometimes be pretty difficult. But when you stick to this path you’ll find benefits you never even imagined, along paths you hadn’t thought were even related to the situation in which you were honest.
One study in difficulty
Take the simple, but very common, example of the annual performance review. This ritual is easy if you have a staff made entirely of “USDA Grade A” employees. Since no one actually has such a magical staff, the performance review is never easy in practice, and for new managers it can be downright miserable. How do you tell Michelle that her performance isn’t up to expectations? Michelle has a chronic problem with missing deadlines, and it has delayed two major projects this year. You’ve only been her manager for a year, and before that you were her co-worker for three years. She’s older than you, with more experience at the company. And besides, she’s not going to take this well, and you don’t want to hurt her feelings.
Now you have two choices. Your first choice is to focus on the things she did well, give her a slightly above average review, and mumble something about perhaps being on time a little more often with deadlines. She walks away with a small raise, and spends the next year not doing anything differently. But because you aren’t happy with her performance, you begin to give the harder assignments to other team members. She notices this, and is beginning to feel left out. Because you haven’t told her anything is wrong with her performance, she concludes that this is personal: “You just don’t like me anymore.” She becomes disgruntled, discontent, and shares her feelings with the rest of her teammates, undermining your effectiveness as their leader.
Ultimately she may leave the group—this is actually the best possible way such a situation can go, because if she stays she’ll become increasingly unhappy, and have an increasingly negative affect on your team. Eventually something will have to break the impasse. Either she’ll quit, or you’ll find a way to make her someone else’s problem. Either way, you’ve got a broken team and a former friend. Worse in the big picture is that your friend still has no idea that there ever was a performance problem, and so she is likely to continue performing poorly at her new job, and the cycle will repeat.
I call this choice the credit-card approach to problems: you trade future pain and suffering for short-term happiness. Just like using a credit card for that vacation you cannot really afford, you eventually have to pay up, with interest. Problems grow when they aren’t addressed directly, and they grow best when they are actively ignored. In this case, a small performance problem with a personal dimension has blossomed into a problem for the company (late projects), a problem for your team, a problem for the new team receiving Michelle, and an ongoing problem for Michelle, as she will likely repeat all this over again.
Your second choice is to be up front at the beginning. Tell Michelle, very specifically, in which areas she needs to improve. Give her examples of times that she succeeded and also of times when she didn’t meet expectations. Tell her why her nonperformance was a problem. Was the project late? Did it go over budget? Was the report not well received? Did you lose the contract? Be honest about impact so that she can understand why her performance is really a problem. Then be clear about expectations, and work with her to develop a scenario in which she can work on the things she needs to improve.
I never cease to be amazed at how well these situations generally end. I personally find them very challenging. I hate to see people upset. However, when I became director and found myself in this very situation time after time, my sense of obligation to the rest of the members of my team drove me not to sugarcoat problem performance just to save myself a little discomfort. It simply wasn’t fair to the rest of the staff.
I would rehearse and plan (more on this in the chapter on communications), always visualizing the worst possible emotional outcomes in the meetings—with people storming out of my office mad as a wet cat, or crying, or both. So far, this worst case has never happened. I expect it will eventually, but so far it hasn’t, and I’ve had some very difficult cases with team members twenty or thirty years my senior with whom I’ve had to be very honest about things they didn’t want to hear and I didn’t want to say. In every case so far, I’ve had a very positive response. Of course the individuals are disappointed to find they aren’t meeting expectations, but as we work together to come to an understanding of where the problems are and how they can be addressed, the disappointment bolsters a real desire to improve.
In some cases my honest review only told them things they already knew about themselves; many times, it was the first time a manager had ever told them the truth. In these situations by far the majority reaction is appreciation that I’ve been interested enough to take the time to be honest and to help them improve. Remember, everyone wants to be a success. In the long run some of my hardest conversations have resulted in the problem persons actually becoming some of my best performing team members. They’ve had an incredible turnaround thanks to some direction and interest from me in seeing them become successes.
And talk about an opportunity for abundance! You can’t swing a stick in this situation without hitting someone who has benefited. The organization has increased capacity now that team members are performing at their best. The individual is excited about becoming successful and being a meaningful part of the team. The rest of the team gets the benefit of everyone working hard with a positive spirit. And I get to feel as if I successfully met a challenge, helped a person, and improved my organization all at the same time.
Difficulties abound
I use this example because I find it the most personally challenging and rewarding illustration of why honesty is so important, but there are many other reasons. When your boss or friend or wife or classmate asks you for feedback, make it honest. In the case of your boss, you may have to be careful about phrasing if you disagree with her or his pet project, and you want to be clear that you will follow directions (as long as they are legal, ethical, and moral) and do everything you can to make the boss’s choice a success. All of this said, however, when your opinion is requested, you don’t serve anyone by saying you agree if you don’t. If the decision works out, the boss will appreciate your candor and your ability to work hard in support of a choice even when you don’t agree with it. All involved will also be looking for evidence that you learned from your mistake, so figure out why you were wrong and make an adjustment! If, however, the decision doesn’t work out, the boss will likely turn to you again and perhaps assign more weight to your opinions in the future. Be respectful of the boss’s position and mindful of possible hurt feelings, but be honest.
Two roads diverged in a difficult situation
Unfortunately, early in your academic and professional career you can get away very easily with not being honest. You can commiserate with a classmate over his “unfair” grade on the last test, even when you really believe he spent too much time that week partying instead of studying. You can blame the project plan if your teammate misses critical deadlines when you really believe that she spent too much time surfing the web instead of working.
The consequences for these dishonesties are relatively slight in the near term, and for the sake of camaraderie you will be tempted to take this path. Don’t. This is credit-card morality, and eventually you have to pay the bill, with interest. Your character is shaped by your habits, and your habits are shaped by repeated action. Don’t develop a dishonest character.
Starting on the path of honesty early will serve you well long into the future. You’ll develop tact and grace, learning how to be honest without being mean, in a much lower stakes environment than if you don’t start until you are the leader of an outsized team. And you’ll develop a reputation for forthrightness that will serve you well as you are considered for advancement.
To become an enlightened leader, as Robert Frost phrased it, take the road “less traveled by”: be honest.
Balance: no one dies wishing they had gone to more meetings
Shoot for balance in everything you do.
Balance rest with exercise, work with play, professional with personal relationships. Make time for the personal and spiritual as well as the professional.
I am privileged to be part a fantastic organization. The organization I work in is one of the largest in the world, full of genuinely brilliant, hardworking, dedicated technologists who create and build a better service, a better reality for our users, every day. To become, and remain, excellent the people doing the creating have to give 110% of themselves to what we are doing. That means they have to be fresh, focused, and on their game all the time.
And that in turn means balance. The image of the mid-1990s Silicon Valley technology company is the picture of an imbalance: people focused singly and completely on the work aspect of their lives. Silicon Valley technologists in technology-boom sweatshops moved constantly from one company to another. I have interviewed many job candidates who have had five or more jobs in as many years, and this was normal for the time. Why so much movement? Burnout!
With so much energy and time devoted to a single effort, these folks were eventually totally drained of energy, drive, and the resources to continue. Rather than looking into themselves for the source of the problem, they wrongly associated it with the biggest thing in their lives, their job, and moved to another job. Instead of finding a greener pasture, however, they simply substituted one place of imbalance for another, and were soon unhappy and moving again, only to repeat the cycle.
Don’t think about the pink elephants
Technology is about creating. As a technologist, you are painting (or sculpting or scripting) the future. Creation is driven by inspiration, and leading the charge to shape the future is about being inspired to explore fundamentally new directions. In order to open yourself up to this kind of inspiration, first you have to have a variety of experiences, and to be open to what they are telling you. Your mind does its most powerful work in the subconscious, and this fact can work for you in two ways.
Let’s say you are dealing with a challenging problem you’ve been bumping up against for weeks. You’ve pulled all-nighters, bugged your friends, read the manual (ack!), tried every avenue, and still no luck. While you are consciously working on this, your subconscious knows about the problem. But it recognizes that at least part of your brain is dealing with this problem, and so it spends its time lolling about, thinking about lollipops and big fluffy clouds.
However, if you take a break—and I mean a real break where you are completely focused for a short time on something else—your subconscious will quickly freak out. Worried that the Big Problem isn’t being worked on any more, it kicks into high gear on solving it. You get all this work for “free”: you aren’t aware of the energy going into the problem, because your conscious is spending energy on your new task. The next day, or next week, out pops the solution while you are in the shower or just nodding off to sleep. Now this is the way to work.
Getting your subconscious to pay rent
The best way to make sure that your subconscious is pulling its weight for you all the time is to have a balanced life. You’ve heard the expression “work hard and play hard.” It’s not a bad start for a worn out slogan. Have a complete professional life, be dedicated to it, and give it your all when you are at work. Just don’t be at work all the time. Have a hobby. Play a sport. Babysit your niece. Exercise regularly. Spend time with your family, and really be with them. Turn your cell phone, and pager, and Blackberry, and laptop, and desktop Off for some focused activity away from work every day. In this way you’ll feel more complete, have a richer range of experiences, and acquire a more fully developed sense of yourself. And you’ll be sure that your subconscious isn’t living off the welfare system while you break your back to support it.
Oh, and if you are a system administrator, the odds are fairly good that building a Linux cluster in your bedroom at night is not going to count toward your hobby quota. Do something different that uses different neurons, and preferably a few fast twitch muscles once in a while.
And in case you are thinking: “Well, that’s all fine for the bourgeoisie, but I’m important! He can’t mean that I should tune out.” You aren’t, and I do. If you really are so important, then build an organization that supports you, not the other way around, and then do them all a favor by giving them a well-rounded personality to lead them onward, further and higher.
The rest of the balance story
Having a balanced life has other benefits beyond just supercharging your creativity. When you have failures or when you experience setbacks, you will not fall as far or land as hard. If your identity is completely determined by your job and your job doesn’t go well, your self-image and confidence will start to erode. This will cause you to perform even more poorly, leading to further erosion of your sense of self. Before you know it, you are in a negative spiral from which there is no evident escape. But if you have balance, in other words if you have a rewarding personal and professional life, you have a buffer against difficulties in either portion of your life.
To become an enlightened leader, seek balance.
Givers get
The principle behind tithing in major religions is that we have an obligation to reinvest some of the blessings that we have received into our less fortunate fellow human beings, perhaps through a community, church, or order. This money is then used to reach out to and create spiritual, financial, professional, and personal opportunities for the needy. Many of the religions that don’t require a tithe specifically—such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Eastern Orthodoxy—emphasize charity and “voluntary stewardship” as virtues.
I believe firmly that in all aspects of life, not just the spiritual, getting is really about giving. In my opinion, we all have an obligation to be involved, and to give back.
So what does this have to do with leadership? Leaders see the world as it could be, if only X. X could be a product, a service, an invention, or a new way for people to interact together to build communities of interest. It is almost always the case that the leader cannot accomplish his or her vision without a team. Teams are composed of individuals each having some of the skills you need to accomplish your goal, to make your vision of reality a … well … reality. Starting now, wherever you are in your training or career, you are building teams, and you will need teams for the rest of your life.
Take every opportunity to give back to those around you, first because it is the Right Thing To Do. We all share life’s road, so make an opportunity to lighten someone else’s load on the way. Second, and far more mercenary, you should do this because it will cement your personal relationships and grow your network of potential teammates.
In the course of your life, much of your giving will be of your knowledge, perspective, and experience to those around you. You can and should give money and time to people and causes of interest to you, and many people do. However most of these resources are limited, and you can only give them so many times before there is nothing left. Your knowledge and skills can be given without limit to as many people you encounter who are interested in learning from you and who then subsequently teach others. This kind of giving is fashionably called mentoring, but it’s really teaching.
An apple a day
Teaching is a truly magical way to give. The giver wins in two ways. The obvious benefit is that by sharing your knowledge with others you increase their skills and abilities. You make them more valuable as part of your potential team. Also, you’ll quickly find people who learn things in different ways that complement your own learning style. Or you may find people who have strengths that you don’t have—strengths you may need later.
It is less obvious, but just as important, that the teacher derives substantial benefits from the very act of teaching. When we learn something new, we ideally learn it in two stages. First, we “head-learn” a new idea. At this stage, we intellectually understand a concept and can act upon our knowledge but we have to “think” about it first. We have to tug these general concepts out of our memory and perhaps wrestle them into a particular form that applies in a particular situation.
Concepts that are head-learned usually hang around only while we need them—stop using a head-learned concept, and it will usually leave to make room for something else. For example, I have no idea what the electron structure of oxygen is anymore, but at one time I could act on that knowledge and cough it back up on chemistry tests (I have forgotten most of what I head-learned in my life, but I do have a large and bizarre store of useless information taking up space in my head; for no good reason I can still remember that the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066, and I remember lists of the linking verbs—always a great way to break the ice at a party).
The next, deeper, and much more important, stage of learning is “heart-learning.” At this stage you have taken a concept and integrated it into your worldview. It is a part of who you are, and you act upon this knowledge without having to activate it consciously. For most of us, knowing left from right is heart-learned: this distinction is instinctive to us and we know it without having to access the left/right memory and process it before making a choice in our actions.
Teaching is one of the best ways to heart-learn something. Communicating a new concept to someone else forces you to address all the little details you skipped over when you were learning. Now you must put the whole picture together in a way that your student can adopt (and, if necessary, adapt). Also the process of watching someone learn something you know will show you new perspectives on your topic. We all learn in different ways. Your student will ask questions on aspects that didn’t occur to you, forcing you to shine light into the dark corners of your own understanding. He or she will stumble on things that were easy for you, and in explaining them you’ll realize that you perhaps didn’t understand them so well yourself the first time, and, prodded by the student’s need, you will finally figure them out fully only now.
Teaching is the best way to learn, and your knowledge and skills are some of the most precious resources you can share with others.
To become an enlightened leader, give generously of your time, knowledge, experience, and perspective to those around you.
