GROUNDED SERVICE

A blog for all the reluctant leaders who know what needs to get done, step up to shoulder their responsibility, and make a difference

Nik Krpan 2024-09-13 Nik Krpan 2024-09-13

FOREWORD

This work is intended to be a concise handbook for emerging and experienced leaders to provide a reality based systematic approach towards rapidly developing or enhancing competency and coherence in leadership. Key references are cited and the intent is to provide a few new ideas framed in the backdrop of concisely summarized great works the reader should further explore on their journey of development.

Goal

I was raised on a farm and received a traditional Chemical Engineering education. I was intimately involved in the execution of many critical manufacturing projects as a president, principal, project manager, engineer of record, field/commissioning engineer, field technician, labourer etc. While this has firmly grounded me in physical reality, I also have an appreciation and an affinity for the abstract, but do not live in the realm of the abstract or imagination and see great danger in doing so.

We are faced with a new type of class conflict: Physicals against Virtuals:

“The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality,” as it’s been called – as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in “social construction of reality” – the central dogma of postmodernist thought – reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency – against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life – the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.” (Lasch, 1995)

We are also faced with a related rise, even an epidemic of narcissism and like narcissists the Virtuals are blind to the feedback of reality-based downstream consequences of their actions.

The natural world and human civilization are composed of sets of interdependent complex systems. Due to the increasingly powerful technologies at our disposal, and hubristic decision-making being made by narcissistic Virtuals in increasingly thick-walled ivory towers, catastrophic destabilization of these complex systems is on the horizon. Reality-based decision making by humble servant leaders possessing Wisdom will help to ensure that we at least do not introduce further destabilization, and hopefully repair damage that has been done.

My desire in writing this work is to provide a leadership framework that will help emerging leaders that have grown up in a largely virtual world get grounded in reality and make better decisions. At the core of the leadership model being advocated is Servant Leadership. The focus will be on how servant leaders at all levels in an organization can work to maximize the positive impact they can have:

1. On the lives of the people they are leading

2. On the desired organizational results

3. In their own lives staying healthy and sustaining high performance

What we need now is Wisdom driven competent leadership.

Stories and Gratitudes

There are a few stories and events in my personal life and family history that provide some context for this work.

A significant event for me was the Canadian Iron Ring Ceremony that engineers graduating from a Canadian undergraduate program in engineering can opt into attending. I attended this first as a new graduate and then 15 years later was invited to “ring” a newly graduating engineer who was actually a mature student working for us as a co-op student and later full time. This second time was almost like a renewal of wedding vows to the profession. The whole ceremony is described here: Iron Ring Ceremony - EGM Heritage (enggeomb.ca). The take away is that the people who take the oath seriously have a true commitment to service and a higher standard of behaviour. This oath is firmly grounded in the all too real consequences of engineers failing in our work. Thank you Trevor for the invitation and for being a great colleague.

Another significant event is having been part of the team to start up an engineering services business, then taking over as its leader and continued and accelerated its growth and eventually selling a majority of the business and transferring leadership to an internally developed leadership team. Thank you to everyone at Cheme.

These experiences were highly informative to this writing as they grounded me in the realities downstream of decisions I made. Thank you to our founding president Paul for your mentorship and guidance.

A big thanks to my dear friend who introduced me to his idea that is central to some of what will be discussed, that three personal characteristics are required to enable someone to become an effective leader: Perseverance, Humility, Emotional Intelligence. These are big seemingly abstract ideas that directly connect to reality. Thank you, Spencer, for this and so much more.

A big thank you also goes out to Jenna, my career coach whose shared wisdom continues to be invaluable.

Nik Krpan 2024-09-12 Nik Krpan 2024-09-12

1. INTRODUCTION: Getting Results

After being critical in the foreword of oversimplification of complex systems I will immediately launch into a simplified modelling of something highly complex. This is a common practice in science and engineering in order to be able to take a complex problem and at least reduce it to complicated and make design decisions. The skilled engineer or scientist makes the right simplifying assumptions, AND is aware of the limitations and dangers inherent in those assumptions and when the model will break down.

The starting point for this discussion is the starting point of why organizations exist. An answer is: To achieve a desired RESULT. See Appendix 2 for a more process-centric framing.

From a high level organizational perspective the desired result is expressed in a mission statement.

Organizations that lose sight of their desired result will inevitably drift off course and risk becoming corrupted distortions of what they were meant to be and do.

Where do results come from? Actions:

The ends (Results) do not justify the means (ie: Actions). The journey to a destination is at least as important as the destination. Leadership defines not only the destination but also the journey. Good leadership is about guiding the organization’s actions in a principled and ethical way to achieve the desired results. Quoting Peter Drucker:

“Only three things happen in naturally in organizations: friction, confusion and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership”.

Shifting gears to an engineer’s analysis: What factors determine whether the results achieved are as desired? Certainly, there are outside influences, but the ones under a leader’s control are:

Competency of the Actors (C)
Amount of Action (A)
Coherence and quality of the Action Taken (Q)

These combine in a multiplicative fashion:

(Meaningfulness of Result) is proportional to C x A x Q

By meaningfulness of result we mean how close to the desired result we actually get. If any of C, A or Q drop to zero, then the overall meaningfulness of the result drops to zero. A good example is in the kitchen where we have a desired result of a delicious meal:

If you put someone with:

no culinary competency (C)
but with loads of energy who will work very hard (A) and
good ingredients and a proven recipe (Q)

The result will likely be poor.

If you take a great chef that is totally burnt out and incapable of putting in the full effort, even with a good recipe and ingredients, the result will be poor.

If you have a great chef who has the energy to work and will put in the work, but has lousy ingredients and a lousy recipe, the result will be mediocre at best.

If you have a great, energized chef, a great recipe (with ingredients and equipment) we will now get the delicious meal we are aiming at.

In the above example there is coherence needed between the recipe and the ingredients. A great recipe, but with missing ingredients is incoherent. Often a single missing ingredient is enough to significantly reduce the quality of the result.

Visually we can look at the above as follows:

Energy is a subject that will come up again and again in this handbook. Setting conditions the that will create a resonance and increasing energy level in the organization is one of the key roles of the leader. This is more than the commonly described simple motivation. A key part of raising energy levels is in the provision of an overall coherence to the organization in this book we will use coherence broadly to include the quality of action, but it’s much bigger than just the quality of action, and to limit the definition to quality of action is too much of a simplification. While positive resonance and energy lift is a desired outcome of effective leadership, alertness is needed from leaders at all levels to the opposite: negative resonances and decreased energy.

Underlying almost everything a leader does is communication: transmission and receiving of information. A great leader must be a great communicator. This is axiomatically and critically true. While there will not be a section devoted to communication in this work, some aspects will be emphasized here and there. However, communication alone does not make a great leader, it may even be able to create a simulacrum of a leader that is in reality a fraud. Effective leadership requires bringing together multiple other competencies in addition to communication.

With great communication of great strategy and great culture and actions that align, a sense of coherence is established. This is of foundational importance. A foundation is provided where people feel secure. Their feet are on steady ground.

Another great Peter Drucker quote: “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.”. Communication is a two way street where a lot more than 50% for the leader is listening, and hearing what is said and not said. A leader should never be only in transmission mode, and rather always be transmitting and receiving. When a leader is transmitting communication there should be questions. If there aren’t questions being asked by the team this is almost certainly a very bad sign, and the leader should be paying attention to what is not said vis-à-vis the lack of questions. Are people afraid to ask? Are they so disengaged that they don’t care enough to ask? Do they not understand what was communicated well enough to ask any questions?

An essential companion handbook to this work is The Unwritten Laws of Engineering (King & Skakoon, 2001) that all leaders of professionals would do well to review.

The body of this handbook will cover the “how to” aspects of achieving high quality planned actions, developing highly competent people carrying out the actions, and high volume/capacity of action. Appendix 1 and 3 will provide theoretical models:

1. Generative aligned action

2. Burn out leading indicator

The “how to’s” are essentially how to lead in a way that achieve the desired results while:

1. Generating aligned coherent action

2. Generating competency

3. Generating and re-generating capacity

The regeneration of capacity is critical to prevention of burn out of the entire team, including the leader.

1.1 Second Order Results and Beyond

It is also worthwhile for leaders to look beyond the first order direct results their organization is working towards. Achieving a particular result could lead to second or third order results, and this is one of the most dangerous aspects of human beings’ almost reckless and rapid adoption of new technologies without thinking of higher order results. For example, the adoption of the internal combustion engine (ICE) while liberating, resulted in a number of higher order consequences:

Creation of ICE powered automobiles
- The use of leaded gasoline and the consequent lead poisoning of several generations of humans.
- The anti-human design of north and south American cities centered on the automobile instead of on the human experience.
  - This, in part, explains the rise in obesity due to increasingly sedentary lifestyles. Farming in the more distant past resulted in an extraordinary fitness level because it was a highly physical occupation. Modern rural (ie: farming) living puts people at higher likelihood of obesity than the modern urban counterparts.

Certainly, there were positive effects as well, and with longer range thinking beyond just immediate results some of these negative effects can be mitigated.

We have been exhorted by leaders who are not connected with reality to move at “the speed of science” and to be “data driven”. Science and technology are two very different things. Human beings adopted the technology of fire 10’s or hundreds of thousands of years before there was even the remotest scientific understanding. There are multiple examples in our history where we have done so to our regret in addition to the ICE:

there is the prophylactic use of antibiotics in agriculture and the consequent rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria
the use of powerful GMO herbicide resistant crops and the rise of resistant super weeds
the use of neo-nicotinoid crop pesticides obliterating desirable insect life including polinators and soil dwelling insects necessary to have healthy ecosystems
The use of industrial fertilizers enabling the breaking of cycles of crop rotation and fallow period to ensure healthy soil

As the power of technology increases leaders need to be more visionary and far sighted in attempting to see beyond the immediately desired results to make better decisions on what results they will aim for.

This does not argue against the adoption of technology, but rather to do so carefully and reversibly.

Nik Krpan 2024-09-11 Nik Krpan 2024-09-11

2. HOW TO DRIVE COHERENCE AND QUALITY - post 1/2

Three key areas will be described in how to develop strategy and engagement.

1. Getting the right people on the bus (to quote Jim Collins (Collins, 2001, Jim Collins - Articles - Good to Great)

2. The leader’s role in strategy

3. Leading by example

Through the execution of these elements of leadership your team will become more cohesive and have a sense of coherence with respect to the goals the organization is pursuing. This cohesiveness and coherence are inspiring and result in an increase in energy level from the team.

Three key areas will be described in how to develop strategy and engagement.

1. Getting the right people on the bus (to quote Jim Collins (Collins, 2001, Jim Collins - Articles - Good to Great)

2. The leader’s role in strategy

3. Leading by example

2.1 Getting the Right People on the Bus

Let’s start with the complete quote from Jim Collins’ wonderful book that is a must read: Good to Great:

“Those who build great organizations make sure they have the right people on the bus and the right people in the key seats before they figure out where to drive the bus. They always think first about who and then about what. When facing chaos and uncertainty, and you cannot possibly predict what's coming around the corner, your best "strategy" is to have a busload of people who can adapt to and perform brilliantly no matter what comes next. Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”

The organizational values level analysis is critical, and one of the things to analyze and codify is the definition of behaviours that support the organizational values. A useful way of analyzing behaviour is through the use of a golden mean type of approach where there is an optimum, an excess and a deficiency defined. Excerpted in the table below is a part of our behavioural analysis:

**Table 1: Golden Mean Behaviours Supporting Values**

Part of the analysis not shown in the above table is mapping how many of the values are supported by each behaviour. The more values supported, the more important the behaviour. What should be immediately apparent in the above table is that there is a major red flag around complacency. This is an uncanny valley of negative behaviour around which there are several peaks of desired golden mean behaviour beyond which lie other valleys of undesirable behaviour.

The main driver in achieving the coherence of personal – organizational alignment is to get the right people on the bus in the first place and this is accomplished through a rigorous and efficient screening process guided by the explicitly defined organizational behaviors and values. This is accomplished through behavioural interviewing, a valuable tool with a standard script of questions. Potential and fit should be prioritized over past experience. Someone that checks all the experience boxes but does not align at the values level will inevitably suffer with poor engagement, and likely stagnate within the organization, risking becoming cancerous and engaging in counterproductive behaviours.

Interviewers are trained to spot desirable and undesirable behaviours. A great addition, especially for senior hires is a multi-part case study focused on leadership that tests for manifestations of the four dimensions:

Beliefs (Spiritual, note that this is not about religion, but rather about checking for alignment with values of the organization)
Disposition (Emotional)
Aptitude (Mental)
Level of Fortitude (Physical)

Behaviours can also reveal motivators and demotivators. In our engineering services organization, a senior technical leader was being interviewed and was asked “How would you feel about mentoring and teaching younger engineers?” to which they responded “I suppose it is a burden I could bear.”. Interview over, not instantly but in my mind it was; we went through the motions of the rest of the interview. They were not going to be productive or satisfied in an organization that values learning together, relationships, apprenticeship and in fact, would potentially be very disruptive to the functioning of our team. There is a high likelihood that this person will not share their expertise and knowledge; at best grudgingly allowing younger people to ask questions, stunting the development of these enthusiastic youngsters. When surrounded by other people in the organization that value and rely on sharing, no one will want to work with this individual. They will become increasingly isolated, and likely resentful, leading to a downward spiral. If, on the other hand, the organization was oriented towards hyper-individualism (some firms are collections of only experienced people poached from other organizations, there is no program in place for development of junior staff and assignments do not require support of younger people) this person could have made a perfectly good hire. This is not a judgement on the worth of this individual as a human being (he was a nice guy); he simply will not be able to function well in our environment.

In modern service organizations where change is constant, it is necessary to have an organization composed of continuous learners (Kotter, 2012, The 8-Step Process for Leading Change | Dr. John Kotter (kotterinc.com)); people who are motivated and energized by learning and sharing what they know. People who “geek out” for fun.

The importance of demotivators and grievance can not be overstated. Human beings will become highly demotivated when they feel aggrieved. Not everyone gets aggrieved equally, nor by the same things. You need to ask yourself “What are the commonplace occurrences in our organization that may make a candidate feel aggrieved?” and then craft behavioural questions to root out a tendency to excessive grievance. It is desirable to weed out people who have an excessive tendency to behave in an aggrieved way in response to these occurrences for which you have no control. In the service industry a thick skin is needed and the service provider is often going to be on the receiving end of unjust criticism and “unfair” situations, “unfair” schedules etc. What is needed are people who do not dwell on this “injustice” and instead roll up their sleeves to get it done. The desirable candidates will understand that they have agency, roll with the punches and that within the “injustice” are opportunities. The highly aggrieved will tend to foment discord among colleagues which can be highly damaging and typically is done in a very passive-aggressive way that can go unnoticed. This is cancerous and as with cancer once it sets in, will be difficult to remedy. This should be a lens used in deciding who you want in your organization to ensure that they will be capable of being high functioning in your environment. If they will feel put out when criticized by a client, they do not belong in the service industry and you are not doing them any favours by bringing them into your organization.

STORY reserved for POMASYS customers.

It is especially important to ruthlessly eliminate narcissists from candidacy and from within the organization. The narcissist will tend to fall into the above trap around grievance and be thoroughly cancerous. Due to the broader social environment of addiction to social media and a “look at me” culture, pedestalizing vapid celebrities rather than accomplishment and competency, we are living in an era of rapidly rising narcissism. Organizations that can keep narcissism out will have the competitive advantage of a higher functioning team.

Furthermore, when new members of an organization are onboarded, their behaviours should be keenly observed and considered when deciding whether they will stay past their probationary period. Obviously, this is in addition to what types of results are being achieved but results alone are not enough. In most organizations arrogant jerks are toxic to the people around them as will be shown later. Onboarding is discussed in more detail later.

Lastly, regarding recruiting, it is more important to recruit for potential than past experience. HR departments are typically going to filter candidates based on past experience directly related to the current job. Some of our best performers came from other industries with seemingly irrelevant experience. Really bright people recognize analogies from another market or industry and then even bring in new ideas on better ways of doing things. Even though we were focused on life sciences we had stellar recruits including future owners who came from other industries including automotive, petrochemical, and nuclear. Typical HR practice of only looking at “relevant” experience would have excluded these stars.

Some example questions we used to great effect are summarized in the table below:

Table 2: Example Interview Questions

TABLE reserved for POMASYS customers.

Interviewing is a very important skill and it is important that the interviewer not only be skilled in building rapport with the interviewee, but to also have a deep understanding of what the organization is looking for in the candidate not only for the position being applied to, but for other potential positions. The interviewers, especially the hiring line managers need to understand the point of the questions being asked.

A big part of how we make sense of the world is through the telling of stories. Tribal cultures transmitted wisdom through the telling of stories. Holy books of most religions are full of story based morality tales. People in the organization, especially those in any type of leadership role, need to be able to tell stories. The questions above ought to evoke story telling from the interviewee.

One of my favourite technical stories is a tale of one of my failures as a young engineer: I had designed two tanks to be connected via a common suction header and due to the nature of the ridged gaskets the header had to be re-engineered during construction; I should have anticipated the need to design around this detail. The difficulty in re-engineering was mitigated as I had built a really good working relationship with the contractor’s foreman and he gave me a heads up about the problem giving me an opportunity to come up with a fix before things got really expensive. Without that good working relationship, earned through the demonstration of the respect I had for the contractor’s highly skilled crew, they could have simply completed the installation saying it is done as per the drawings, and sat back with popcorn to watch the disaster unfold later on. For me it is a memorable experience, and in the telling of this tale it can stick in others’ memories, learning the technical lesson from my mistake, AND the importance of relationship building.

2.1.1 The Triple Threat: Act – Sing – Dance

The idea of the triple threat that can act, sing and dance is useful for the young leader looking to progress their development, and for the senior leader looking to fill a pipeline of future leaders.

What this means in practice is becoming skilled enough in three areas:

The actual work of the business: manufacturing, the service the organization provides,
Sales and marketing
Business administration

For the young leader, if you want to progress to full organizational leadership you will need to get experience in all three of these areas. You will build a skill stack, and learn different languages. Yes, the dancers and actors and singers speak different languages, and to be able to lead a whole organization you will need to learn them to be able to effectively communicate across these tribes.

For the senior leader, keep an eye out for young people that exhibit capabilities to become a triple threat and work with them to develop it. Get people on the bus who are capable of becoming triple threats. The triple threat that can excel at all three is a bit of a unicorn and highly prized, however, more common and still very effective is someone who is excellent at one and good enough at the other two. This later case can still rise to becoming a very effective senior leader within the organization, perhaps leading a division. Not everyone is a future CEO, and that’s a good thing. We need capable leaders at all levels in the organization.

Nik Krpan 2024-09-10 Nik Krpan 2024-09-10

2.cont. HOW TO DRIVE COHERENCE AND QUALITY - post 2/2

The development and implementation of strategy is the most important accountability and responsibility of the leader and of leaders in general. Does this mean the leader does the strategic planning in isolation in their ivory tower? No! (except in very small organizations, and even then debatable) The strategic planning process should be consultative with the entire organization, and at minimum actively involve the leader’s immediate team.

2.2 Strategy

Organizational strategy includes at a minimum the following elements:

Codification of values
Definition of mission
1. High level description of a goal and how you will get there. I love Tesla’s:
  “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”
Detailing of vision
1. This includes a high level summary vision statement that will tend to be qualitative and a more granular and quantitative detailed description of the future.
Planning of objectives, goals and their supporting actions
1. Including planning and creation of supporting infrastructure

STORY reserved for POMASYS customers

One of the major contributing factors to a major positive inflection point about 10 years into our history was good strategic planning which started with codification of values and mission. There is a mountain of literature on this topic and commentary here will be limited. For the engineering services firm PSMJ’s “Ultimate A/E Strategic Planning Manual” is a must have resource (PSMJ, 2019, The Ultimate A/E Strategic Planning Manual (psmj.com)). The use of a skilled third party facilitator is extremely valuable in the strategic planning process.

Mintzberg provides a good critique of the more rigid strategic planning process that many organizations have adopted (Mintzberg, The Fall and Rise of Strategic Planning, 1994). Mintzberg argues that vision should not be overly detailed and that strategy is a synthesis process that can not be “forced”; that strategy is in a way emergent from people’s creative energies. We had success in forcing this process through the collection of information by our facilitators from our staff and clients and consolidating this information into a required reading report prior to the formal planning retreat. The leaders at the planning retreat then had time to independently synthesize ideas around what strategies were available for pursuit and meriting planning. The synthesis of strategy is something that requires a rested mind that has time for reflection. A leader should regularly schedule themselves time to read and reflect. Going into a planning retreat the team should not be in an exhausted state.

The third party facilitator should be provided with the latitude to keep the leader in check during the planning session. The leader should be doing a lot of listening during the planning sessions but have veto power over things they are not in agreement with. Generally high performers like to have autonomy, and the leader letting the rest of the leadership team make their own goals will give them a sense of autonomy and ownership over those goals and a higher level of engagement. The emotional intelligence, humility and perseverance of the leader are important in striking the right balance in this process. Perseverance is needed to know when to reign in the supporting leadership team and impose the leader’s will in setting certain key directional elements.

The strategic plan should be a living thing adjusted and tweaked as time goes on with occasional full blown planning sessions to do a rewrite. The set of objectives and goals should be looked at like a battle plan, and “no battle plan survives contact with the enemy” (a distillation of Helmuth von Moltke the elder’s wisdom). The planning is essential in determining the field conditions and what tactics are at hand in order to achieve strategic objectives. The leader needs to read the changing field conditions and be prepared to make adjustments to the plan. The plan needs to include identification of who is accountable for what goals, and it is the responsibility of the leader to enable people to succeed by providing them the time and resources to reasonably achieve their goals, and then to hold people accountable. A balance needs to be struck in not making the plan too “realistic”, ie: not ambitious enough. In our experience the way to strike this balance is by assigning priorities to the objectives and supporting goals. A lower priority goal may have no effort assigned, but in the event of changing field conditions a reprioritization may be appropriate. The planning process is essential to this.

The best example of our strategic plan getting a major adjustment was when the COVID lockdowns started in March 2020. A major priority in our plan was to select and deploy a new ERP system. We were on the verge of launching the procurement effort having just completed defining our User Requirements. In 2018-19 we had been lightly experimenting with hybrid work from home and office. Figuring out how to do this effectively suddenly became THE priority, along with the creation of various infection control and compartmentalization strategies. We shifted gears and then when the dust had settled a year later we restarted the ERP procurement. The ERP procurement when put on hold was not at a high level of urgency, but we were anticipating that by 2022 our accounting, time sheet and project management systems would no longer be scalable. We ended up deploying the ERP in time to avert a bottleneck. Had we not done the original planning around the ERP we would likely have ended up in a painful crisis situation.

An essential part of strategic planning is the communication of the strategic plan to the team. This is a part of leading with clarified intent (Kish, 2018, BOOK | Eric Kish Author) and is key to empowering people. They know what the objectives are and possibly the broad strokes of how. They know what tools and resources are available, and they get it done without being micromanaged (ie: with as high a degree of autonomy as possible). This will then enable the entire team to identify opportunities that can be seized to facilitate the achievement of strategic objectives. This is one of Erik Kish’s three things that are needed to create and run a scalable organization:

Clarified Intent (discussed below)
Optimized Talent (see section 3.2)
Disciplined Rituals (very briefly discussed below)

His book “5 to 50 to 500” is a must read for the leader that wants to scale their organization up.

A key concept that Kish presents towards clarifying intent is that of the organization playbook and that there are essentially three possible playbooks as summarized in the table below. It is important that you know which one you will be dominant in your organization, and that you are only good enough in the other two. This fits well into the idea of bringing coherence to what the organization is pursuing.

Table 3: Organization Playbooks

Operational Excellence

Customer Intimacy

Product Excellence

TABLE reserved for POMASYS customers

This table is extracted directly from Kish’s work.

As I have spent my entire post-university career in organizations that ran from the customer intimacy playbook this handbook will be most relevant to customer intimacy organizations.

A valuable tool that Kish suggests is the strategic map. A similar and simpler version is an objectives tree (Baird, 1983, Technical Manager: How to Manage People and Make Decisions: Baird, Bruce F.: 9780534979256: Books - Amazon.ca). An simplified one is shown below. These can be prepared at differing levels of granularity within the organization, or in organizational sub units. The strategic map and the plan overall should be incorporated into the onboarding of new hires at appropriate times and should be more than just a read and review; this is a key opportunity to gain alignment with new hires and for them to know and understand what the intent is. When managing by walking around a senior leader can and should ask people if they know how what they are working on fits in to the bigger picture. Each of the boxes in the strategic map shown below can be measured and key performance indicators or metrics collected. While metrics can be useful, as discussed later in section 3.2.4 be careful what you measure.

There are many rituals that are important and happen on a much higher frequency, as much as daily.

STORY reserved for POMASYS customers

Another form of ritual I engaged in as a front line leader was the micro-teach. When working with a younger engineer and coming across some detailed technical aspect that was new to them and initiating the gathering of other people it was new to in a meeting room for an impromptu lesson. Usually there were other tangentially related areas of knowledge relevant to the work others were doing and others would get an opportunity to contribute and speak publicly. The ritual followed the pattern of:

Identified knowledge gap
Identify others that need the lesson
Gather
Teach
Q&A

All no more than 15-20 minutes. This ritual reinforced the culture of knowledge sharing, leading by example in that regard. It works on building relationships with other people in the organization. Further elaboration on this topic will be presented in section 3.1.6.

A final element of strategy is the organization chart. In a truly servant leadership driven organization the leader should not envision themselves at the top of the heap. It is in fact the opposite. We utilized an inversion of the traditional org chart with the leader at the bottom. My mental image and conception of this in fact is that the organization is like a tree with the leader acting as a trunk, past leaders are the roots. The trunk of the tree supports branches who are the next level of leaders and so on to the leaves of the tree. The leaves of the tree are the ones collecting energy from the sun. Our customers are the sun, our source of life. Our job as leaders is to support them so that they can do their jobs. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it helped me.

**Figure 4: Servant Leader Organization Chart**

When doing strategic planning it is useful to not only look at the organizational chart of today, but of what you think it will need to be in five and even ten years time, taking names out of positions. Think of what structural changes will be needed as the organization grows. Then you can examine the talent pool you have for who may be good candidates for future needed roles, or you will have identified well in advance what some of you needs will be and can recruit and develop early for them. This allows you to avoid future bottlenecks and crises.

Another book that must be read cover to cover is Kotter’s Leading Change (Kotter, 2012). This work is essential reading in providing a framework for how to effectively lead change. Concepts in Kotter’s eight step model scale up (society wide change) and down (project execution):

Create a sense of urgency
Build a guiding coalition
Form a strategic vision
Enlist a volunteer army
Enable action by removing barriers
Generate short term wins
Sustain acceleration
Institute change

Rather than repeat more of the work here the reader is encouraged to go out and read Leading Change as soon as possible; if they already have, go and read it again.

2.2.1 Process Ownership

A lot of smaller organizations only create policies and procedures (ie: formal processes) when problems are encountered. I did this when leading our organization. Engineers are, believe it or not, creatives not just a bunch of block heads. Creatives do not like being under the yoke of overly proceduralized bureaucracy, hence the maxim of “as much policy as is needed and as little as possible.” In our early days we probably took this a little too far and the result was some processes that should have been formalized but were not resulting in a regular reinventing of the wheel, and undesirable friction between people constantly having to re-establish boundaries.

A fully developed Process Ownership paradigm is a if not the solution to this problem. Every organization will have a sub set of processes that are routine, mundane requiring little if any creativity to execute once they have been well defined. These processes in particular are the low hanging fruit to assign to process owners and to formalize thereby freeing up more energy for the creative work that is more transformative in delivery of products and services to customers.

Lets go back to a few definitions: A process is how things get done. It is the series of steps and actions taken on inputs to achieve a desired outcome or result. Appendix 2 discusses theoretical aspects of Process Leadership in more detail.

In Figure 3 above there is a band that refers to “Internal Business Processes”. These processes are formal and informal.

In Figure 2 there are actions; the same actions we talk about in the sense of a process. For a process to yield the desired result, the people doing the process actions need to be competent at those actions and have enough capacity to execute all the necessary actions in the process.

Process Ownership is where people are identified to voluntarily own a given process. Owning a process means they are in control of it, meaning they have the authority to see that the process is followed. They have the authority to define it, improve it. Ideally a process owner has intimate familiarity with the execution of that process. They are accountable for the outcomes of the process. The process owner can be empowered to decide on the level of formality that is needed to define the process. It could be a standard operating procedure (SOP), a work flow, a policy, a combination, or something else. The process owner will bear in mind what play book the organization is running. An Operational Excellence organization will probably lean towards more tightly defined processes whereas a client intimacy organization may define things a little more flexibly for some processes to allow for more client customization.

A key process used in process leadership is process mapping. Process Mapping done well is a facilitated by someone who stays out of the content of the mapping exercise and helps to get a group of people to define the process. Improving a process starts with defining it…mapping it.

A well defined process will define the desired result, the necessary inputs, the context it is executed in, and especially the interfaces. As discussed in section 3.1.4, interfaces are a source of friction and by having processes with minimal and well defined interfaces they will have less friction reducing the generation of negative energy.

Having in house facilitators is good. We invested in training our project managers on facilitation and found that this made them more effective as leaders. Facilitation training is also great for instilling the servant mindset. The facilitator is essentially acting in service to the group and successfully facilitating a group is a very satisfying experience.

Organizations that are not running an Operational Excellence playbook should not get carried away and overdo it with respect to process mapping and definition. As in all things finding the right balance is essential.

Process ownership can serve another important function: it allows a leader to test their future leaders, to see if they are ready for that promotion. It provides an incremental increase in authority, responsibility and accountability for the future leader. This also helps in building competency. Ideally as a leader you will make a call to adventure for some future leaders to voluntarily take on process ownership. It can come with additional perks such as recognition at certain company functions, bonus money, or additional salary. Make it clear that for those seeking to grow and advance in the organization process ownership is a key step. Top-down assignment of process ownership is unlikely to yield the desired results and may even breed resentment. A voluntary approach will yield people in these leadership positions who are engaged and excited about the trust you have in them.

2.3 Lead by Example

Leaders at all levels in the organization need to know the company values intimately and live them out. Like it or not, as a leader you are being watched constantly and how you behave will be emulated by the people around you. Your energy will be emulated. The Gold Standard is recommended reading (Cormier, 2001). If you are being pessimistic, angry, chaotic this negative energy will percolate out from you and infect the people around you. If you are bringing hope, optimism, joy, orderliness, and supportiveness this positive energy will infect the people around you. The world has become increasingly chaotic and people are looking for sources of stability. The leader should provide shade in a thirsty desert and shelter in a storm.

Success in leading by example is critically important in providing a sense of coherence to your team. If you as a leader behave in ways that are inconsistent with the organization’s values the team will notice and it will erode their respect for you. YOU are the model of behaviour for people to follow.

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The leader must behave consistently with very high ethical standards. A commitment made is a commitment kept.

A leader is not immune from criticism. You must be open to constructive criticism from subordinates, welcoming it with a spirit of gratitude as an opportunity for improvement. This should be formally incorporated into the performance review process where the subject of the review is provided an opportunity to give feedback on the organization and leadership. This is not hard to do if the prerequisite behaviour of gratitude for critical feedback on the part of the leader has been observed: a simple request for feedback on the part of team members during performance review is a good place to start. A behavioural inventory can be used as a prompt for this kind of discussion.

Leading by example is HARD. Recognize and accept your flawed human nature (humility + emotional intelligence), but do not be complacent about it (perseverance). The leader should strive to be on a trajectory of improving their competency as a leader, building on strengths, reducing and eliminating flaws, knowing that perfection will never be attained.

Leading by example is critical to building:

Coherence
Cohesion in your team
Connection between you and the team and between team mates
Competency of your leadership skills and technical skills

Success in leading by example will start a positive resonance that increases energy levels.

Collins makes a great metaphor: The Flywheel (Collins, 2001). The idea is that by incrementally adding momentum and velocity to a flywheel eventually breakthrough velocity can be achieved. Leading by example is essential to these incremental increases in momentum.

2.4 Closing

In conclusion there are a few things that simply must be done to drive quality of action:

Getting people on the bus
Codification and communication of Values, Mission, Vision
Leading by example with respect to values and mission
Strategic Planning: Planned actions that are consistent with Values, Mission, Vision
1. Part of the value in planning is being prepared to change with the situation changes, making adjustments in real time.

Appendix 1 and 3 present models of generative aligned action and some of the big ideas above fit into these more abstract formulations. There are two direct outcomes from the above:

High quality planned action (Q) (see Appendix 1)
Highly engaged team members (E) (See Appendix 3)

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3. How to Develop Competency post 1

The recommended practices around building of competency are the most applied and action-oriented of this handbook. On an individual basis, and for many organizations the building of competency is a worthy result to pursue in and of itself.

High functioning teams need to build a high level of mutual respect and a connectedness with each other and their leaders. Essentially one of the things that is happening in the application presented below is that people within the organization are constantly being recruited; recruited into continuous improvement of themselves and the organization.

This is a call to adventure, to venture into what was previously unknown to you, to seek the treasure of knowledge and wisdom.

3.1 Personal Leadership Habits and Tactics

At the leader’s personal level there are a number of tactics and habits that can be very effective to help create positive energy and avert crises. Stephen R Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” (Covey S. R., 2013) is a must read, cover to cover. Briefly summarizing the 7 habits:

Be proactive
Begin with the end in mind
Put first things first
Think win-win
Seek first to understand, then to be understood
Synergize
Sharpen the saw

All of these habits will echo in the practical guidance below, and one of the most powerful ideas is what Covey calls the “Time Management Matrix”. I would rather call this the prioritization matrix as it really helps to prioritize things. It is often misunderstood and we will briefly examine the most common trap people fall into. The matrix is shown in the figure below:

**Figure 5: Covey's Time Management Matrix**

The trap is to spend most of your time in the quadrant I. This is not only a path to mental exhaustion which results in the remaining time available going to quadrant IV due to the exhaustion, but also a path to a positive feedback loop where more crises are created due to a lack of long range planning and prevention. An effective leader will spend a lot of time in quadrant II. In any organization there will be crises, and a leader will need to help in dealing with them. A great leader and a great organization will have minimized the number of crises by virtue of the leadership spending enough time in quadrant II activities. Again, 7 Habits is a must read and Covey’s full exploration of this topic should be considered mandatory reading.

3.1.1 Lead by Example

Of all habits and tactics, leading by example is the most important and probably the hardest, hence it is being addressed a second time. The earlier context discussed exemplifying values. Here the focus will be on more applied aspects.

As leaders, we are constantly being watched and judged whether worthy by the people we are trying to lead. Everyone hates a hypocrite. If you are going to make rules you need to live by them.

If leaders create rules that then result in people breaking them (even just once) because that rule is impossible to follow or so hard to follow that it is likely that people won’t, then the entire structure of rules come into question: “If this rule doesn’t need to be followed then why should that one, or that one??”. Chaos ensues and even worse corruption may follow.

Follow the rules (policies, procedures etc.) starts with you and:

“Make as few rules / policies as possible but as many as necessary.”

A tricky part of leading by example is when to lead from the front and share hardship. There are many times, especially when bringing younger staff up to speed, especially future leaders, that being out front is really valuable. The less experienced staff get to see a pro in action role modelling how things should get done. They see a leader that is not afraid to get into the trenches and get dirty. There are a couple of dangers here though:

Ego
Martyrdom

It can be tempting to lead from the front to almost show off to the people around you, that “you’ve still got it”. This is the wrong reason for doing it. The right reason is that there really is no one else to do it, and it needs to get done. Even then there is an opportunity to be a teacher. As Willink discusses extensively in his podcast and books, ego driven leadership is not good leadership. Check your ego. When your people are ready kick off the training wheels do so; there is an interesting spectrum of your level of involvement where at one end you lead from the front and are intimately involved, and at the other end, you largely absent yourself as discussed in the next section. It takes some experience and leadership judgement to know where in this spectrum you should operate in any given situation.

Excessively leading from the front can also be one of the paths to burn out. In a growing business, if you are always at the front, you risk becoming overscheduled and overworked, leading to burn out. Don’t be a martyr, even though people might love you for it, after all you are reducing their work load. However, you might end up doing the work for your protégé’s rather than working alongside them and providing guidance robbing them of an opportunity for growth. This could actually result in the protégé building up resentment. This temptation can be hard to resist especially in the engineering world where fun is to be had doing the engineering work.

Another ego related trap, and the opposite of humility is hubris: excessive pride and overconfidence, often in combination with arrogance. This is a trap the leader must avoid and the way is simple: ask yourself:

“What if I am wrong?”

Every leader should also know about the heuristic known as Chesterton’s Fence named after G.K. Chesterton. Briefly, it means to not do away with something that is existing, like a fence in a particular location, until you know why it was put there in the first place, and what other downstream effects there were from it having been put there.

The rest of this personal habits section should be looked at as part of leading by example. These are all tactics and habits that as a leader you need to put into practice, master and teach others to do.

3.1.1.1 Self Care

Leadership can be dreadfully lonely and there is a need for self-care beyond just physical need for exercise and proper nutrition. Having some peers from outside the organization, maybe a friend from school that has attained a similar level of leadership, that you can chew over things you are struggling with can be really helpful. Organizations like The Executive Committee (TEC) in Canada and Vistage in the United States provide this service and can be very helpful. I spent about two years with TEC and found them to be very helpful from a self care perspective. I was able to get a critique of some of my ideas for organizational change, exposure to other peoples’ ideas and the realization that the struggles, doubts and sleepless nights I had were not personal failings, but universals that all leaders have from time to time.

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A dangerous trap for leaders and part of what can help propel them into leadership is the willingness to make sacrifices to get things done. Is this truly sustainable? What is it that is getting sacrificed? What impact is that going to have on you in the long run? Is working on holiday weekends to get shutdowns done the kind of sacrifice I am talking about? Not really. It is the more insidious sacrifices that happen week after week, can become habitual, stack up and creep up on you. Things like the sacrifice of

hobbies or interests outside work
sleep
exercise
date night with your spouse
family vacations
energy needed to do any of the above

If you are consistently so wiped out that you don’t have any energy left to do the above, there is something really wrong. One of the aspects of self care is to be able to create and respect some boundaries for yourself. If you don’t do this, how are you gong to respect other peoples’ boundaries?

If you feel like you can not handle the work load and you need to consistently sacrifice things from the above list there are some important questions you need to ask yourself:

1. Am I in the right job?
1. Is the level of complexity of this job too much for me to handle?
  1. Is the sacrifice a way that I am compensating for a lack of ability?
  2. Am I afraid of a loss in status or income?
    1. Should I simplify my life so that I don’t need as much income?
2. Is the job itself one that no one can handle and I should be going to a new job?
Am I micromanaging?
Am I delegating effectively?

The human-centered approach to servant leadership has to start with YOU taking care of yourself. Just like on airplane pre-boarding instructions: put your mask on first, then help others. If you aren’t taking care of yourself, you will not be able to help others, and the lack of self care will be contagious, spreading your burn out to others in the organization AND in your family.

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3 cont: Leading By Example

Continuation of leading by example with subsections on:

Work Load Management

Removing the Training Wheels

Flexing Your Style

Be Available (but not too much!) and Pay Attention to Interfaces

3.1.1.2 Project Execution and Work Load Management

Project execution is a form of transformation and it is good to reflect on this quote from Leading Change (Kotter, 2012) in reference to leading organizational change:

“Transformation requires sacrifice, dedication and creativity, none of which usually comes with coercion. Efforts to effect change that are over managed and under led also tend to eliminate the inherent messiness of transformations.”

Caution is advised on the first part of this quote regarding sacrifice. We must balance this notion of sacrifice with the needs of self care ensuring that the sacrifices made are not chronic in nature leading to an unsustainable effort.

This is certainly not to say that projects don’t require disciplined management. They do as Kotter makes so clear with respect to organizational change in the latter parts of Leading Change. What I have observed in the last decade is more and more management in projects and less real leadership. A truly effective project manager is also a leader, and for the transformation inherent in project execution both management and leadership are required. Project managers are a cadre of future leaders that need to be cultivated and closely watched.

A key aspect of good management is work load planning. Excessive work load is obviously a major contributing factor to burn out and the most obvious first thing to address. Putting effort into and successfully managing work load effectively communicates to your team that you care about them. I loathe when I hear a manager talking about needing more “resources” when what they mean is people. Talking about people as “resources” is dehumanizing, disrespectful, and contagious. Before you know it this mindset permeates the organization. This is part of why I have a level of hostility for the department name “human resources”. I find it ironically dehumanizing to treat human beings as simple resources. We resisted having any title in the organization referring to human resources as long as possible, preferring to split the traditional HR functions across multiple other roles: Administrative, Recruitment, Talent Development. We went with a more grounded approach to directly address what matters to the organization and foundationally important people related matters

Leading a team of teams with shared personnel is a challenging dance and requires a lot of coordination and communication between team leaders. For a long time, I owned and coordinated this process and when the time came was able to delegate this to other senior managers. There is a temptation and even a natural gravity for this process to let the transactional aspects become fully dominant. This can not be allowed to happen. This process of workload management has a large relational aspect to it. The leader running this process has the opportunity to get feedback from team leaders to find out where there is friction in the organization, who the high performers are that leaders compete for, which team leaders have higher leadership potential. You get to watch them in action.

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3.1.1.3 Remove the Training Wheels

Sometimes the best thing to do to build the confidence of your people is to make yourself absent. This is directly in opposition to the idea of leading from the front. Such dichotomies are everywhere, and Willink explores this in his excellent book “The Dichotomy of Leadership” (Willink & Babin, 2018).

In this case when people are ready to take on a more independent level of work, the continued presence of a leader will hinder the development of people. For instance, as was my case, when in a face to face meeting with a client’s team and the leaders team, a physically imposing leader with a reputation as a knowledgeable, get it done guy will suck the air out of the room pulling the attention of the client away from the growing people who are trying to build their own reputations. If these people are always in your shadow their growth will be stunted. Set your ego aside and get out of their way. Helping these people build their own reputations, especially in a service organization, is part of your job as a leader.

If the leader is constantly the center of attention the future people who need to be front and center with clients will never develop the skills and reputation needed for them to take over and allow the organization to scale. Your ego may like the attention but you are missing opportunities to develop future leaders and you will miss opportunities to do more in quadrant II of the time management matrix in figure 5.

It is helpful to be quite explicit with your people telling them “I trust you. You have the skill needed to do this without me being present. If you need help you can call me in and I will be happy to help”. They will feel empowered, supported and respected.

In addition to feeling respected taking on a new challenge is highly stimulating, a key hunger. Some people will find this new freedom and stimulation very rewarding.

“Leaders create more leaders”

I have applied the above concepts in practice, but not always perfectly: We had a water treatment project (my deepest technical area of subject matter expertise) with a client for whom I had been at the front lines of service delivery for over a decade. Our young and enthusiastic project engineer, Jessica, was running the project and doing a great job of it. We had our first design review meeting with the client, Jessica did a good job presenting, but inevitably when there were questions asked from the client they would end up directed at me because of

my long standing relationship with the client
my reputation
my aforementioned physical presence.

After that meeting I decided to absent myself from future design reviews. They went fine and our work on the project was successful. In the research for this book I spoke with Jessica about her recollection of these events, and what I failed to do was to explicitly communicate to her that she had my confidence. Another interesting insight Jessica told me was that me being present in the meeting actually made her more nervous as in her mind I loomed large as the only person in the room that would have a level of knowledge to call out any errors however minor. So, the added benefit of me not being present was to boost her confidence going into the meetings. In any case providing this space for added responsibility would not have been possible without having made myself available outside these meetings; the investment in formal and informal training, the invisible-to-client interactions in preparing Jessica.

Another way of taking the training wheels off is through process ownership as discussed in section 2.2.1.

3.1.2 Flexing Leadership Style

Good leadership requires using a lot of different tools and this is especially so in personal interactions with people of various social styles. In a group setting where there are a lot of social styles present you can be natural, but it is important to know your organization and know your audience. Section 8.2.1 of Appendix 1 has an exploration of some of the theory behind the Merrill-Reid social styles discussed in the application here. It is recommended that if the reader is not familiar with the social styles of Amiable-Expressive-Analytical-Driver that the Appendix first be reviewed.

If you are naturally expressive and you are working with one or more analytical types, then you may come across as “salesman-like” and not be very respected. It is noteworthy that I am NOT knocking sales people, it is that an analytical person has a natural antipathy to the expressive. In hindsight I made this mistake about a decade ago with a junior employee who was VERY analytical. Depending on where you are naturally it may make sense to flex your social style to the neighbouring quadrant of driver or amiable to be more persuasive with that individual or group. The analytical will appreciate a more dialectical rather than rhetorical approach.

A high performing team will need some diversity of social style to keep it on track. A team of only analyticals will tend to get paralysis by analysis. They need a driver to keep them moving. Without an expressive they may have difficulty in convincing people outside the team of something, maybe budget funding, or pursuit of a particular strategic objective. An amiable added to the mix will be more sensitive to the level of cohesion in the group and help keep it together.

As a leader you may be more dominant in one social style, and it is not productive to surround yourself with clones. It is important to get some other social styles around you to help cover your blind spots.

By flexing your social style towards a direction where you are more compatible with a person you are interacting with, you will be able to connect with them better.

Moving away from social styles and into an adjacent topic of motivation, it is also important to understand how people are hunger driven, and to deliver the appropriate positive and negative, and conditional and unconditional strokes:

An unconditional stroke is based on who they are.

A conditional stroke is based on something they have done

A positive stroke is acknowledgment or praise of something that was done.

A negative stroke is providing criticism of something that was done.

An example of a negative unconditional stroke would be if someone is, and this could be unknown to you, of eastern European descent, and you make a comment about how disgusting eastern Europeans are. Negative unconditional strokes should be rigorously avoided.

A positive unconditional stroke could go in the other direction where some kind of affinity is proclaimed about eastern Europeans. While it might be great for one individual it then leaves a bunch of other people feeling left out and negatively stroked.

In a workplace it is generally suggested that, especially in group settings, unconditional strokes are counter productive.

A positive conditional stroke on the other hand could look like:

“Nancy, great job on the solvent delivery system design, I loved how you came up with XYZ design feature”. You are now acknowledging what the person did and reinforcing the good behaviour.

A negative conditional stroke is the opposite, where:

“Nancy, that design on the heat exchanger really didn’t work, next time lets have another senior engineer review that work before it goes out to client review.”

A good strategy for delivering a negative stroke can be to make a poop sandwich…put the negative stroke in between two positive strokes instead of the blunt delivery above. One of the slices of bread in the sandwich could be the leader expressing their belief that the team member is capable of improvement in performance to the desired level. This depends on the individual you are delivering the feedback to. Some will not even hear the negative feedback if packed in between the positive and come away thinking they are doing splendidly. For these people do not use this tactic or maybe all you need is an open faced sandwich. Some people will come away only having heard the negative feedback and feel beaten down. Ideally over time you develop good delivery skills and good enough relationships with people that relatively direct negative strokes can be delivered without anyone taking it personally. Delivery of critical feedback takes practice. Considering this the above example could look like:

“Nancy, thank you for getting the heat exchanger design done on time, but the unit was oversized and won’t fit in the space available. Please have Jane review the design next time before it goes to the client. Jane is super knowledgeable and likes working with you.”

Then there is the hunger side to consider. If someone has a particular hunger for recognition, then a positive conditional stroke in public is the way to go. More shy people may benefit more from private positive feedback.

If a person is structure motivated, then added structure or praising them for some of the structure they created would be rewarding for them, while someone who is stimulation motivated may find praise over their creative endeavours more rewarding.

Further reading on transactional analysis is recommended.

3.1.3 Be Available (but not too much!) and Pay Attention to Interfaces

In general, the more responsibility that you have for overall organizational performance the less predictable your day becomes as issues and opportunities arise that demand your attention. If you start from a schedule that is nearly full, a few negative things result:

· You have limited your time available for rest and reflection

· You are virtually inaccessible when people need to consult with you about an urgent matter with no notice

· Even when accessed, time stress erodes your presence

The solution is simple:

Put first things first (Covery’s 3rd habit) and don’t overschedule
Schedule in blocks of time to do work
Be available to the people supporting you.

Everyone will have some time-of-day where you will be most productive on deep work that requires a flow state, understand your own rhythm, and this is time that you should seek to protect and not allow it to be “confetti’ed” with interruptions. The amount of work you will get done in this time will then allow you to move on to other interactions that only need shorter bursts of time.

What being available also communicates to the people you are supporting is that they matter to you; that you respect them enough to make time for them. They know you are busy and you still make time for them.

All this said it is counter-productive to be too available. People will abuse this, taking your time for granted, checking in on things they don’t need to. Make sure that they know the limits of their authority, and that they are clear to operate right up to those limits without your permission and that they only really need to check in when operating beyond the limits of their authority or where they are uncertain. So be available, but not too much. As in most things there is a balancing act. A way of introducing intentional friction to make yourself a little less available is to instruct your people to do a little process before coming to you with a question: they should first ask themselves what are two questions that you will ask them. This will make them better prepared when they do come to you with a question and your time will be better utilized.

An axiomatic truth is:

“Interfaces are sources of friction”

In the physical world friction results in a dissipation of energy as useless heat that further energy is used to manage. For young leaders starting out in project management the project interfaces are places for extra attention as likely places for crises to form. Effectively managing these interfaces reduces the risk of crisis. In the leading of an organization with multiple business units, sometimes with hard silos, it is the leader to which these units report to ensure that there is no more than the desired amount of friction in place. Lack of lateral communication across an organization can be deadly, while if there is the right amount of lateral communication possible crises are anticipated, identified and eliminated before they happen. In an empowered team with decentralized authority this will happen without the leader’s direct involvement. Process ownership as discussed in section 2.2.1 can help to reduce this friction.

Part of being available is also not having too many direct reports. While it is desirable to keep an organization as flat as possible there is a limiting number of high quality relationships a single person can maintain. In a professional workplace it is probably in the range of 5-10 direct reports depending on the type of work environment and level of intimacy needed. Maintaining these relationships is harder in a work from home / remote work or hybrid work environment and the number of reports in this type of scenario is at the lower end of the range. Another view on this could be the strength of the work culture that plays into the number of direct reports that is sustainable. In a strong and established culture a higher number of reports will be possible, while in a weak culture, or in a scenario where a major change to culture is underway the number of direct reports may be lower for some period of time.

A great tactic for being available is managing by walking around. In the face to face environment talking with people who are not your direct reports about what they are working on, even asking them “how does what you are working on fit into our strategic plan?” can help gauge engagement, how well the plan is being communicated, a whole host of non-verbal things IF you are paying attention and being PRESENT.

In section 2.2.1 Process Ownership is discussed, and another key strategy for the leader in a rapidly growing small or medium sized organization towards improving availability is delegating process ownership. This is how I managed to keep it together. Process Ownership allows for the compartmentalization and delegation of responsibilities, opportunities for others to grow and for you to free up more time.

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3 cont: Leading By Example 2

Be Available(but not too much)

Don’t Micromanage and No Stupid Rules

Always be Teaching and Learning

Contemporaneous Error Correction

Empathetically Listen

Be Grateful Publicly

3.1.4 Be Available (but not too much!) and Pay Attention to Interfaces

You have limited your time available for rest and reflection
You are virtually inaccessible when people need to consult with you about an urgent matter with no notice
Even when accessed, time stress erodes your presence

The solution is simple:

1. Put first things first (Covey’s 3rd habit) and don’t overschedule

2. Schedule in blocks of time to do work

3. Be available to the people supporting you

An axiomatic truth is:

“Interfaces are sources of friction”

In the physical world friction results in a dissipation of energy as useless heat that further energy is used to manage. For young leaders starting out in project management the project interfaces are places for extra attention as likely places for crises to form. Effectively managing these interfaces reduces the risk of crisis. In the leading of an organization with multiple business units, sometimes with hard silos, it is the leader to which these units report to ensure that there is no more than the desired amount of friction in place. Lack of lateral communication across an organization can be deadly, while if there is the right amount of lateral communication possible crises can be anticipated, identified and eliminated before they happen. In an empowered team with decentralized authority this will happen without the leader’s direct involvement. Process ownership as discussed in section 2.2.1 can help to reduce this friction.

3.1.5 Don’t Micromanage and No Stupid Rules

This is really simple. Micromanaging people who are high performers demoralizes them. It is the opposite of autonomy discussed above. They feel disrespected that you think they are so stupid that this level of direction is required. I learned this lesson from a co-op student early in my supervisory career. I had given highly detailed markups on a prepared document and he was kind enough (actually frustrated enough) to share with me that he did not need that level of detail to revise the document to what would be acceptable and found the detailed feedback to be insulting. I was grateful for the feedback and adjusted accordingly improving our working relationship. He went on to have a great co-op internship with us. If you are getting the right high performers on the bus they should not need to be micro managed.

Making rules that can not be followed or are stupid is incredibly corrosive to mutual respect in the organization. The leader and the organization making the rules is respected less. The second level leaders that have to enforce the rules lose respect for you, for themselves and from the people they are leading. The people breaking rules may lose respect of their peers and the leaders. Awful.

A stupid rule that people must break to get their job done pushes people down the path of making rule breaking habitual. This puts people down the path to full corruption.

If you get the right people that are engaged on the bus, in the right seats that understand the leader’s intent, then minimal rules are necessary. A culture is established where people know what the expected results are, the acceptable ways of doing and delegation becomes much easier.

“Make as few rules / policies as possible but as many as necessary.”

A caveat on the above in the case of poor performers: It is a good thing to give people a second chance however, there needs to be a limit. If there is a poor performer on a team, and the leader has authority to decide who is on the team or not constitutes a failure on the part of the leader. In cases of poor performance, the leader should evaluate for a square peg in a round hole situation; it could be the person that is performing poorly is simply in the wrong job. Consider someone who could be great in the kitchen but is stuck out front at the restaurant as a host. Reassignment could be appropriate. A way to evaluate this is for the line manager / leader to get in and for a short period of time and micro-manage, but this needs to be time limited, and the poor performer needs to understand the time limitation to provide them some sense of urgency in performance improvement. If the team member was recruited and onboarded properly this lack of fit problem should not be an issue, but no one is perfect and leaders need to be prepared to deal with this.

Overall, though persistently poor performance should not be tolerated and the poor performer exited after they have been given a chance or two for improvement. Not doing so erodes the level of mutual respect on a team, decreasing energy levels and impairing team performance.

3.1.6 Always Be Teaching and Learning

While this may fall into the overall category of leading by example the concept merits its own section. Every day is filled with opportunities to teach and to learn. If a learning organization is desired, everyone and especially the leaders need to be a part of this. Just because you have attained a leadership role does not mean that your learning has stopped.

When delegating work to a new collaborator there is an efficiency curve where the first few delegations are inefficient, but if done appropriately things get more efficient over time. One of the ways to make this curve steeper is to take full advantage of opportunities for micro teaches/lessons. In a face to face working environment this can be really powerful. Where there are several people available (this needs people not to be overscheduled) more than one person can be brought into the micro-teach. Even if they are not going to apply the lesson immediately, they will now know which of their peers has not only been taught the lesson but put it into application. Then, when they encounter a need to use that skill they don’t need to come to you for the lesson, but will come to their peer instead. The peer will then get a chance to teach and reinforce their knowledge.

In delivery of these micro lessons, there is also an opportunity to test the knowledge of some of the people in the room. If they know part of the concepts being presented, invite them to be put on the spot and get them to explain it the small group. They get a chance to practice public speaking with a friendly audience and by teaching deepen their understanding of the material and the apocryphal quote comes to mind: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it.”

You get to see if they really know their stuff and if they don’t a gentle correction can be applied. It can be made explicitly clear to people that this is exactly what this is. In our engineering business highly technical design concepts would need to be presented to clients, in essence teaching the sometimes lay-person client about some technical concept. Inexperienced people getting a chance to teach is a great way for them to prepare and practice for taking the stage.

A virtuous set of behaviours can be established here:

The example you are setting for the up and comers to “pay it forward”
You are amplifying and scaling your impact in the sharing of your knowledge by bringing it to others so they can now disseminate the knowledge
Relationship building: this is a gift of your time to these others
Preparing people for real world client interactions they will be faced with

We are living in the age of the podcast. Time in the car or train while commuting is a great opportunity to expand your horizons and there is a cornucopia of podcasts that will help with leadership concepts and can be very entertaining. I have found the Jocko podcast by Jocko Willinck to be both entertaining and transmitting some really valuable insights into not only leadership but the human condition. Find a podcast that engages you and make use of this time.

When you learn something new, not only to you but to others in the organization, “geek out” about it with others. For me this is something that is done with a sense of genuine joy and excitement. This is infectious. It creates the desired resonance, raising energy levels.

Another key aspect of this mindset is as it relates to success and failure. The line from IF comes to mind again:

“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;”

Success and failure both bring learning opportunities. Don’t get too full of yourself for the triumph and don’t let the failure bring you down too much. Learn from what caused both of these and share these lessons with the team so that successes can be repeated and failures avoided.

Another great side effect of continuously learning is that is helps to keep you humble. A great experience for me was when already president of our company in my mid thirties I decided to get back into martial arts with Jiu-Jitsu / MMA. The interest was reignited when I enrolled my 5 year old son. I had some significant prior experience in Judo but it was a great and humbling experience to start again as a beginner getting your butt kicked (well ribs actually). A second way I have stayed humble is to do my own yard work at home. I could afford to hire other people to do it, but getting dirty, digging, doing that laborious work of tending the gardens, cutting the grass, manually weeding (I do the maintenance totally organically), learning and experimenting with different techniques, keeps one grounded. Other people I know get grounded by working in the garage on cars. In these examples when you screw up, you know it…boy do you know it when you get submitted in Jiu-Jitsu! Everyone should find some way to get physically grounded so that you have a solid connection to physical reality to keep maintain your humility.

A last tip on teaching is the use of story telling. Before the written word people passed knowledge and wisdom from one generation to another through an oral tradition of story telling. When lessons are embedded in a memorable story the learner will be more able to retain the knowledge and most importantly the wisdom. Some of the things I consider the most important things I have learned were through teachers telling me their stories. As a teacher get good at story telling and find these stories of others and of your own that you can tell well. As a leader you will probably need to tell these stories in front of groups of people. If you are uncomfortable with public speaking, learn to be better at it; Toastmasters is an organization many people have benefitted from to learn this skill. One of my most useful courses in university was a drama course on public speaking; I came away with a greatly improved ability to speak in front of a group that has benefitted me throughout my career.

3.1.7 Contemporaneous Error Correction

When errors are made corrections must be applied as soon as possible. Parents know this. If a toddler has made some kind of an error, they will not remember the situation an hour later. Adults may be slightly better. Coaching athletics works the same way. In a practice or game if a player is making an error, a coach will often immediately make a correction, or depending on the player and the error wait for a quiet moment ASAP to make the error correction. The style of how the error correction is made is important. It should not be done as a personal attack. “Why did you do that!!!” is counterproductive.

When the error correction is done properly, and the right people are on the bus (ie: not focused on grievance and not ego dominated) the feedback is treated as a gift and improvements are made immediately. The above average coachable player is more valuable than the prima donna; they may not rise to the heights of what the prima donna is capable of, but they are capable of working in a cohesive team and not only getting better themselves but making those around them better.

Failing to correct the error guarantees that it will occur again…and again…and again. Resentment then build. The person making the error may now have gotten into a pattern of doing things a certain way and error correction will become even harder. Nip it in the bud before the “muscle memory” is set, and before you and the rest of the team become resentful and it is harder to do the error correction in an appropriate way.

By taking advantage of the error correcting coachable moments the competency of the individuals in increased, and mutual respect is increased. A virtuous cycle is established if you are doing the error correction well as now a second generation will do the same thing. Lead by example in this regard.

The error correction is not done in a belittling way, and should be framed in your mind and delivery as opportunity for improvement.

3.1.8 Empathetically Listen

Empathetic listening is one of the most important skills in life and especially in leadership. Active listening can be considered a sub-set of empathetically listening.

This is a valuable skill in mentoring and coaching. It is noteworthy that empathy is not the same as sympathy. Empathy is to understand how another person is feeling, understanding the circumstances around their emotional state. Sympathy is feeling the same way as them, presently or in the past and being in agreement with those feelings. Sometimes sympathy is appropriate, but often not.

One of our biggest needs is to simply be heard, especially when we are struggling. In the high performance, high stress environment that often comes with service-based organizations there is a need for people to vent and be heard.

Empathetically listening basics involve:

Listening! If your jaws are flapping your ears aren’t working
Get rid of distractions and be fully present
- Yes, this means put the damn cell phone away, preferably in airplane mode or out of the room entirely. Simply having the phone visible as a possible source of interruption is enough to degrade the quality of the interaction. Putting it out of sight signals to the speaker that you are engaged and ready to really listen.
Paraphrase back
- Confirm your understanding of what you think you heard by reiterating what you heard in your own words.
Body language
- Adopt an engaged and open body position. Do not cross arms or legs. Lean forward slightly
Listen to understand
- When listening to the speaker do not listen with the intent to reply. Listen with he intent to understand the perspective of the speaker. Asking “why” questions can come off as judgemental and it is better to ask what, how, when type questions. This will be hard for a lot of engineers as we have been trained in root cause analysis techniques such as 5-whys. It will come with practice.

Empathetic listening skill is foundational to servant leadership and engaging in empathetic listening is done with a mind set of being of service to others, and is key to Covey’s 5th habit: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

Empathetically listening to someone communicates that they matter to you and will help to make them feel respected.

That said, you are not a therapist and that is not your job. There is an argument to made that as a society we are “over-therapied”. Life is going to get tough and a lot of time the best thing we can do is to simply put one foot in front of the other, getting on with it and through it. What is your job though, is to be aware of when people are struggling and to be able to factor this in when planning and making assignments. You can make the people who are struggling aware of resources that the organization may be able to bring to bear to help them.

As much as possible don’t solve your peoples’ problems for them. When you solve someone’s problem for them, both the problem and the solution are now yours. Whatever outcomes arise therefore, are also yours. Help them to solve it on their own by asking open ended questions and maybe giving the occasional hint. They will get to a point where they will independently solve their own problems. When they have solved their own problem they will now have more confidence to do so with new problems they have never seen before. This ability is a key part of leading: to face the often frightening unknown with the confidence and courage that you and your team will find a way to solve the problem at hand. Actively listening and helping others develop this problem solving ability is key to developing future leaders.

A close friend and business leader gave me the following metaphor: Someone you are seeking to help has a monkey (or maybe a couple of them) on their back. If you lean in close enough when helping them the monkey will climb onto your back.

3.1.9 Be Grateful Publicly

As mentioned earlier the inward expression of gratitude for the vicissitudes in life is powerful, and so is the external expression of gratitude towards those that have contributed.

Simple genuine public expression of appreciation for a job well done can go a long way. It must be genuine and not for every little thing otherwise it becomes meaningless. You should tailor the expression of gratitude to the person on the receiving end. If the person is more shy, and not driven by a hunger for recognition, and more so by stimulation, then the expression of gratitude for a job well done may come with a promise of more interesting work in the future.

The personal practice of gratitude will help with being able to be genuinely grateful. The personal practice can take the form of meditation and for people of faith, thanking their creator on a daily basis. This personal practice even extends to being grateful for hardships and challenges. The ancients including the stoics knew this.

Public gratitude addresses a hunger: recognition, but be careful for the people who don’t really care that much about it as it could even make them a bit cynical. For those not really craving recognition a little goes an even longer way.

The opposite is also true, for those hungering for recognition a public scolding is positively nauseating. Where constructive criticism is needed it should be done in private.

“Praise in public, scold in private”

Even a group dressing down erodes leadership capital. Is it sometimes called for? Possibly if a group does something truly egregious. Even then, caution is strongly advised. See section 3.1.11 for a more complete discussion of the concept of leadership capital.

Any kind of public scolding will be corrosive to respect and engagement and burns leadership capital.