The Business Sensei

“She doesn’t know how to lead!”

“Clearly, we picked the wrong person when we brought him on as CEO. He’s just not a leader!”

“We don’t need a leader. We’re all equals.”

These are all comments I’ve heard from Boards of Directors, senior management teams, even groups of college students. Okay, to be fair, college students don’t refer to any of their number as a CEO, but otherwise the sentiment is the same. In each case, the first reaction of the group to any difficulties or controversy is to accuse the leader of being unable to lead. The groups with no leader do avoid that problem, but at the cost of not actually managing to get anything done. Sooner or later, a leader emerges, whether or not openly acknowledged.

Fundamentally, the problem with effective leadership is that most people have no idea what an effective leader looks like or how an effective leader actually leads. I am told over and over by managers, board members, and the like, that what the leader really needs to do is stand up and tell everyone to shut up and do as they are told. Of course, should the leader actually do that, those same people are the first to scream that they are having their opinions ignored. What they really mean is that they want the leader to tell everyone else to shut up and let them speak.

I worked with one company that fired a team leader because the CEO didn’t see that he was contributing anything. He seemed to spend all day doing nothing at all. Once he was gone, though, it became painfully obvious to the company that he was doing far more than nothing. By the time the CEO accepted that he’d made a mistake it was too late to get the team lead back.

The image of the leader as the person who tells everyone what to do, approves all decisions, and controls all aspects of the group has just enough truth in it to be dangerous. When a group is first assembled, there is frequently sufficient uncertainty about the goals of the group and about how the members all fit in that they are quite happy to have a certain amount of very directive leadership. Indeed, a leader can get away with quite a bit at this point, in large part because the members of the team don’t yet actually care all that much about the team’s goals.

At this point, the leader needs to be helping the members of the team build a sense of team spirit and team identity. That means getting to know one another and appreciate each other as individuals, not necessarily for what they bring to the team. As paradoxical as it may appear, you build the team by not focusing on the team. Instead, you focus on the individuals by building a strong foundation of trust and camaraderie. People want to be appreciated for who they are, not just for the skills they bring to the table. The more team members can celebrate each others accomplishments, whether those accomplishments are work related or not, the more likely that team will be successful. That level of cohesion and trust does not come about through telling people what to do.

The toughest moment for the leader is when people start to care. Now that they care, they will actively work to bring about the success of the team, which is where things become challenging for the leader. When they didn’t care, they accepted the leader’s directives with little question. Now that they care, they want to bring their own perspectives, ideas, thoughts, and approaches into the mix. That means that many of them will start to question the leader, argue, and potentially become confrontational. Should the leader respond by squashing the apparent dissent, he also squashes the nascent sense of caring about the team and the company. Instead, the leader needs to slow down, invite opinion, and explain his actions and reasoning. The leader must be open to making changes if someone comes up with a better idea of how to do things. Otherwise, the leader is not fully taking advantage of the resources available to him: the eyes, ears, hands, and brains of his team. Unfortunately, this team strengthening behavior is all too often seen as weakness by many people, including the leaders themselves. As a result, they refuse to do it, and thus limit the capabilities of their team.

The goal of the leader must be to create a team that is more capable than any individual member of the team. Otherwise, why bother having a team in the first place? By building up a sense of team identity, trust, and appreciation for one another amongst the members, each person will be free to ask for and receive help from one another. As MIT’s Ed Schein points out, it is only when each person, including the leader, feels that they can accept and give help freely that the team has the potential to become stronger than any individual member. It is only through the asking and giving of help that the team can determine which member or coalition of members are best suited to solving any particular problem that comes up.

Thus, we come full circle. This process of mutual helping contradicts the image many people have of leaders. Rather than working to build up their teams, far too many so-called leaders act like the leaders they see on television or in movies. Others do not even seek leadership roles because they believe that being a leader means acting in ways that they find repugnant. If they do seek leadership roles, they may be ignored by team members who have bought into the fictional construct of the leader.

The leader who has to constantly tell people what to do is not doing a good job of leading. The leader who has to get out of the way so that his team doesn’t run over him in their rush to accomplish the goals of the team is the true successful leader. What sort of leaders do you have in your organization?

“We need to take our time and carefully evaluate the situation.”

“We don’t have a lot of time and we need to move forward.”

Both of these statements were made about the same project by different sets of people. The first was made by a representative of a large company, the second by a representative of a much smaller company with which the larger company was working. The folks from the large company wanted to plan everything out to the last detail, avoid any possible errors, guarantee a perfect product, and not move forward until success was assured. The members of the smaller company, not having the financial resources of the larger company and being more personally invested, wanted to get the project started.

In any project, it’s important to evaluate the situation and determine the best way to move forward. However, in any non-trivial project, it’s impossible at the beginning to foresee every eventuality. When leaving on a trip, one attempts to plan for various contingencies such as traffic, weather, flight delays, and so forth; however, some things cannot be predicted either because they are too far off to see clearly or because changing conditions make long-term prediction unreliable. On the other hand, it’s foolish to set forth on a journey without making some effort to predict the possible pitfalls and plan for how to deal with them.

There’s an old saying that “no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” While true, how, and when, the battle plan fails can provide valuable information about what is going wrong and how to fix it. That’s assuming, of course, that the plan is designed correctly in the first place.

When planning a project, be it a battle, software development, a sales campaign, or just about anything else, the first step is always to understand how you’ll know when you’re at your destination. If you don’t know what success looks like in terms of the results you expect to achieve, it’s all too easy to take the wrong turn. Once you know what success is, only then can you identify what failure looks like.

Of course, success or failure is still a long way off. That means that your descriptions will, of necessity, be more or less vague. In order to sharpen your focus, you need to identify several stopping points between where you are now and where you want to end up. When doing this exercise, it often helps to work backward from the end point. Those stopping points become your initial milestones and should be sharper the closer they are to your starting point. A secondary goal of your milestones is to identify resources and dependencies and make sure they will be available or met at appropriate times.

For each milestone you must once again repeat the process of understanding where you are and how you’ll know if you didn’t get there. Your goal is not to avoid all possible errors, but to make sure you can identify errors as quickly as possible and be willing to cut your losses before you’ve invested too many resources down a non-functional path. When you’re uncertain which way to go, it often helps to explore several possibilities simultaneously. Some will be wrong, but if you cut your losses well, then you can save a great deal of time and may develop some novel or unexpected solutions. Walt Disney liked to have a dozen movies in production at once: he knew that half of them would flop, just not which half.

Once you have your milestones, you can get started. At each milestone, you need to evaluate your progress and adjust as necessary. What worked and what did not? Have unexpected problems cropped up? Are their external dependencies that may become a problem? It’s not about fixing blame but about understanding how to best allocate your resources and move forward. Mistakes are part of the game and initial guesses about how difficult tasks are or how long they might take are often wrong.

Once you’ve done all that, you’re still not ready to move forward to the next milestone. It’s important to take a little time and see what you’ve learned about your upcoming milestones. Have they come into sharper focus? Do they need to change? Have you discovered new dependencies that need to be taken into account or are there old dependencies that are no longer relevant?

While this may seem like a lot of work, with a little practice it becomes surprisingly easy. Once you understand your route and know how you’ll adjust it as necessary, cutting loose the anchors and moving forward is remarkably simple and even relaxing. You’ll reach your destination faster than if you rush forward without considering or planning for potential obstacles and much faster than if you never start.