Month: November 2018

Hopeful Leadership

There you are, in the middle of a sprint. Everything is going well, the team is humming along, and things are getting done when WHAM!, a bug from an obscure part of the application that you’ve never personally dealt with is discovered. It’s not critical enough to drop everything to fix, and it’s not benign enough to just dump in the backlog to forget.

You shrug your shoulders, open up your issue tracking software, and assign it to the developer who knows the most about that part of the application, and you get back to work. Problem solved.

Except it isn’t. Not really. What are the chances that the developer works on the bug in a timely manner? What are the chances that it gets done at all? In my experience, the chances of an issue treated  this way getting resolved is near zero.

Hope != Leadership

We’ve all been there. As humans we have a natural reaction to non-critical issues that we’re not comfortable with: avoidance. Hand the problem off to someone else, make them responsible for it, and get back to what you’re good at. It feels good, safe. But it’s not leadership. It’s hope.

You set your team’s priorities, and if you don’t want to address an issue, it’s very likely that they won’t either. A leader isn’t part of a fire brigade, taking a bucket of water from one person and just handing it off to the next person with the hope that somewhere down the line someone is going to dump that bucket onto the fire. Leaders are the ones making sure that the chain has enough people, that everyone is on the same page, and that every bucket of water ends up where it’s needed. Every bucket of water is your responsibility, even the annoying ones that you don’t particularly like.

The leader keeps track of what needs to be done, when, and by whom. They communicate expectations and priorities, and they follow up so that nothing is forgotten. Your team will pick up on this discipline, and it will become unacceptable to just let things slide. Everyone will become more aware of the overall project goals, even the things that aren’t directly on their plate, but it all starts at the top. Leaders who only pay attention to things that interest them, end up leading teams of people who only work on things that interest them.

Remove Yourself from the Equation

This principle extends beyond technology to disciplinary issues, working with recruiters, approving budgets and expenses, anything that is a responsibility of your job that you don’t particularly enjoy. Ignoring it and hoping that it will take care of itself isn’t a plan. No problem ages well.

We’ve all done it, and we probably see it all the time. Every time someone says “someone should fix this”, or “we’ve had a plan to improve this  forever”, you’re hearing the hope that someone else will tackle the problem and make it go away. This is an opportunity for a leader to step in, take responsibility, and deliver results that no one else will.

Your personal feelings shouldn’t drive your priorities, the severity of the issue and the benefit of the solution must. If you ever find yourself reluctant to tackle a problem, take a moment to examine why. Is it because you don’t think it’s important, or because it’s not something that you’d enjoy doing. Find a way to take yourself out of the equation, evaluate the issue on its own merits, and if you find that it should be addressed, drive it home.

In the end, it all comes down to responsibility. Leaders embrace it, even when it’s not fun. Never forget: hope is not a strategy, and it’s certainly not leadership.

Serenity Now

Like everyone else, I’d heard lots about mindfulness over the last several years. I’d even gotten into the habit of doing some simple breathing exercises when I found myself getting upset or frustrated about something. When it occurred to me that is.

Most of the time though I was going through life as I always have: with my heart on my sleeve, spending a good portion of each day frustrated, and often not dealing with it particularly well. It finally came to a head one night at the dinner table about a month ago.

My son, who is one of my favorite people in the world, was goofing off and ended up dropping some of his pasta and sauce onto his shirt and lap. He thought it was kind of funny until he saw the look on my face. I didn’t scream or even raise my voice much, but what I said bordered on emotional abuse. It was mean and totally disproportionate to the mistake my son had made. I reduced him to sobbing tears right there at dinner.

Acknowledging you have a problem

My wife and I went out to lunch the next day, and she (carefully) mentioned that I needed to something about my behavior at dinner the previous night, and she suggested a meditation app named Headspace. She had heard about it somewhere, and I was happy to take up her suggestion, because I was pretty ashamed at my behavior as well. That night my meditation journey began.

I started out on the easiest setting, which was frankly all I could handle. Trying to calm and clear my mind, which had spent over a decade on the hamster wheel of constant mobile phone distraction, was more difficult than I can describe. But my motivation was strong so I persisted; meditating with the app every day, progressively for longer and longer periods.

The change wasn’t immediate, but it was far faster than I expected. It wasn’t complete, but it was far more drastic than I would have ever dreamed.

Who are you, and what have you done with myself?

The first thing I noticed after about three weeks of daily meditation was that my pace of walking and talking slowed down, and my voice softened. Nothing the kids did bothered me. I could recognize that what they were doing was wrong, and that they should stop, even taking on a stern voice if necessary, but these were all conscious decisions. Meditation didn’t make me OK with everything my kids did, it put me in control of my reaction to it.

I found myself, for possibly the first time in my life, in complete control of how I perceived my environment and those in it, and how I reacted to everything. I was OK with being in the moment, and the urge to pick up my phone whenever I had a free moment slowly evaporated.

I would go for walks without my phone and see, for the very first time, the color of the leaves, the quality of the light as it passed through the trees, the texture of the clouds, and really feel the wind on my face. I was experiencing Earth like I was a visitor who had never been here before.

It starts with a single step

I know my journey is not done, and I am by no means a finished project, but the impact that meditation has had on my life in the month that I’ve been doing it has been incalculable. It turns out that meditation isn’t at all what I thought it was, and the effect it could have on me is not something I ever could have expected.

You might be wondering what this is doing on a leadership blog, and I’d tell you that this experience has shaped the way I see my family, my co-workers, and those I have been entrusted to lead to a greater extent than any education, learning, reading, or advice I have ever received.

I don’t know if everyone can expect similar results to what I’ve seen. Maybe I was particularly ready to receive this wisdom. I honestly have no idea. I just know that it has made me better at everything that is important to me in my life, and I desperately wish that I’d discovered it decades ago.

I don’t know what your meditation journey would have in store for you, but I would highly recommend finding out.