Entries Tagged 'Leadership' ↓

In our last installment of this series, we discussed setting the vision for your organization and developing SOPs. At least, that’s what the series list says.

When I started writing this series, it was more like unconnected braingoo than a series of linear thinking. I did some scaffold-assisted planning and saw that some structure would make the series make more sense. That said, I discussed setting the vision last time because all of the suggestions below require that your team knows what you want them to do.

Okay, you’ve set your vision. Great! Here are some suggestions on how to help them execute your vision:

• Use the 4/5s Rule

No one likes getting handed the project that someone’s been sitting on until the last minute. The 4/5s rule states you should give your team 4/5 of the time allotted for the project to complete it.

For example, if you have ten working days to complete a project, you should have the rough details of the project in their hands within two working days. You can’t always do this - urgency strikes and things have to happen now - but it’s a good rule to work by. But the only way you can actually use this one is to…

• Give Them Enough Guidance to Get the Job Done and No More

If you try to plan everything down to the minute detail, you are mis-allocating your time and taking execution time away from your team. You are their leader - they need guidance on what you want done, not on how to do it. You’ve already set your vision and approved SOPs, so all they need is the critical requirements to get the job done.

An easy way to ask yourself whether you’re giving them too much information is to ask yourself if you’re telling them what to do or if you’re telling them how to do it. If you’re telling them how they should do the job, either they aren’t trained for the job or you’re wasting everyone’s time.

If they don’t know how to do it, get them trained. If they already know how to do it, get out of the way and let them do it. The goal is to get your operators better at doing their jobs in the company than you are - you make decisions, they execute those decisions.

In my experience, you make better, more adaptable teammates by giving them as much latitude as possible and they often do a better job than you could have estimated if you leave them alone and let them do what you pay and train them to do. This is hard to do because you have to learn that…

• How They’ll Do It Is Different Than How You’d Do It, but That’s (Usually) Okay

You probably think you know exactly how to get something done. Stop right now and get over yourself. You can’t do everything, and it’s not your job - learn to accept that people are going to do things different than you would and to look at the end result objectively.

As long as they’re doing the job within legal, ethical, and procedural parameters, they’ve gotten the job done. If they go outside of those parameters, it’s your job to push them back in them.

The key thing here is for you to take note of the process. Their way may be significantly slower than your way, in which case you’ll probably want to step in and show them a more efficient way. Their way may be significantly faster than your way, in which case you’ll need to learn from them, praise them for their efforts, and make that part of your organization’s standard operating procedures.

• Use Their Time Wisely

People hate to have their time wasted, and as their leader, it is your responsibility to ensure that people have enough to do to justify their being away from their families and free time.

As a general rule, give them more than you think they can do - people complain more fervently about not having anything to do than about having more to do than they can do. You can always triage tasks for them if they need it, but it’s pretty apparent when you’re just trying to find something for them to do to fill time.

If you’ve set the vision for the organization and you encourage initiative, your junior leaders will start to make things happen. Think about how Google does business: 20% of their employees’ time can be spent on side projects that interest them. I don’t think the G-team will ever have to worry about their employees watching the clock and being unproductive. But they’ve set a vision for innovation…

You’ve no doubt noticed that I continually use the words “guide” and “lead” rather than stronger words like “direct”. This is intentional: people don’t like someone looking over their shoulder while they work while constantly telling them how to do what they’re doing. It’s unproductive and generally demoralizing - they are trained adults that show up to do what they know how to do.

The next installation in this series is about spreading teamthink throughout your organization. If you’d like to learn more about the Art of Leadership, get FREE updates by Email or by RSS.

This post is a continuation of The Elements of Leadership series. Knowing your team is critical if you are to lead them, but knowing what you want them to do is just as paramount.

Your job as the leader of your team is to effectively communicate your vision for the organization and to initiate and finalize standard operating procedures. With these two pieces in place, your team will know the direction you want the organization to go and they’ll know how to react without you being there.

Communicate Your Vision

Where is your organization going? Who does what jobs? What does success and failure look like?

These are hard questions that only you can determine. If you want your organization to make $100,000 dollars this quarter, make that goal public. Talk about it with your team. Explain why it’s important to the organization that you do so. No one should be left in the dark about it, and everyone should know how their job helps advance that goal.

Perhaps you’re not in the business of making money, but rather you’re in the business of educating people. Define the standards you consider relevant to education and some threshold for people to aspire to. Talk to your teachers to see how they think they can help achieve that goal. Every employee who shows up to work should know how their job relates to that goal.

If you can’t immediately articulate in one sentence at least three short-term goals for your organization, stop the train now and figure them out. Rate them by importance in case your organization comes into the situation that not all goals can be achieved at the same time. If you, as their leader, can’t do it, your organization won’t be able to do it.

I’ve worked in places where I had no idea what the goals of the organization actually were. It’s not that they didn’t have any, but that the goals where so convoluted and inconsistent that when it came time to make decisions, I didn’t know what I should do. The only resolve was to ask someone, who asked someone else, who asked someone else, until someone finally decide what to do.

Don’t do this to your team. People naturally want to succeed - your job is to let them know what success looks like.

Develop Standard Operating Procedures

Every organization should have standard operating procedures. These procedures document the standard actions to be taken in certain situations.

I was in a sports store yesterday and their credit card server had crashed. Despite the fact that it took forever to process my order, I was impressed with the store’s response. They doubled up cashiers at registers and one cashier prepared the order to be handwritten and the other did the writing. It was clear that they done this before and had developed an efficient system.

I’ve been in other stores where this has happened and they closed down their registers. The store managers and employees had no idea what to do, and rather than continue to get sales, they turned customers away or asked them to shop for an additional twenty or thirty minutes (yeah right!).

The difference in the two stores was the leadership of the managers. The managers of the first store anticipated this problem and developed a system in case that problem happened. The employees of the store didn’t have to try to figure it out on their own - they grabbed their credit card slips and kept going.

The real value of standard operating procedures comes in the training and integration of new people. Rather than having to learn everything the hard way, new team members can pick up the document and see basically how the organization runs.

It’s important to keep in mind that you personally don’t have to write the standard operating procedures. In fact, you shouldn’t. Harness the intelligence and experience of those people who have actually been doing the job and let/make them do it. Review the standard operating procedures and other get them corrected or approve them.

Clearly communicating your vision and developing standard operating procedures allows your organization to run without you getting in the way of normal operations. Your team knows what you want them to do (since you’ve shared your vision), and they know how to do them (since you’ve developed the organizations standard operating procedures). This frees you up to lead, guide, mentor, and decide - which is what you should be doing.

The next installment in this series is on guiding your organization and using your team’s time wisely. If you’d like to learn more about the Art of Leadership, get FREE updates by Email or by RSS.

This post is a continuation of The Elements of Leadership. To effectively lead people, you have to know who they are.

I’m not talking about learning their names and positions. Where do they live? What’s their spouses’ and kids’ names? Who are their favorite musicians and sports teams? These are the types of questions that begin to give an indication of what they value and who they really are.

Take the time to get to know the people you work with - nothing lets people know you care about them as people, rather than as workers, than if you talk to them about things they care about.

I suggest you…

• Start with who you primarily work with and build your way out

I’ve got 156 people in my company, and I’ll never actually have a chance to talk on a personal level with most of them. However, I see my middle and senior supervisors often - so rather than being overwhelmed with 156 people, I started with the 15-20 people that I work with. I know them well enough now, so I’m starting to move to out from there.

• Talk to people who aren’t in cliques

Every organization has people who aren’t in the “in” crowd. Make sure you take the time to talk to them so that they know they’re part of the team. Not only are you helping them, you’re helping your organization because these people can become fiercely loyal and will work when everyone else is looking at the clock. They will ride with you through the gates of hell - all because you took the time to ask them how their third-grader was doing.

• Use notecards to help you learn who they are

When I deployed, I made notecards that had the Soldier’s name on one side and relevant information on the back. I wanted to know their age, birth date, their hometown, their civilian occupation, and their family information (spouse’s name and occupation and kids’ names and ages). That’s a lot of information, but when I had downtime on missions or back in garrison, I’d start flipping through the notecards- it took me about a month to do it. It definitely helped with camaraderie, and, if nothing else, they knew I cared enough to try.

Obviously, you may not need to know their civilian occupation if they work with you, but the rest is a pretty good start.

The next installment in this series is about defining your vision for your organization. If you’d like to learn more about the art of leadership, get FREE updates by Email or by RSS.

The art of leadership takes years to learn, mainly because knowing how to lead requires knowledge of yourself, knowledge of those you lead, and knowing how to get things done. Despite these variables, there are elements of leadership that will apply in any context.

I’ve been in a leadership role in one shape or another for about 16 years, and I started thinking about these elements the other day while driving to military training. It started as tips I was going to share with my new lieutenant during our first counseling session - but I figured I’d share it with everyone.

Many people think military leadership is different than civilian leadership. What’s different in the military setting is that the scope of leadership is greater - the elements are the same. The elements that keep your team working under fire when they’ve been up for too many hours are the same ones that keep your team together after a strong push at work.

There’s a lot to the art of leadership, so I’ll split this into a series. I’ll try to keep the post size manageable, and they’re not in any particular order. And we’re off…

Teach Your Team about the Three Types of Decisions

There are three main types of decisions that your team will have to make.

1. The decisions they can make on their own without letting you know

These are the routine decisions that they make to get their job done on a daily basis. They have no obvious long-term repercussions for your organization, and you just frankly don’t need to be included in the process.

2. The decisions they can make on their own but they have to let you know they made them

Your team has to make some decisions on the fly, but sometimes you need to know they made the decision. As a general rule, if there are obvious positive or negative long-term fiscal, legal, or public relations repercussions, you probably want to know so you’re not blindsided by the information.

3. The decisions they can’t make and must defer to you
   

There are just some decisions that no one but you, as their leader, can make. They need to know what these are so they a) don’t make them and b) learn to anticipate when a process is going to lead to this type of decision.

It takes a while for people to learn these types of decisions. On the one hand, you don’t want to have it where they can’t make any decisions without deferring to you, and on the other, you don’t want them to make decisions they shouldn’t be making. It is your responsibility as their leader to help them through this lengthy learning process.

When someone comes to you with a decision of the first type, kindly thank them for letting you know and let them know that they don’t have to tell you about it in the future. If it’s a good decision, praise her to encourage her budding initiative.

When you get blindsided by information that you should have been told, find the project manager and kindly let them know that you applaud them for making the decision but that it’s something you needed to know.  If it’s a bad decision, clearly and calmly explain why it was a bad decision - your goal is to teach them to make good decisions without you.

If someone makes a decision that fell within your domain as a leader, kindly let them know that they overstepped their boundaries and that in the future all decisions of that type need to be deferred to you. If it’s a great decision, praise the hell out of the her and consider including her on important decision-making committees.

Above all, present a clear vision of the organization’s goals and encourage people to take as much initiative as they can to advance those goals. The more they advance your vision on their own without stepping outside of legal, fiscal, or procedural parameters, the more time you have to make strategic decisions and plan for the future success of your organization.

The next installment in this series is about getting to know your team. If you’d like to learn more about the art of leadership, get FREE updates by Email or by RSS.

Joel over at Lifehack gives a bit longer survey of good leadership traits. It seemed to me that he hit all of the major points I talked about in yesterday’s post, sans the picture with the stooge in glasses.

Apparently leadership is on the hive brain.

Throughout my military career, I’ve run into many different kinds of leaders. It’s hard to really specify what exactly makes a good leader, but I have a very quick saying that helps me gauge them:

“Some leaders you want to sit at the dinner table with, but you wouldn’t want to go to war with them.
Some leaders you want to go to war with, but you wouldn’t want to sit down and eat with them.
The ideal situation is when you both would want to sit down and eat with them and you would want to go to war with them.
Life just sucks when you neither want to sit down and eat with your leaders nor want to go to war with them.”

It’s pretty simple, really, but it captures the important pieces. See, some people are just really nice, you get along with them, they’re fun to be around–but they don’t possess either the character to lead in hard times or the ability to get the job done. You might like to see them when you hit home base, but you don’t want them making decisions that impact the lives of you and your troops.

The second category is a bit tougher. Maybe they rub you the wrong way. Maybe they don’t have a sense of humor. Maybe they’re just assholes. But, and the important but when it comes to life or death situations, you know that when it’s time to mount up and fight the fight, they’ll get you and your troops through it. You may not like ‘em, but they get you home in one piece. And that makes all the difference.

The third category of leader is what you want. They’ll get you home and make life easier while you’re away. What many people don’t get is that a large majority of how bad your life will be while you’re at war depends on the personality and competency of the leaders above you. Being away from home and having people actively trying to kill you is always bad, but it’s worse when your superiors are a bunch of robotic numbnuts (the last category).

Of course, there’s a lot of translation of these qualities outside of the military existence; combat and the pressures of military existence only magnify the commonalities of the human experience. You see this eat play when there’s that somewhat pitiable manager who everybody likes but who everybody knows probably shouldn’t be in the position he’s in. Then there’s that manager who people really don’t like to hang out with and who’s generally avoided but manages to have a successful department no matter what else is going on; you may not want to chill with him after work, but you’re glad you’re in his successful department. Thirdly, there’s what I like to call the “Kool-Aid manager;” just add people, and somehow she makes a successful team without trying to do it. Every organization–military, civilian, religious, or other–is looking for those type of people. And almost everyone has experienced the last category; they make life harder for you and they’re incompetent.

I’m fortunate that a good few of my current superiors in the Guard are of the ideal type; my morale, and the morale of my troops, has been much higher recently. It’s hard to relate to my academic superiors as “superiors” in that same way since it’s a much looser type of structure, but even still, they’re competent, understanding, and generally try to improve my position, so I’m fortunate to have them, as well.

What type of boss do you have?