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

2.2     Strategy

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.

Organizational strategy includes at a minimum the following elements:

1. Codification of values

2. 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.”

3. 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.

4. Planning of objectives, goals and their supporting actions

   1. Including planning and creation of supporting infrastructure

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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:

1. Clarified Intent (discussed below)

2. Optimized Talent (see section 3.2)

3. 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

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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.

Figure 3: Strategic Map Excerpt

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

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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:

1. Identified knowledge gap

2. Identify others that need the lesson

3. Gather

4. Teach

5. 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):

1. Create a sense of urgency

2. Build a guiding coalition

3. Form a strategic vision

4. Enlist a volunteer army

5. Enable action by removing barriers

6. Generate short term wins

7. Sustain acceleration

8. 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:

1. Getting people on the bus

2. Codification and communication of Values, Mission, Vision

3. Leading by example with respect to values and mission

4. 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:

1. High quality planned action (Q) (see Appendix 1)

2. Highly engaged team members (E)  (See Appendix 3)

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:

1. Be proactive

2. Begin with the end in mind

3. Put first things first

4. Think win-win

5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood

6. Synergize

7. 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:

1. Ego

2. 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. 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?

2. Am I micromanaging?

3. 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.

3 cont: Leading By Example

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:

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

2. Schedule in blocks of time to do work

3. 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.