October 2018 – Leadershipness

Integrity

I’m a dedicated listener to NPR, and if you are as well you will have noticed that this week they started their semi-annual fund drive. The hosts were asking people to donate while mentioning that only a tiny fraction of habitual, dedicated listeners actually do, and it got me thinking about integrity.

I consider integrity as doing what’s right, even when it’s inconvenient. It’s such a simple definition and ideal, but such a difficult one to live. All of those millions of people listening to NPR tell themselves comforting excuses about how they can’t really afford a donation right now, but will definitely give in the future. There are no consequences for this behavior. Others
have always stepped up in the past, and NPR has continued on without their involvement. It’s so easy! The only reason to actually give, is that it’s the right thing to do.

Integrity has a civil engineering definition as well, referring to the structural strength of an object; how likely is it to fail under stress. I find this definition enlightening. A wall with structural integrity doesn’t fail when hit by a storm, just like a leader with personal integrity, real integrity, doesn’t fail under stress. Even when things are hard, even when no one would ever know, they are still much more likely to do the right thing.

Integrity is doing what’s right, even when it’s inconvenient

Underlying Issues

Have you ever been in a meeting with management and been tempted to take credit for an idea developed by someone on your team, or to duck responsibility for a mistake? The team member who came up with the diea isn’t there; they would probably never find out. That mistake was REALLY more of a team effort; lots of people could have done things better. Do thoughts like these go through your mind in moments of stress and accountability?

You can tell yourself that it’s just this one time, but it never is. These thoughts, these excuses that we tell ourselves aren’t the real problem, they’re symptoms. If you would consider taking more credit than you really deserve, it indicates the wrong mindset. It’s a sign of putting yourself before the team. Avoiding responsibility for a mistake the team made indicates insecurity. Maybe you’re afraid of criticism. These are underlying issues that can seriously eat away at a leader’s credibility and the team’s effectiveness.

Priorities -> Goals -> Behaviors

It’s critical to always be honest with yourself and to critically analyze your motivations. Your priorities dictate your goals, and your goals dictate your behaviors. If you consciously put the team first, then you’re much less likely to do something to compromise that like stealing credit or redirecting blame.

Integral Leadership

These little things are so important, because, like a wall, any act that lacks integrity, compromises the integrity of the whole. Take a single brick out of the strongest wall, and it becomes ever so much weaker and leaves a gap that makes it much easier to take another brick, and another… Eventually, what seemed like such a small thing that could never hurt such a sturdy wall, has caused it to become frail, full of holes, and ready to fall down at the smallest stress. Your personal integrity works the same way.

Don’t kid yourself to think that no one will notice these lapses. Everyone knows a leader with integrity; it’s in everything they do. A leader who genuinely puts his team first has an undefinable credibility with the team that cannot be bought any other way.

A team led by a genuine leader is like a highly trained special operations team instead of a group of hired mercenaries. Team members won’t hesitate to sacrifice themselves for the team and a leader who would do the same, while the mercenaries will scatter when things get hard. It can be hard to tell what kind of team it is when things are going well, but the difference is night and day the moment there’s a problem.

I have personally struggled with owning mistakes in the past, and every instance where I compromised my integrity haunts me. Each was an opportunity for genuine leadership lost, an opportunity to set the example for my team and learn from the mistake wasted. I now make a conscious effort to recognize this behavior, try to realize when I am engaging in it, and to hold myself accountable. Even more, I try to work on the underlying issues that cause me to engage in this behavior in the first place. It’s a struggle, but trying to make myself better and holding myself to a higher standard is the only way I can ask the same of my team.

How to Set Goals

Everyone sets goals for themselves, and every leader has goals for their team. These goals may be informal, aspirational, explicit, or any number of other things, but, in the end, goals are just what you hope to accomplish, both for yourself and for your team.

But what makes a good goal? What goals, and how many should a leader set for themselves and their team? Is it good to set easy goals so the team can have a sense of accomplishment, or should one make very challenging goals to inspire the team meet the challenge? The answer to many of these questions is: “it depends”, however there are a few criteria that all goals should adhere to, and several mistakes around goal setting that should be avoided.

It’s critical that goals are not only SMART, but well thought out, intentional, few in number, focused, and aligned with the company’s incentives. It may sound funny, but it is far more common in my experience for a company to want one thing, but structure incentives that encourage something totally different.

Aligning Goals and Incentives

For example, have you ever worked at a company that paid its sales team a commission on signed contracts? Once the ink is dry, the salesperson gets a cut of the agreed on sales price, and the company gets a new project. Great deal, right? Well, what does this scenario really encourage? Does it incentivize the salesperson to make reasonable promises and set appropriate expectations? Does it encourage the salesperson to collaborate with the implementation team to ensure that the project can be completed on time, on budget, and to the customer’s satisfaction? Or, instead, does it encourage the salesperson to say whatever they need to, make whatever promise is necessary, to get the contract signed so they can move on to the next one?

In most cases, the company doesn’t want a signature on a contract. That’s a nice and necessary first step, but what the company really wants is a successful implementation, a happy and reference-able customer, and repeat business. That first contract should just be the first of many if the company delivers on their promises, but if those promises aren’t made with respect to reality, then the company is going to get that signature on a piece of paper, and likely none of the things that they really want.

You can’t blame the salesperson for this scenario; they’re just doing what they have been encouraged to do. You can’t expect to set incentives that encourage behavior that doesn’t contribute to your ultimate goals, and hope to achieve them.

Aligning Goals Vertically

Another common mistake when it comes to goals is the creation of independent goals at every level of the company hierarchy. Imagine that the company leadership is looking to grow new sales by 20% year-over-year, the engineering team has decided to work on issues for existing customers to increase the Net Promoter Score, and the sales team is working on customer education to get existing customers to adopt more modules of the product.

These are all fine goals, but they do not contribute to each other at all. Neither the engineering team or the sales team is contributing to each other’s goals, and neither of them is contributing to the overall company goal. Imagine three teams of people all pulling a section of an enormous rope in different directions. Nobody’s going to get very far without the support of the other people pulling the rope.

Now, imagine instead that the leadership team has announced that the company’s goal is to grow new sales by 20% year-over-year, and then works with the engineering team to decide to build new features that prospective customers have been asking for, and with the sales team to reach out to contacts made at conferences to increase their awareness that the features they were interested in are in the pipeline. This is an organization all pulling the rope in the same direction, and it’s amazing how much can get done if the goals set by every team align with each other and contribute to the goals of the greater organization.

When you’re deciding on goals for your team, make sure to understand what goals your boss has set for their team, make sure that the goals you set for your team align with them, and also be sure that your incentives encourage behavior that will accomplish them.

Less Is More

Yet another mistake when setting goals is a loss of focus. Sometimes a team will have so many things to do, so many issues to resolve, and so many stakeholders to please that it’s tempting to set dozens of tiny goals to try to make everyone happy. In my experience, this only results in
the team not understanding what the real priorities are, no stakeholder really getting what they want, and results in the sense that little was accomplished.

Your goals set your priorities, and having a few, clear goals that everyone on the team understands and can work toward is far more valuable than many smaller goals that seem unrelated. It is a very powerful thing to tell a team that in the next three sprints we are going to accomplish two things, and everything everyone does is going to contribute, in some way, to the accomplishing of these things. It sets the vision, it enlists their support, and gives clarity to why they are working on whatever tasks are assigned to them.

It is fine to have smaller sub-goals, but they must all align and contribute to the greater, stated goals, otherwise the message gets confusing. If everyone on the team is working on tasks that clearly align with each other and contribute to a greater communal goal, it creates a sense of team, partnership, and purpose that cannot be replicated otherwise.

What your goals are and how challenging is less important than their focus, and alignment with incentives and greater company goals. Being thoughtful and communicative about your team’s goals is a great way to develop a high performing team with a track record of accomplishments.

Embracing Failure

How do you react to failure, either yours or that of a team member? Do you feel embarrassed? Ashamed? Was it a mistake that you would take back? This reaction is one of the key differences between teams that achieve amazing things, and those that produce the same, predictable results over and over again.

We are taught from a young age to look at failure as a mistake, and the fewer mistakes made the better. We assume that there is an inversely proportional relationship between success and mistakes: the fewer mistakes, the more quickly success must be achieved. The truly brilliant among us have no idea what failure is, and perpetually bask in the constant stream of success that their efforts inevitably result in.

That nonsense is as poisonous as it is untrue. Successful people are that way in large part not because they avoided mistakes; quite the opposite! The story of every successful person I have ever known is punctuated by risks that don’t always work out, failures survived, and mistakes turned into lessons. Successful people are the ones who have survived the most failures, and pushed on in spite of them.

“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
Henry Ford

Leadership and Failure

Leaders should neither avoid risks nor embrace them uncritically. Instead careful consideration should be given to any effort that has a high likelihood of failure, and the following criteria applied:

What is the likelihood of failure?
What is the cost of failure (discounting the value of lessons learned)?
What is the value of success?

Most of you should recognize the above for what it is: a very simple ROI calculation. And, like all ROI calculations, you have to be sure to include the value of all outcomes. The part that gets left out is the value of the lessons that failure can teach.

What is the value of trying something bold and new that doesn’t work out, but teaches an incredibly valuable lesson that can lead to new projects or impact the way your team operates going forward? Is it worth the cost of the initial failed effort? Compare this instead with pursuing the safe approach where failure isn’t possible, but neither is learning anything new. What kind of team do you want to manage? Which of these approaches truly provides the most value to the company?

Leveraging Risk

In order to truly start leveraging risk, it’s critical to get into the right mindset. You can’t expect your team to bring you bold new ideas unless they are seriously entertained, or to try things that might not work if they are chastised for failure. It is important to create a culture of calculated risks, creative thinking, and bold actions, and to do that your team members have to believe through repeated experience these are the things that you value.

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
Winston Churfhill

If you view failure as a mistake, then your team will respond by not taking any of the risks that might result in one. If you view failure as a chance taken and a lesson learned, then your team will follow that lead and will start to produce the truly unexpected and brilliant things that humans are capable of when they aren’t constrained by fear and anxiety. Your words and actions are a major component of how many novel ideas and innovative approaches your team produces.