Category: Principles

How to know when your life goals are right

When I was in my second year at Georgia Tech, my girlfriend at the time asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I had just spent a few weeks that summer at the World Cup in France with my sister. We travelled across the country, ate amazing food, met interesting people, visited fascinating cities, and joined the world in a mutual celebration of soccer. It was a life altering experience. So without thinking too hard about it, I responded that I’d like to live all over the world, learning new languages, exploring different cultures, and meeting different people.

This was not the right answer, or at least not the one she was looking for. She wanted stability for a family, a big house, a yard, security, and all of the other signs of success that young Americans dream of achieving. I remember feeling a little silly and irresponsible, thinking that backpacking across Europe was a something you did after high school or college, and not a life ambition. I was going to have to grow up, and so were my dreams.

Twenty years later I was married to an entirely different woman with a family, a big house, a yard, and security. We were very stable. We had achieved our dream, the dream, at a reasonably young age, but there had, of course, been compromises. I had commuted huge hours for years to get to work, my wife had been working in a job that she had become increasingly disillusioned with over the years, and our savings weren’t what they should been considering how hard we worked. The stress caused both of us to be short-tempered, and we occasionally fought over things neither of us really cared that much about. We needed a vacation.

Getting away

My wife is Polish, and every other year we’d make a summer trip to Poland to visit her family and visit another destination while we were already in Europe. My wife noticed that Wrocław, Poland had just been declared Europe’s best destination in 2018, so we decided that it would be a perfect place to spend a week.

We got an AirBnB right on the old square. It was summer, people were everywhere, the food was amazing, and we fell in love with the place. Spending a week in this beautiful foreign place reminded me of my youthful dream of living, working, and exploring places like it for my entire life. A dream that I thought I had outgrown.

For the first time in decades, I stopped to look at my life, what I had and what I truly wanted. I had a big, beautiful house in a very desirable location, but I felt more alive in a tiny apartment that was a two minute walk from 50+ restaurants and bars. I had a convertible sports car in my garage, but I didn’t even want to own a car at all. I just needed one to get to work. We’d lived in the same city for 20 years (stability!!), and we had stopped exploring it long ago.

I was outwardly successful, but unfulfilled. I had spent the previous two decades perfectly executing a carefully planned strategy to achieve someone else’s dream. I didn’t really need any of the things that I had, and in order to get them we had sacrificed the things that were truly important: family time, international travel, language classes, etc.

Iterative planning

It is often said that “execution trumps strategy”, and this is true. A great strategy counts for nothing if you can’t realize it. What is also true is that executing the wrong strategy, no matter how perfectly, is equally useless. Building the perfect product that no one wants is an excellent way to make a large investment disappear. Often business leaders miss a giant opportunity as it zooms by them while they are focused on executing their current strategy, not realizing that what they are trying to achieve no longer matters.

Markets and technology change fast, and focusing on what you think you’re supposed to do, or what the rest of the industry is doing, can blind you to what you really should be doing. There are a few really effective techniques for cutting through the clutter of information and assumptions and getting at the true core of the problem. I have personally used both First Principles and 5 Whys to help me understand a problem, decide on a goal, and formulate a strategy. But that’s just the first step.

Once you’ve done all of the hard work to determine your ultimate goal, and plot a path to get there, you have to periodically and objectively re-apply these frameworks during your journey to evaluate your progress, your approach, and whether the destination still makes sense. During this evaluation it’s critical to avoid the Sunk Cost Fallacy and Confirmation Bias (First Principles thinking can be especially helpful here) to ensure that all of your efforts are the best investment the company can be making at that time. If you decide that it’s not, then it’s important to have the courage to learn, adjust, and move on. This unemotional detachment from a goal and a plan is often what spells the difference between a successful project or startup and failure.

Life pivot

After returning from our trip and having taken this long, hard look in the mirror, I found a remote-only job 3 months before the first Coronavirus case was announced in the US. We sold our big, beautiful house, and moved to Wrocław in the middle of a pandemic. My life is now so much smaller and quieter, but it’s filled with the things that I care about. The clutter has been removed and everything is simplified.

My Polish is coming along nicely, but I only have another 16 months to master it because we plan on moving again next summer after 2 years in Poland, and then again, and again… It turns out my plan to be a digital nomad was just ahead of its time, and not a childish dream after all. My teenage self didn’t get a lot of things right, but it did seem to know itself. Without all of the clutter of other people’s dreams and expectations, just knowing what made me happy and inspired me, I was able to come up with a goal that was truly aligned with who I was and what I wanted. A great example of First Principles thinking.

Soft Power

I actually had multiple people respond to my previous post and comment that their favorite part was the point I made about informal authority. Informal authority is such a cornerstone of my leadership philosophy that I was sure that I had written a full-length post dedicated to it, but after reviewing my archives it turns out I haven’t! It definitely deserves a post of its own, so here it is:

Formal authority is vested in you by the company and your title. It is given to you when others are placed under your leadership; it is an awesome power and a powerful tool, and is best left completely unused.

Informal authority is earned through your actions and your reputation, and cannot be given or faked. It is the true currency of leadership, and the invisible steering wheel with which real leaders guide their organizations. In a healthy organization with a positive culture, informal authority is all that is necessary to keep a team aligned and productive.

Formal Authority Apocalypse

As I’ve mentioned in this blog before, most of my ideas about proper leadership come from experiencing the opposite for so long from so many different sources. I have seen what bad leadership looks like so clearly and so pervasively, that it crystallized in me a determination to never subject anyone else to the kind of “leadership” I had suffered. Formal authority is the tool of those leaders that I have spoken of.

You can recognize a weak leader by their consistent use of imperatives and self-reference: “do this…”, “I need this…”, “this is what you will do and how you will do it…” They dictate a vision to their subjects, whose sole purpose is to execute on their master’s plan. Any attempt to question, deviate, or even propose an alternative results in the wielding of their formal authority; a constant reminder that things will be done their way, because they’re in charge.

If you ever find yourself in a situation like the above, leave. Not because it’s a miserable work environment, even though it is. Not because it will stunt your career growth and professional development, even though it will. Not because of any high-minded, moral objection to this behavior, but because it is a failing strategy. A weak leader who dictates from on high creates an organization where ideas are only generated from a single mind, where discussion is silenced, independence crushed, and initiative discouraged.

A workplace like this will be out-competed quickly by organizations where ideas win the argument no matter their source, where disagreement is encouraged, and initiative rewarded. The command and control model of corporate authority is obsolete, and working at an organization where leaders have to lean on their formal authority is a dead end. People in these organizations are promoted based on relationships and their ability to follow orders, not to think or creatively problem solve. If you are good at what you do, you should avoid this situation at all costs.

Punctuation Matters

How do you avoid using your formal authority, but still manage an organization effectively? How do you drive the agenda, execute on a plan, but avoid all of the pitfalls described above? It can be as simple as the usage of punctuation.

I mentioned above that weak leaders lean on their formal authority by issuing commands and using terse imperative statements which leave very little room for discussion or disagreement. If you instead turn these statements into questions, you invite discussion and disagreement. An employee is far more likely to voice an opinion after “would you do this?” than after “you will do this.”

A team of smart motivated individuals doesn’t need to be told what to do and how to do it. They merely need to know what the priorities are, and they can take the rest from there. Denying creative, intelligent people a forum for discourse or disagreement will result in their departure from the organization, leaving only mindless sheep in their place. Always leave the door open for disagreement from your team, and when someone walks through that door welcome them.

After asking one of my team members if they would do something, they often point out other priorities that they believe are important. What ensues then is a collaborative discussion about what is most critical and why. Some of the things they bring to my attention I had either forgotten or did know about at all. How could I have made the best, most informed decision about priorities without that discussion?

Informally Persistent

Informal authority builds credibility in the eyes of your team. They see you as someone who values them and their opinion and is secure enough in your position to accept disagreement. People are much more likely and willing to put in the extra effort for a manager that they believe truly hears them and plans that they feel some ownership over.

Like in all things in life, it is necessary to observe and recognize your own behavior. Try to be attuned to your tone and how you delegate work. Be aware if you are encouraging discussion and welcoming differing ideas, or if you are often commanding and dismissive of alternative views. It may not even something that you are aware of until you look for it.

If you ever find yourself trying to use informal authority, but having to fall back on formal authority to achieve your aims, take a step back and review the situation. At some point, I believe that all reliance on formal authority is an indication of an underlying systemic issue: Are you trying to achieve the wrong thing and your team is trying to tell you? Do you have team members that take your attempts at collaboration for weakness and become obstructive? Are you too focused on your goals instead of those of the team and its members?

All of those are situations that can be dealt with and resolved, but only if they are recognized for what they are. Don’t mistake a systemic or cultural issue for a failure of informal authority. Informal authority won’t necessarily be effective if there are other issues present, but that’s not a reason to abandon it; it’s a reason to fix the problem that’s causing it to fail in the first place. If you start with the view that all appeals to formal authority are a failure in leadership and should be addressed as such, then you’re on the road to creating a healthy productive team.

Drawing the Line

If you’ve read any of my blog entries, you know that one of my core tenants of leadership is that a leader has no greater goal or responsibility than helping the members of their team achieve their goals. This obviously requires getting to know each team member well in order to understand what their goals are. It’s natural to build empathy and become close to your team members as you get to know them, as you make their dreams and desires the purpose of your day, as you enable them to grow beyond their current role and abilities, but how close is too close.

I will say that that empathy is absolutely necessary to be an effective leader. It will motivate you and help you push through the hard times, but it can be a double-edged sword if you lose perspective and a professional distance. Employees who feel that you are more buddy than boss may be tempted to push the boundaries trusting that their friend wouldn’t punish them, that their special relationship means the rules don’t apply to them.

This attitude can be as destructive to the morale of a team as almost any other team dysfunction. If any team members are perceived to be receiving special treatment and avoiding punishment for bad behavior, then team members who are doing everything right won’t be motivated to follow the rules either. The choice then becomes to allow discipline to slip across the entire team, or to punish your friend and risk losing a good employee. The only good way out of this situation is to never allow it to arise in the first place.

This can be harder than it sounds. Building a positive relationship with your team members, establishing trust, participating in team building exercises are all valuable activities, and are designed to bring the team closer. How does a leader who has organized and participated in team lunches, after work socials, and holiday parties with their team keep a professional distance? For people like myself, who are naturally social and build relationships easily, this is a real danger.

Maintaining Authority

I believe that, like all leadership activities, one should start with one’s goals in mind. What are you looking to achieve and what are you trying to avoid through these social activities? You want your team to see you as a person, to trust you, to believe that you have their best interests at heart. At the same time, it is critical that you maintain their respect, be someone for them to emulate, model behaviors you would like to see in your team, and above all maintain authority.

I’m not talking about the authority given you by your position at the company: formal authority. I see formal authority as a tool of last resort when all other avenues have failed. Using formal authority is an admission of failure, and should be avoided whenever possible. Leadership, when done properly, makes formal authority unnecessary in almost all situations.

The authority that I mean is informal. It’s the authority granted to you by your team in the way they listen to you not because you’re the boss, but because they respect your opinion. Informal authority gives a leader’s voice weight in a way that formal authority never can. Informal authority is what allows you to correct your employee’s behavior through a simple side conversation instead of an HR-approved Performance Improvement Plan. It’s this authority that must be guarded at all costs.

Create Space

One way to maintain professional distance is to decline invitations to lunch. Lunch is when people vent their frustrations, complain about their work, and, sometimes, their boss. This venting can be healthy and necessary for an employee, and they can’t do it if you’re always there. Give them space to talk to each other about what’s bothering them, and if you’re running a strong, healthy team, then the other team members will talk the employee through the problem for you.

It’s good to not have to solve everyone’s problems, and if anything really important is said, you’ll probably hear about it anyway. Eating lunch with the boss might be fun and not overly stressful sometimes, but it’s definitely a different experience than a lunch that’s just with peers. It’s still a team building exercise, just one you don’t have to always participate in. This will set the expectation that you will join sometimes, but not always, thus leaving room for different conversations to occur at different times.

Always at Work

When you do choose to join your team for a social event, it’s critical that you be cognizant of your behavior. I tend to be very informal with my team both in the office and out, but I would never allow myself to get drunk, tell inappropriate jokes, or display any behavior that would undermine my authority. The easiest way to ensure this is to think that if you are with anyone from you company, anywhere, ever, then you are at work. If you can’t say it or do it at work, then you can’t say it or do it if you are with someone from work.

For me, this is a rule that leaves no room for compromise. It can be difficult sometimes to remember to behave differently in some social situations than others depending on who you’re with, but as I wrote earlier, the consequences of a misstep that could compromise your informal authority could be disastrous. If you feel that treating all social situations with coworkers as a work event is excessive or not something that you can trust yourself to do, then I would strongly advise you to avoid these situations altogether. It is far better to remain a distant leader than one who is too close to the team.

You know you’re striking the right balance when your team comes to you with problems, and actively polices each other without your intervention. That speaks to a healthy team dynamic that needs to be carefully nurtured. The leader sets the example, models the company’s culture, and is responsible for cultivating a healthy team dynamic. Leadership takes discipline, empathy, and moderation, and a strategic leader would never put their team or their position at risk for a night of socializing.

Busy Is Dumb

Anyone in IT can tell you, and Americans are notorious for this, that a completely full calendar is a badge of honor. Ideally not only should you have every minute of every day committed, but you should have overlapping meetings, preferably three deep. The thinking, as best I can figure it goes, “if you’re important, then everyone wants you to be in their meeting.” If you’re not as busy as you can possibly be, then you’re not contributing to your full ability.

The Busyness Fallacy

I have fallen into this trap, as has almost everyone I’ve ever worked with. No one has ever explicitly explained this to me, it’s cultural, implied. You notice that the people you report to have more full calendars than you do, and that the people they report to even more so. Expectations are set, and everyone very quickly comes to the same understanding: busy is good. Busy = advancement.

The longer I’ve been in the workforce, the more I’ve realized that conventional wisdom isn’t always right, however. I’ve found that some of my most profound insights have come from questioning what everyone just knew to be true, and almost nothing is held to be more true than the above. It’s for this reason that I was shocked when I read that Warren Buffet, the very symbol of American success, sustained over decades, had, at most, a single item in his daily planner that he’d kept his entire career. He would often have no scheduled appointments on a given day.

How? Why? Was Warren Buffet’s time not important? Was he not needed in meetings? By clients? How could he get away without committing every second of every day to someone or something, and why would he want to? It got me thinking.

Question the Fundamental Assumption

What is the effect of being busy all the time? Sure, attending a ton of meetings meant that you were in the loop, your voice was heard, your input recorded, but was that really the best use of one’s time? Of course, there are important meetings, but not every meeting is critical. While you’re busy, what is happening outside of the meeting room, and what signal does it send to your people that you’re always in one?

It occurred to me that adding a meeting to your calendar, in effect, took some of the slack out of your day. Slack that could be used to have a conversation with someone, handle an unexpected issue, or just sit and think for a moment. Schedule enough meetings, and there ends up being no slack in your day for these ostensibly less important things, but really, what could possibly be more important in a leader’s day than being available for his people?

The message that continuously being in meetings sends to your team is that you’re off doing important leader-y things, and that they should just learn to handle their unimportant issues by themselves. It removes availability, and creates an artificial separation between you and your team. This is exactly why I strongly advise against anyone in leadership ever wearing headphones at work. It sends the signal that your time is too important for your team, and that you should not be bothered.

Time to Breathe

After this realization, I’ve taken to actively leave as much time as I can open on my schedule. I attend meetings that I think are worth it, but don’t attend everything that I possibly can. I leave huge gaps in my schedule, and spend that time either at my desk available to my team, or walking around actively engaging them to see if they need anything from me.

It’s a sign about how ingrained the philosophy of busyness is in our culture that despite this, when people come to my desk to ask me a question, they often preface it with an apology or an acknowledgement that they know how busy I am, but if they could just get a moment of my time they’d really appreciate it. I consistently respond that nothing I could be doing would be more important than helping them with their problem, but the apologies persist. If they’re reluctant to bring their issues to me when I’m sitting quietly at my desk, do you think I’d ever hear about it if I spent all day, every day in a meeting? I’d never have any idea what my team was doing, if they were struggling, and I’d never be available to help them with their problems.

Serving Your Team

This approach has an additional benefit that reinforces another priciple of mine: creating opportunity for others. Some meetings are important, but not critical. They need leadership in attendance, but does it have to be me? I’ve started asking members of my team that have shown an interest in leadership or management to attend these meetings in my place, and to let me know if anything comes out of it that needs my attention. This has the duel effect of keeping my schedule free, and giving members of my team exposure and experience leading meetings.

Inevitably things go wrong where something important gets missed, or a detail gets miscommunicated. Afterall, these people are learning how to lead. Imagine, however, how much worse these misses would be if I were constantly in meetings and less aware of the issues the team was dealing with. By keeping my time free, I notice much faster and am much more available to deal with things that unexpectedly come up.

I know that this entire post could be construed as a defense of laziness, of having others do your work for you, but the truth is I’m just as busy all day as I ever was before. The difference is that I spend all of my time handling things that only I can do. Things come up unexpectedly all day, things that I would be otherwise unaware of if I kept myself fully scheduled, and I have the flexibility to handle them. I spend all day addressing my number one priority, helping my team.

In the end, it’s not about doing less work, it’s about priorities. By leaving your day open, you are prioritizing your team over the appearance of importance, prioritizing flexibility over your own visibility, and prioritizing your teams goals over your own, and nothing is more important than that.

Giving Criticism

A conversation I often have with my son is about taking responsibility for bad behaviors or mistakes. Like all of us, he doesn’t like to be told he’s done something wrong. It doesn’t feel good, and he resists by making excuses or blaming something or someone else. Really anything but raising his hand and taking responsibility.

This behavior is understandable, expected really, in eleven-year-olds. It starts to become really problematic when this behavior is displayed by adult co-workers, however. Working in a place where no one takes responsibility can become toxic, because the inevitable outcome is a blaming, which leads to resentment, which creates a very poor culture indeed.

Telling my son to take responsibility over and over didn’t seem to have much of an impact. I guess he didn’t really see what was in it for him. It made his parents feel better, but why would HE want to do it when it felt so much better to make excuses? I started looking for an argument that a child could understand; something that could help motivate him to take ownership and strive to do better in the future.

Now, before giving him criticism I’ve started asking him, “do you want to feel better, or do you want to BE better?” This makes him stop and think. Even at his age he knows that being good is the goal, so he has started accepting my feedback more easily, as long as it’s given in a constructive and non-judgmental way. Slowly, he’s starting to see feedback the way I do: compliments are candy and criticisms are veggies.

Candy and Vegetables

Compliments feel good in the moment, but they don’t do a thing for you. What’s the value? What’s the takeaway? When you’ve been told that you’ve done a good job, there’s nothing that you can do better next time. Just like candy, you get no benefit from being told what a good job you did other than a happy feeling.

Criticism, on the other hand, doesn’t feel good. We naturally resist it, try to find some way to deflect, nullify, or ignore it all together. But the truth is criticism is the way that we can get better, either through self-criticism or criticism from those who’ve observed our behavior. Learning from our mistakes is only possible if we’re aware and honest with ourselves that a mistake was made. Criticism makes us better, stronger, and wiser.

Just like learning to eat your veggies, one can become better at accepting criticism and we can help others become better at accepting it as well. To paraphrase Gordon Gecko, “Criticism is good,” and it needs to be seen in this light. Here are a few of the things that I’ve noticed make criticism easier for myself to accept, and have seemed to work for others:

Be Positive

Just because something went wrong, doesn’t mean that the tone of the feedback needs to be negative. In the end, we can focus on punishing a mistake or we can focus on the better, more glorious future in which this mistake is no longer made. Tone makes a world of difference when delivering criticism.

Focus on the Behavior

One of the biggest problems with giving criticism is all of the unnecessary, unhelpful things that get thrown in along with it. The most helpful feedback in the world isn’t going to get through if the point is lost amid personal attacks, and hindsight. The only thing that truly matters is that the cause of the mistake is understood and it can be avoided in the future. That’s it!! Everything else is besides the point, and clouds the issue.

Model Responsibility

Nothing else matters, if you as the leader don’t show the team how it should work. If you find yourself in a culture of blame-shifting, be the change. Actively seek out opportunities to own mistakes, loudly and publicly take responsibility, and let everyone know what went wrong and how things will be different going forward. For team members to see that owning a mistake doesn’t entail being blamed, that, in the case of a genuine mistake, there are no real consequences, and that this is how leaders behave, it can make a world of difference.

A Better Way

A team where there’s no responsibility is a dangerous place. Mistakes may be hidden for fear of the associated blame, investigation into root causes might be poorly done for fear of what might be found, and there can be no trust because you know your teammate will pin the blame on you if anything goes wrong. In this situation mistakes are still going to happen, there’s just very little chance that anyone will learn from them.

Creating a culture where there is no fear of blame doesn’t mean a culture where mistakes are OK. No one wants to make mistakes, and if you make it easy and safe to learn from them, then they’ll become less frequent not more. Your people will feel more secure without the threat of blame hanging over their every action, the team will grow as they learn from their experience instead of hiding it, and genuine trust will form as criticism can then be seen as a beneficial action by a helpful colleague instead of an attempt to tear you down.

Learning to give and receive constructive criticism is one of the most beneficial, and least observed, leadership skills that I know. If done properly, it can mean the difference between leading through respect, and leading through fear.

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.

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.

It’s All Your Fault

What is the single most important quality that defines a leader? Leadership has been a source of debate for centuries, from the “Great Man” theory, to Management theory, to Relationship theory. Where does leadership come from? Can it be taught? What defines it? Most people think of leadership in the words of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, “I know it when I see it.”

What it’s not

No matter how Hollywood portrays it, or politicians pretend it is, leadership is not power and power is not leadership. The CEO may run around pointing fingers, making excuses, and being indecisive when the project is on fire while the intern is calmly asking the right questions and creating a plan of action.

A director may sit in an executive meeting taking credit for their team’s long hours, hard work, and brilliant insights while blaming them for any shortcomings while the project manager next to him heaps praise on the team and takes responsibility for the delays.

Powerful people display a distinct lack of leadership every day, and their subordinates often rise to fill the vacuum that is left behind. Leadership can come from anywhere. At its core, I believe it only requires a single thing…

Responsibility

Responsibility means ownership. Ownership of problems and ownership of mistakes. It means a lot of other things as well, but these are the two I want to focus on today.

Owning a problem doesn’t mean working on a piece of it, handing it off to someone else, and then considering your part done. Ownership means asking the questions to understand the whole problem, putting together a plan to resolve it, and making sure that every part of that plan is being executed. It means tracking what tasks are still in process, and continuously following up to make sure that the tasks aren’t being blocked, and if they are help remove the blockers. Owning a problem doesn’t mean fixing everything yourself, it means coordinating all of the fixes and tracking them until completion.

Owning mistakes doesn’t just mean taking the blame for everything that goes wrong on a project. It means asking the questions to understand what went wrong, putting together a plan to prevent it from happening again, and following up to make sure that the plan is being implemented. Every mistake made on the team could be prevented by the right process, the right training, the right communication, or the right plan. All things that the leader is responsible for. If you have the wrong people on your team, then it’s your responsibility for hiring them. If you have people on your team who cannot be trained or aren’t contributing, then it’s the leader’s responsibility for getting them off of the team.

Somebody has to do it

Responsibility isn’t just some evil that is the price to pay for leadership. Real leaders seek it out. They understand that unless someone owns the problem, it’s not going to get fixed; unless someone owns the mistake, it’ll keep happening. They want to be the ones who put their necks and reputations on the line to get things done and to solve the problems.

If your hand doesn’t go up when it comes time to solve the hard problems, if you don’t want to get involved because you’re afraid you might make a mistake, if you’re relieved when someone else steps forward and takes the burden, then leadership isn’t for you. Real leadership isn’t glamorous and powerful, it’s dirty, hard, and selfless.

Ask me to find the leader on a team, and I don’t immediately look at the person in charge. I look for the person who takes responsibility, volunteers for the thankless tasks that it takes to make the team succeed, and that person could be anyone.