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.