Chapter 2:
Enlightened Technology Leadership and Managing People
This chapter covers some of the principles of the philosophy of enlightened technology leadership that will apply to you as you move up in your organization, gaining responsibility for and authority over larger and larger groups of people and projects. The principles in this chapter don’t replace what we’ve already discussed. The previous chapter outlines the overarching philosophy of enlightened technology leadership. The principles apply to everyone at all levels of experience and success.
If you can learn to apply those principles to your life in such a way that they become a heart-learned part of everything you do, then almost always you will be given the opportunity to advance in your organization. This will happen because you’ll stand out as someone with “potential” and “the right attitude.”
Not everyone will take this opportunity. Not everyone should take this opportunity. Some folks feel a very strong individual desire to stay on the front lines of individual creativity without the burdens of being responsible for others, and this is perfectly fine—heck, statistically it’s required. Everyone can’t be in charge. But if you do feel called to contribute as part of your organization’s executing team (sometimes referred to as “management,” more below), you’ll have the opportunity to create or sustain a culture of change, creativity, and empowerment.
The principles in this chapter will show you how. Start learning these principles now, along with the core principles in the last chapter. You usually aren’t given a lot of warning before you are promoted and need to apply them. It could happen tomorrow … are you ready?
Oh, Mr. Webster…
First, we need some definitions to make this chapter work. The trouble is that the words “management” and “manager” have become so overloaded. In one context, they simply refer to the body of executives who are responsible for making the decisions and operating your organization. In another context, the words refer to the principles and those who apply them. The term thinks of people as resources to be placed against tasks and motivated to perform against schedules and milestones, whether they supervise other people or not.
The term I’ll use to refer to the folks in charge is the “executing team”. Don’t misread that as Executive Team, that group of folks in the executive suite with passes to the private boxes at sports stadiums. In this book the phrase executing team will refer to anyone who’s leading a project or people or making decisions on the directions of the organization (you know, folks who “execute” the mission of the team). This really broad definition captures everyone from team leaders to presidents, and is what people sometimes mean when they say “management” or “management team.”
But when I say “management” I’ll be referring to the acts of—or processes related to—stimulating, motivating, and guiding people through the organizational red tape to get actual work done.
This book is about leadership. Management has a place, and leaders need to know the skills of management (managers likewise need to know the skills of leadership, but too often don’t). Leading is where the magic is, though, and that’s where you should focus your lifelong learning energies. By the time you are managing a project, you’ve already worked all the fun out of it. Well, I have anyway.
So, you’re a “manager”
First of all, don’t be. A manger, that is.
As we discussed in the last chapter, leaders and managers differ in their approach to motivating people. Management is about directing and prodding people (the way the shepherd and his sheep dogs prod the sheep); it’s about keeping a group of people within a predefined set of parameters to produce a product or service in the way that it has always been produced. It can require a lot of effort on the manager’s part; the manager pushes those around him to produce. (Not that the manager is a bully, but the idea of pushing here is to be contrasted with what happens when people are led: they follow under their own energy.)
Management is a necessary part of most organizations, and there are definite functions in which it can exist successfully apart from leadership. For example, in technology companies, the infrastructure teams (those responsible for the physical plant, manufacturing facilities, office space, etc.) and operators (often hourly workers who monitor terminals in large computer centers for signs of trouble and call in administrators to address the problems) are in charge of functions that can be successfully managed. Innovation isn’t usually expected, even in really forward-thinking organizations.
However, even these functions can be led from success to excellence by someone willing to do the job differently than it’s always been done. People inclined only to management are a dime a dozen, and there are precious few functions that can be only managed and still achieve success. A leader, on the other hand, is a much scarcer commodity, and his or her leadership can be used anywhere to advantage.
I personally think that managers are a dime a dozen because management appears easy. And, it is easy to do at the low level of performance at which most people practice this craft. Good managers are as rare as giant, perfect gemstones. Once you’ve gotten a feel for leadership, you should study this craft as well. Do both well, and you can be president of your world.
Technology is for creative types
In most technology companies, services like facilities or physical-plant management are provided to support the creative force behind the company. Creative? Yup!
Despite all the press from the art community that would indicate they have the lock on the world’s creative output, technology professionals are creative people. We create the products, services, and technologies that will shape how we meet, greet, and interact with one another and with our environment in the future. I have found that I have creative people do not respond well to management.
Management creates boxes and moves people and tasks around within them. Boxes do not lead to innovation and creation. They don’t create the kinds of environments in which a single lightning bolt of an idea can shape an entire industry.
A small part of the creative environment can be nurtured by the physical workplace itself. This is why Silicon Valley companies provide free soda and snacks, pool tables and video games, and other premium services to their employees. But the biggest part is the intellectual and emotional environment that leaders create. This is why hugely innovative new companies can still innovate on TV trays in their Mom’s garage, and why brilliant new approaches to fundamental problems sometimes rocket out of the sometimes depressingly under-funded facilities of major university and government labs.
Lead to create, manage to quell
In large measure, creativity in technology professionals is stimulated by the degree to which they are led. There’s more: creativity is stifled in proportion to the degree to which these professionals are managed.
Technology professionals want to have a direction, with broad outlines of a plan, and then be let loose to create the best solution to get to the goal. They want to contribute, be recognized, and feel they made a difference.
This is absolutely not easy. I’ve worked with and for a lot of managers, and a few leaders. All of the managers had different personalities, and different personality traits. But in general managers who aren’t also leaders are dictators. Some of my managers were benevolent dictators, content not to micromanage my every action so long as I didn’t ask too many questions and “stayed in line.” Some of them were the kind of people you often see running small South American countries after a violent coup. They ruled by intimidation and fear.
Both management styles control information as an effective means of controlling their teams and their management’s perception of how well they are doing their jobs. They create an information black hole: a lot goes in, but very little ever comes out, little goes up or down the chain of command.
In my case, these dictators appeared effective by most direct organizational measurements. Their projects were usually delivered on time, and few personnel problems ever percolated up to senior management. This is partly because of the rigid control of the flow of information which these dictatorial mangers maintained.
Margin people and the New Deal
Information-control managers can also appear successful partly because over time they attract the “margin people.” Margin people are the folks who want a job where they clock in, are present for eight hours, and clock out. They do what they are asked to do (after the third or fourth time). They require close management because the minute someone isn’t paying attention to them they are surfing the web or napping in their cubicle.
Margin people don’t complain because it takes too much work. They have a bargain with their manager that lets them do the bare minimum, so long as they don’t make waves for management. When a competent, driven person joins one of these teams, he quickly realizes that he is not in a creative situation that will let him grow and contribute in a meaningful way. Sooner or later these people leave for another group or another company, most often without ever having complained (what would it accomplish?).
Talent follows the leadership gradient: good teams get better by attracting the best performers, and bad teams get worse as they continue to drive away anyone not in the margin. I have been part of this cycle myself, leaving underperforming teams that were managed by dictators (good and bad) for teams that were led by leaders.
Although the bad managers in my experience appeared effective by some of our organizational measures, the teams never innovated, never surprised, and never did more than just barely meet expectations. In other words, they didn’t move forward. Not moving forward in technology means you are falling behind.
The mandate for leadership
This is the business motivation for the mandate for leaders to foster creativity. But it is not the most important motivation.
The strongest motivation for leading in technology rather than managing is that the technology community isn’t just providing jobs for engineers and scientists and profits for investors. We have responsibility for shaping the future. We owe it to the world to ensure that we put the best minds, motivated to their full potential, to the task of making sure that this future is a future of abundance for everyone. This only happens with leadership.
Don’t complain about the world; change it through enlightened leadership.
The circle of life
Leading a team is hard, mostly because managing seems to be part of our nature. To know and control everything that goes on around you always seems to be the best way to minimize your risk of failure or of being seen to make a public mistake.
You will find yourself fighting the manager within you on a daily basis, at least early in your career. I make it a point at least once a day to think about the decisions I have made and critically evaluate them. Did I micromanage? Did I specify a solution when I should have just communicated the problem and let the team find its own solution? Did I assign a decision to someone and then not follow the direction he or she picked?
When my review turns up an un-leaderly action, I undo it. If I can’t undo it, I find the person that I failed and apologize. Every time. You won’t always do the right thing the first time. Make the lesson stick—heart-learn it—by fixing your mistake quickly and as publicly as is appropriate.
Also, I rely on my mentors here. When I am unsure of my own motives, I always find a sounding board in one of them before I act. I may still follow my original intention, but this step gives me the chance to refine my plan and at least be aware of any shortcomings before I get started. Sometimes my judgment is clouded by my own emotional response to a perceived slight or threat (leading is a human activity, after all, and we human beings are filled to overflowing with emotions).
At these times, my mentors never hesitate to lead me to see this for myself, usually before I’ve acted. Very occasionally my boss, who is a leader, will see something in my actions that I have not seen. At these times he’ll pull me into his office, close the door, and constructively correct me. We are friends, and this isn’t easy for him. He does it to make me a better leader by helping me look into my blind spots. He and I also know that this sets the example for me to do the right thing even when it is not personally pleasant.
Keep this in mind when you are interacting with your friends and coworkers and do the right thing: you never know who is learning from your example.
Success and your new job
OK, so you want to be a part of the executing team, but not just as a manager. How will you know if you’re doing it right? Or wrong?
You will know that you have been successful in your drive to lead rather than manage when you become the least important person in your organization.
Decisions—the right decisions—will be made and actions taken even before you are aware of what’s happened. Initiatives will grow around the themes that you set. Problems will be identified and solutions crafted by the people most affected. All of this will happen without your direct involvement and sometimes without your direct knowledge. The daily stuff will just get done, and you’ll find yourself with time to think. Time to lead.
The least important person?
So it’s a bit of hyperbole to say that you will be the least important person in your organization. There are decisions and responsibilities that you must take on your own. They are the job of the person in charge.
But at some point, when your team is large enough, your job won’t be to do any of the work that your organization does. Your job will be to enable other people to succeed.
This was a big adjustment for me. I was used to doing, and my transition to management involved a rather unusual jump from a two-person team to a hundred-person organization and a big mission (remember when I said you don’t always get a lot of notice?).
At first I tried to stay very hands on, actually doing some of the same work I had been doing before I took over as director of my organization. It was a hard lesson for me that this was not going to work. I was unavailable when things needed to be done or when people needed to see me. There were decisions that were legitimately mine to make that I didn’t take time to handle because I was still doing the job that I used to do; the job that someone else now had. My job was now to set the stage for the team’s success, to define the tone of the workplace for the team, to identify and nurture each team member’s special talents, and to form a vision for where we would go from here.
As Joseph Jaworski, author of Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership (San Francisco, 1996), points out, before you can lead others you have to know who you are. Rather than enforcing your will upon your organization, you have to make yourself available to others to shape and mold them into the people who will execute your mission as if it were their own. This kind of leader is self-aware. Self-aware people know what motivates them, and can recognize these factors in others even if the others do not see these traits in themselves. A self-aware person with a vision rightly comes across as credible, honest, and nurturing. People sense the genuine desire to help rather than push, and they respond to that. At the same time, the leader is prepared to make, and capable of making, the final decision.
Your Plan of Action
So, where do you start? Your plan of action for leading—rather than managing—your team is short. There are three disciplines on which you must focus:
- Setting the tone
- Creating and nurturing teams
- Informing and infusing your vision
If you master these three approaches and focus on implementing them as “your job,” you’ll be leading. The rest of the sections in this chapter will help you learn how to make these principles part of everything you do.
Tone up!
One of the things that is your job, and that you must never shirk, is to set the tone. “Tone” is the general atmosphere that you create in your workplace or for your team.
This is one area where you really should lead by example. You should start by communicating the basics of what you stand for. How you do this depends on the size of your team, and your personal style.
If you are comfortable talking about the softer things in life, your values and life philosophy, then you may want to consider having a team meeting where you outline your values explicitly. This is a pretty good life exercise as well, because it gives you the opportunity to give some thought to what you actually do stand for, and the act of articulating it for others will crystallize it for you.
Standing up in front of a group and articulating what you stand for, possibly even with slides, will bring visions of 7th-grade poetry recitations and night sweats to many of you. If you aren’t comfortable doing this, it will be clear to your audience, and your message will get lost in your discomfort. You’ll likely lose more than you could possibly gain.
If you have comfort issues with this kind of formal presentation, you do have other options. Look for opportunities in everyday interactions to highlight the values behind the decisions you are asked to make. For example, consider a situation in which you are working on a project report with one of your teammates. Faced with a decision to finesse the project progress numbers or be honest about a schedule slip in a project, choose the path of honesty, and tell your teammate why you made the decision to be honest. For example, instead of just saying “let’s put the real numbers in,” say something like “well, I’ve always believed that it really is best to be honest. It’s going to mean some tough questions from the boss, but I think this is the best way to go in the long run.”
There may arise a case when you must consider finding a way to deal with any discomfort you may have about a values presentation. If you are suddenly assigned to a large organization in which you have had no previous leadership role, you almost have to have an introductory all-hands meeting where you introduce yourself and your values to your new team.
This is the situation in which I found myself in charge of the executing team in my organization. I had been a part of the organization for about eight years, but my only official management position up to then had included responsibility over a group of one. Most of the team knew me, but only as a familiar face. They didn’t know what I stood for, or what my goals for the center would be. There was a lot of uncertainty in the center about the new young pup, and uncertainty causes discomfort and distraction. Being an engineer, I determined to fix this situation by calling an all-hands meeting and talking about what’s important to me, what people could expect from me, and what I expected from them. I’m very comfortable talking in front of large groups, and I’m also fairly comfortable talking about what’s important to me, since I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about it, figuring it out for myself. Also, I was taking over a situation in which morale had been pushed down by a management style that did not focus on creativity and the power of teams to affect the direction of the organization. In this context it was especially important for me to state up front that there was a new sheriff in town with new values and ideas about success.
I focused the talk around my core values: respect, integrity, honesty, and teamwork. To help my message stick, I created an acronym around these four values, right. It was more than a little corny to add the acronym, and I debated for a long time about whether to use it. It did give people something to walk away with, and got them talking about my message. Even if the conversations started with “Can you believe how corny that was?” at least some of the hall talk I heard then continued on to the core of what I said.
In the end I think the details of what I said were less important, in the specific atmosphere I inherited, than the fact that I said something about my beliefs. The impact you have will vary depending upon the prevailing mood of your team.
Overall, the talk went fairly well, with lots of questions about how I would translate my values into specific, concrete changes in the organization. Some were hostile, “Just because you say you value teamwork doesn’t mean you will.” And some were less so. I didn’t convince everyone that anything would change, and I didn’t expect to do so. But what I did accomplish was to give everyone a mental list of how things could be different. As they saw real examples of my values being put into action, these examples would register against the mental list, and slowly everyone would recognize the change in culture that was occurring. If I hadn’t given the talk and planted the list in everyone’s head, many people wouldn’t have been “watching” for the change, even if only subconsciously. These people would have kept working the old, anti-team way, because they weren’t primed for change.
People hate change. What they hate even more than change, however, is not being on the train with everyone else as it leaves the station. In changing the culture of a workplace, you can use this stay-in-the-gang mentality to reach the most hardened staff members and bring them over to the new way of thinking.
Set the tone in your organization by telling everyone what you stand for, and what they can expect from you. If you are, or can become, comfortable doing it in a formal all-hands presentation, then do it that way. This will put you on record with a public commitment that you won’t soon break.
Putting on the boots: defend your core values
So far we’ve focused on how to positively shape the tone of your organization for success. Leaders put their stamp on their organizations most powerfully in this way. However from time to time you will be required to define the other side of tone, and take action when people act in ways destructive to what you are trying to create.
This is another of those areas that is your job, and no one else’s. As a rule, never delegate bad news. If you find an encounter difficult, there are ways to manage that, and we’ll cover some of them in the second half of this book. But if you want to lead, you’ve got to lead from the front. This means that hard decisions and bad news are yours exclusively. When people talk about accountability, this is part of what they mean.
Each leader has to decide what the core values are in her leadership philosophy, and act to protect those values when they are threatened. All of the aspects of the philosophy of enlightened leadership in this book are important to me. Honesty, integrity, teamwork, and accountability are the cornerstones of effective leadership. Although I always defend each of the values, I personally always act most swiftly to defend the integrity of the team. The very few times that I’ve had to dismiss individuals from my organization have been for anti-team behavior. When taking corrective action, however, you have to be careful to do it right.
Corrections done correctly
Be clear in everything
First and foremost, when correcting an employee, be direct and honest. Beating around the bush, using euphemisms, or being indirect will simply not do. You cannot risk anything to interpretation or misunderstanding. In other words, don’t try to finesse the situation.
Now, I’m not suggesting that you should be cruel or “brutally honest.” When possible (and it usually is possible, but not always), you should assume from the beginning that the employee being counseled does not in good faith realize that his actions have been harmful. You must take into account that this discussion may bruise his self-image. If it is the case that you have assumed correctly and the employee sincerely wants to do a good job, his self-image will be bruised. This is unavoidable, but your honesty and direct approach will ensure that you are maximizing your chances not to have to repeat this correction in the future, and a slight bruise will help to reinforce the lesson. If you have assumed incorrectly—the employee is aware that his actions were harmful—you will be acting from the safer, high ground of presumption of innocence which will put you in a stronger position if you do have to act to remove him or her from your team.
Keep in mind that in today’s increasingly litigious society it is always a good idea to get an outside opinion on your course of action before you initiate this conversation. Talk to someone you trust, one or more of your mentors, and depending upon what you anticipate might be the final outcome, you may want to review your plans and options with your Human Resources or Staffing department ahead of time as well. This will ensure that you are dealing from a position of strength that you know will ultimately be supported and supportable by your organization.
Explain yourself
Always explain why you are taking action. Remember, you are assuming that the person involved has no idea that his or her actions were destructive. Don’t assume that the undesirability or impact of the actions is recognized, and be prepared to say why you view those as destructive. Unless the employee understands exactly what he did wrong and why it was wrong, he’s likely to repeat the behavior.
Start small
Don’t act publicly unless the wrong action warrants it and you are completely sure of the facts. Very few infractions require an immediate and public correction. Public corrections can be extremely effective—public shaming has been used since biblical times as a very powerful punishment and deterrent. But if you act too quickly without all the facts, you will reduce your own credibility enormously. Even more importantly, you’ll have committed a wrong against the person in question from which it will be fairly difficult for both you and the person to recover.
Start small, escalate methodically
When you do start small, take escalating actions, culminating in dismissal or transfer as a last resort for repeated infractions. When your team sees that your core values apply only some of the time for some of the people, everyone will start to disregard them as meaningless marketing, and you will cease to be a leader.
Get the facts
Make sure you talk to everyone involved, and follow the chain of command. If there are five people involved in an incident, talk to all five—separately. It has been my experience that no matter how black and white an incident appears, there is often a mitigating factor. Make sure you know what it is before you proceed.
Correct down
Corrections should be managed at the lowest appropriate level in your team commensurate with the degree of the infraction in question. You want to empower your managers (assuming you have some below you) to do their job. Talk to them about your concerns, and let them handle the incident if it is appropriate. You’ll want to handle problems in your management team itself, or problems of sufficiently large scope or severity, on your own. But even then if you are taking action against one of your managers’ team members, coordinate with them ahead of time so they know what is going on and why. Incidents that I always handle myself, no matter where in my organization they happen, are harassment issues, anti-team behavior with a large scope or very public outcome, security violations, and anything that will or could result in employee dismissal or administrative leave, or conviction for a crime.
Remember the Golden Rule, and then live by it
Finally, give everyone a fair chance. Presume innocence and ignorance over guilt and malfeasance. If your tactics aren’t working, make sure you’ve communicated your concerns frankly and directly. Rely on your mentors before you take precipitous actions. And when you do become emotionally involved in a particular issue, find a way for someone else to handle the situation with you as a check on your own behavior.
Create and Nurture Teams
Nothing is impossible if you are willing to give the credit for the accomplishment to others. This is the magic of having a team. As the popular business saying goes, “TEAM: Together Everyone Achieves Miracles.”
We’ve already talked a lot about teams; this is another example of how the principles of enlightened technology leadership are all intertwined and support one another. But there are a few things to say about how you actually go about the business of starting and running teams.
Traits of a Team
Like leadership, teams cannot be simply ordered into existence. A team is created when a group of individuals, each contributing his or her unique talents and expertise, work together to achieve a single purpose. This is collaboration, and while the only trait of a leader is having followers, the only trait of a team is collaboration.
Just as the term “leader” is overloaded with the concept of anyone in a position of authority in an organization, so too is the term “team” overloaded. Since the team concept is in fashion these days, any group of individuals stuck together to complete a project is called a team. If they aren’t motivated, coordinated, and collaborating, they aren’t a real team. They are a mere collection of individuals.
We used to have “team projects” in my undergraduate computer-science classes. Either the professor would assign a group of us to work together on the project or some of us who always sat together would team up. Either way, these team projects were the poster children for what a team is not. We were four different people, probably with different majors, different outlooks on grades and studies, different social obligations and personal relationships, and different goals in life and different goals for the class and the assignment. There were no rallying points to pull us together—no motivation or vision for all of us to work toward accomplishing. We were not a team. In this situation the person who cares the most does the project and gets the “A” that the rest of the individuals take credit for. No doubt you’ve had similar experiences, either in school or in your professional career.
Structure of teams
It is a fact that the projects we deal with on a daily basis in our technology careers are far too complex for a single person. The days of the lone ranger were past with the first version of the 8-track tape player. Things get done in teams now, pretty much exclusively. A given project may have thousands of team members, but it is almost always divided and divided again to create units of work that are manageable by small teams who nest together under the subproject leads.
This nesting of teams within teams to form small work units is an artifact of managing. It is easier to manage a small group than a large group. And the hierarchical relationships which this approach creates mirror the standard corporate structure, which is also hierarchical—so the managers can report to other managers who report to übermanagers, and so on without anyone having to write a lot of memos setting the project up. These are not good reasons to run projects this way.
Even so, in this case you don’t have to buck the corporate wisdom to be successful. Here’s why.
As I’ve already said, what you need for a successful team is a group of people motivated around a common vision, collaborating on a single set of accomplishments, each contributing his or her most relevant skills. This requires leadership. You will have to infuse each of the team members personally with enough of your vision and enthusiasm to focus the strengths of all of them on solving the problems at hand. You will have to know the strengths and weaknesses of each team member, and work to match tasks to talents. You will have to be open and honest, handing out compliments and admonishments alike immediately upon being earned. In this kind of environment, everyone is filling a vital role, knows what his or her role is, and knows exactly where he or she fits. This should make each individual confident and comfortable. When we are confident and comfortable, we can create. And we can think out of the box to contribute new ideas without fear of rejection, because our other teammates are similarly motivated and focused. This is real magic, and as a young leader, you will find that this is easiest to create with a small team.
Note that I said “easiest to do,” not “easy to do.” If it were easy, all teams would achieve miracles. They don’t, because building and leading a team this way is not easy. You will probably not be successful on your first couple of attempts, but the nice thing about failing with this approach is that your teams will still be more energized, creative, and productive than teams resulting from more traditional management approaches.
Everyone has a starring role
What you must seek as the leader of your organization or team, to the exclusion of all other options, is a situation in which everyone involved benefits in a real way. In other words, you must look for the “win-win” solution.
I know, that phrase “win-win” sounds like a late-night infomercial for real estate, the kind that makes you cringe and turn the channel. But win-win situations really do exist, and you can find them everywhere. There is enough credit, success, happiness, fulfillment, and motivation for everyone to have their fill.
Take the case of your first assignment as team leader. You have a tight deadline, with too much work to do, and one of your small team isn’t performing. Your first instinct is to shuffle him or her out of your group and find someone new who can perform. At best this is a win-lose deal: you win by getting a new team member, but the original team member loses out on an opportunity to grow and if you aren’t up front with the group that receives your problem employee, then they lose too. More likely though, this will turn into a draw-lose or a lose-lose deal as you discover that your new wunderkind has his or her own problem issues.
So how to make this a win-win deal? As we discussed earlier in the section about excellence, the vast majority of failures are due to the system, not to the employee. Almost everyone wants to do a good job. What you have to do is to look at the current situation, your project and its tasks, from a new angle. How can you match what needs to be done with what your problem team member is capable of doing really well? What is he or she interested in? A lot of times this requires some shuffling and reorganizing. For example, you may not have planned to write the user’s manual or do a marketing plan for your team’s new widget for another three months, but if that’s something of real interest to your problem team member you might consider assigning that job to him now. He’ll be grateful for the chance to show his stuff and so will work extra hard. You could get more than you expected from the product, and add a whole new dimension to your success at the end of the project. Win for him, win for you, and win for your organization. What’s even better is that you’ve laid up stores of good will for the future. Your team has seen that you treat everyone with compassion and respect. They now know that you aren’t likely to toss any of them out at the first sign of trouble, and this loyalty will bring new life and creativity to your team. And your “problem” team member now feels an even deeper connection to the team that helped find a way for him or her to be successful.
This looks as if it is about creating and nurturing teams, and there is a component of that in this concept. All of the concepts behind being an enlightened leader are intertwined and support one another. But the big picture here is that you are setting a tone for the organization that says you are committed to facilitating your team’s success by looking for an opportunity for all its individuals to be in their starring role. Even when you do have to help someone move on to another opportunity to become successful, he and everyone remaining will know that you are operating from a good motivation, not from negative energy.
Set the tone for success by making it your job to find everyone’s starring role.
Everyone’s gotta row
There is another issue that is closely tied to the motivation to find a starring role for every member of your team. Remember earlier when we talked about teams we talked about everyone being focused around a single motivating set of goals with each member contributing according to his or her own special talents, skills, and interests. This is how a true team functions, and everyone feeds from the successes and dedication of the other team members. When one link in that chain is broken—when one or more team members are not contributing, or aren’t focused on the team goal—then the team starts to suffer. Productivity and creativity are reduced, and in the worst cases the team breaks up into a collection of individuals, or the firm goes out of business.
You do not have a place on a good team for people who don’t contribute anything. The price is simply too high. Some organizations are large enough to carry a couple folks who aren’t performing. Don’t make this mistake. The cost is far higher than the salaries of one or two people. These one or two people will eat at the productivity, drive, and creativity of your entire team.
Think of your organization as a canoe. The only way to get where you are going is for everyone to row, in the same direction, and at the same time.
A note about contractors and outside support
As a special note, let me say a word about handling contractors. In technology, especially in technology in the federal government, contractors play a large role in getting things done. Technology organizations must respond quickly to changing markets and changing customer needs, and a very effective way to do this is to hire teams of established expertise via external contracts rather than (or in parallel with) building an in-house team of expertise.
Every organization has its own laws and procedures for dealing with contractors, and as part of the management team you’ll need to be aware of these rules and abide by them.
However, I urge you to view all the members of your team, whether contract or in-house, as full citizens of your team and your organization’s family. If you want everyone to give 110% of their best creative energy, then everyone needs to feel that they are part of the family and that they matter. If you are seen taking great lengths to nurture your in-house team, but dismiss your contractors immediately at the first sign of difficulty, then your contractors will not feel that they are valued contributors, and your in-house team will feel an unhealthy superiority. The result will be a rift in your workforce, and the destruction of the team. Do not make this mistake. As a leader, make sure everyone has a starring role, and that everyone is valued for her or his contribution, not for who signs the paycheck.
Empowerment: Infuse and Inform Your Vision
There has been a lot of talk about empowerment in recent years—it’s one of those $50 management buzzwords that spawn whole management consulting cottage industries. But what is it really, and why do you want some?
According to the American Heritage Dictionary, there are two definitions for the verb “empower.” This first is “to invest with power, especially legal power or official authority.” The second is “to equip or supply with an ability; enable.” These are ideal definitions in the context of this chapter, because the point is that in doing the first, you get the second.
Empowerment is about putting your team members in a position to make decisions for themselves without having to consult with the boss first. Your goal for your organization is to have the right decision made as quickly as possible. This makes you agile, and being successful in the technology business is all about the ability to respond quickly to changes in the demand for your product or service. The least difficult way to accomplish this goal is to make those decisions as close as possible to the place in the organization that needs the answer. If the development team has to run every decision all the way up to the CEO of the company, then that product is not likely to come to market anytime soon.
The most important information that your decision-makers will need is an understanding of your vision. Everyone needs to understand the big picture of where you want to go and how (generally) to get there. This understanding of your vision provides the framework within which all the small pieces of information and small decisions that must be made every day can fit. Getting this understanding to everyone in the organization is the inform portion of the empowerment recipe.
Understanding that the vision provides the framework for all decision-making makes it clear that as the decisions grow bigger the depth of familiarity with and understanding of your vision both need to grow. Normally this means that the leaders in your organization who report directly to you need to be most intimately familiar with the details of your vision. Those farther away make smaller decisions, and so need less of the detail, provided the foundation is solid. Achieving this balance between the general aspects of your vision and the details of its accomplishment is the infuse portion of the recipe.
Hmmm. Sounds hard: why bother?
To achieve success, big success, lasting success, and success that goes beyond what one person can accomplish, you must inform and infuse your goals and vision into your team. Your team needs enough information and explanation that they can heart-learn what you are trying to accomplish. With this heart-learning, they will be able to make decisions on their own. If they are making the decisions based on their understanding of your vision, then guess what: it’s their vision too. This is absolutely vital to success.
Anytime you must approve or review something, you create a bottleneck. What you need in order to create a standout success of your project is the minimum number of bottlenecks. There is only one of you, and five, seven, or ten members on your team. If you create an environment in which no one but you knows where they are headed, you’ll have to make all the decisions for everyone. Big or small, the problems will come to you. In the best case, you won’t get any of your own work done because you’ll be constantly fielding questions. In the worst case, no one else will get anything done either because they’ll all be waiting for you as you deal with their teammates’ problems. Every bottleneck is added risk of failure. Avoid becoming one.
Empowerment is also vital to success because it multiplies your opportunities for breakthrough. We bring to every situation we face the lens of our past experience. No two people have the same past experiences, which means that everyone’s lens is at least slightly different. These lenses provide us with our perspective, and it is through these lenses that each of us evaluates and analyzes situations and challenges. Breakthroughs are achieved when someone thinks outside the box and comes up with a new way of addressing the challenge at hand. If no one is informed and infused with your vision and goals but you, then you are the only one who even knows where the box is. Unfortunately, because you’ll be solving everyone else’s problems, you won’t have any time to think outside of it.
If everyone on your team is informed and infused with your vision, then the odds of creating something beyond the expected are multiplied by the size of your team. And it gets better. Because these people are motivated and energized around a single vision, because they are collaborating together toward a single goal, they will drive and inspire one another with their own perspectives, and you’ll actually see an exponential growth in creativity; an exponential growth in your ability to create the unexpected.
And if I don’t?
By contrast, if you don’t inform and infuse your vision, if you don’t empower your team, then your only other choice is to manage your team. The best you can hope for is 70 or 80% effectiveness from this approach, and that’s if you are an extremely competent manger—in other words, 80% effort is the upper limit. That final 20 or 30% only comes from the motivation deep inside each individual. You can lead this 30% out of an individual. If you want to get to 110%, and that’s what is needed to really change things, you need a team working together. Their efforts will augment and multiply one another, and together they will accomplish more than was expected. All this magic only happens if you can motivate by leading, not by managing. You have to unlock this motivation and give it a place to stretch its legs.
You can take only 70% out of your team or individuals by managing; you have to be given the rest from a team you are leading.
I’ll take a pack of gum, and a quart of empowerment, please.
So, to empower your team all you need to do is to issue an e-mail telling everyone to start making decisions, right? Notice that I said that empowerment is about you doing something: specifically, it’s about you doing two things. First, it’s about you putting your team in a position to make its own decisions. You, as the leader, have to provide your team with the information they need to make the right decisions in the first place. This means making sure you aren’t the sole caretaker of information in your organization. Second, you have to teach your team how to make decisions and which things are important to you in making those decisions.
Get the words out
You must first inform and infuse your vision throughout your organization, at a level of detail commensurate with the needs and responsibilities of those hearing it.
If the vision is the framework of your metaphorical house, then the rest of the small and large bits of information that fly around an organization every second are the sheetrock, moldings, outlet covers, and paint that make the house habitable. In order to become prepared to make good decisions for the organization, your team not only needs to understand the big picture, they also need to understand the small facts that surround whatever particular issue they are facing right now. You must create a culture that diffuses these facts quickly and efficiently so that the right information gets to those who need it.
One effective solution for information that is sent by e-mail is to set up shared e-mail accounts for team and subteam members. This can work extremely well in those environments that depend heavily on e-mail, especially those that are geographically distributed. I do this in my own organization. Because responsiveness to stakeholders in my program is key, and because much of what we deal with is time-sensitive, I created an e-mail account to which the center secretary, the three assistant directors, and I all have access. Now, rather than stakeholders sending information directly to me, they send that information to this e-mail account. We monitor this account on a daily basis, and coordinate with one another to ensure that we’re covering all the issues. This gets information to all of us at the same time, and also ensures that if someone is distracted or out of the office the issue isn’t likely to go ignored.
This is a technology-centric solution, but there are no-tech options as well that may be just as effective, especially when the volume of information you have to share is low, or when you don’t have many people to share it with. Start a daily status meeting where you share open issues and review status in five minutes or less. Or simply forward critical e-mails and phone messages on to the people involved when you receive them. No matter how you do it though, getting information to the right people when they need it is key to putting them in a position to make the right decision for your organization.
For information that doesn’t start out in written form, a daily status meeting is a good option. Keep the meeting short, five to ten minutes, but use it as an opportunity for teams and functional units to quickly exchange critical, rapidly changing information and statuses about key functions. I also do this in my own organization. I have an operational meeting where all the elements of my team that are responsible for the quality of the experience which the users have in interacting with the center report the major issues of the day and reveal the status on the health of their part of the center. This meeting is time-limited to no more than ten minutes, and I make everyone stand up to ensure that no one settles in and starts filibustering. Occasionally someone will surface a critical issue that needs to be dealt with immediately. In these circumstances we complete the daily meeting in the ten-minute format, and then schedule a follow-on meeting to deal with the critical issue. Sometimes this meeting follows immediately and involves the same people, but we do not break the ten-minute format of the daily status report.
Teach your team
The other key to creating the opportunity for your team to make the right decisions is to share your decision-making process with them. When it is time for you to make a decision, try not to simply declare the answer and move on. If others are to make decisions that reflect the core of what you want done, then others have to understand how you make decisions. As often as you can, lead key decision-makers in your organization through your thought process. Once these key leaders start to get it, make sure that they share this process with their teams, and so on, until the whole organization is sensitized to the issues that you consider before making a decision.
This approach not only prepares your team to make decisions on its own, but it makes your job easier in those cases where you must make the call yourself. Because all members of the team know how you make decisions, they can come to you with the right information the first time, reducing the level of effort you have to invest to research the issue yourself.
One of the ways that I accomplish this goal with my team is that I reflect requests for a decision back to the asker. I do this by asking what they would do, or what they think the right answer is. As they suggest what their course of action would be, I run the suggestions against the various criteria I would use to come to a decision myself, and weigh their options against what I’ve chosen, if I’ve already come to a preliminary conclusion. “That’s a good suggestion, but what about x?” “Have you thought about what happens if all the steps don’t succeed?” “Who has to be notified and when?” And so on. This makes my process more transparent and educates the asker, and repeating this process ensures that everyone can learn incrementally what is important. Once they are consistently making decisions that align with the needs and goals of the organization, I dispense with the roundtable approach and simply ask them to make the decision themselves.
It is interesting that people are sometimes reluctant to take this last step and strike out on their own. They still want to “check in” before taking action, even when their decisions are perfectly aligned with the organization. It is important to push these people out of the nest quickly. This is essentially a self-image or confidence problem, and the only way to solve it is to let them see that they can fly on their own. If they cannot fly on their own, then you have to find a place in your organization where their dependence will not impede progress.
Ready. Set. Get out of the way.
So these steps will get your team to a position of being prepared to make decisions on their own that are in the best interest of the organization. The next thing you have to do is to make sure that you aren’t stopping them.
One of the most harmful things you can do as the leader of a team you are trying to empower is to correct a decision they’ve made. You want to make sure that you do this very rarely, and only when the stakes are high enough that the damage to your organization or goals will be sufficient to outweigh the damage you are going to do to the progress of creating an empowered team.
You can minimize the need for corrections in a couple of ways. First, realize that just because a decision differs from what you would have done, it isn’t necessarily a bad one. There is usually more than one acceptable solution to a problem, and many times there are several good solutions. Be sure before you undo a decision that the consequences really warrant it. If the team decision really would work, but it’s just not the way you would have done it, then don’t say anything.
Second, not all mistakes should be corrected. Let’s say that you have evaluated a particular decision that your team has made, and it really is the wrong way to go. Ask yourself what the consequences are of going in the wrong direction. If they aren’t particularly injurious, your team may be best served by experiencing a failure. Experience is the very best teacher, and often leads straight to heart-learning.
If you only head-learn something—say, that red horseshoes are really hot—then every time you come across a red horseshoe you’ll have to spend some processing time to access the rule about red meaning hot and then act against your urge to pick up the pretty red horseshoe. If, on the other hand, you pick up a red horseshoe and get burned, you’ll instantly heart-learn it. No processing time will need to be spent next time looking for the rule: your hand will remember for you!
If the consequences of the bad decision aren’t dire to the individuals or to the organization, consider letting it go forward. But when things go south, let the team manage the problem they’ve created! Insist they fix the new problems that they create, reinforcing the lesson. You can then use this as an opportunity to illustrate your decision-making process further in light of what they missed in coming to their bad decision.
And, life is funny. Sometimes a decision that you are absolutely sure is Bad with a capital “b” turns out to work just fine. Even better, occasionally these decisions turn out to work much better than what you would have done. It’s certainly happened to me. If you followed the advice and let the bad decision go forward, when things do work out you’ll look wise beyond your years, and willing to go out on a limb and try things in ways that haven’t been done before. And you’ll learn something new, too! Voilà , instant abundance.
Third, take care with the kinds of decisions that you encourage others to make. Make sure that you aren’t delegating authority on decisions related to things about which you alone have all the information, contacts, context, or perspective needed to make the right decision. Either educate your team so that they are prepared to make these decisions, or keep them for yourself.
Pssst: you don’t do everything well. Really.
Think of it this way. You are paying these people a lot of money for their time and expertise. Use it. Ask them their opinions and require them to solve problems. You’ll be creating new leaders by teaching them to see the bigger picture. You’ll be creating buy-in for organizational direction from the bottom up, because your organization has helped to set the direction. And you’ll be strengthening your team; when one gets stuck, he’ll know to go to peers before coming to you, because that’s the example you set.
How will I know when I’m doing it all right?
You’ll know you’ve got it right when your team members can make the right decision without asking you. When this happens, they are informed of your goals and vision and are empowered by this knowledge with the ability to make the right decisions. When you don’t inform, when you don’t infuse your goals and vision into others, then every decision made on every day is a mystery to them, and rightly so. With no context, how can anyone anticipate what decision is the right decision? In this situation no one can do anything without your direct and personal involvement. This is a very common situation that arises with managers who must control and who live in fear of failure. They don’t tell anyone what the vision is, so no one can criticize it beforehand or know whether they’ve failed afterward.
