Decision Making

Have you ever had the experience of shopping for a single item with someone and watching them agonize over the vast selection of brands, sizes, and features available to us these days? Has it occurred to you how much faster the process and how much happier that person would be if there was only a single option? Limited options may mean they don’t get exactly what they need, but it can spare them the paralysis of trying to make the perfect decision.

My personal experience shopping is the exact opposite. I walk into an aisle, grab a brand that I’m familiar with or, barring that, the first thing that looks like it might possibly do the job. I’ll admit to getting the entirely wrong thing more than once and having to make a return trip to the store, but I’ve never stood there, frozen in place, trying to decipher the endless options on offer.

Have you seen this dynamic at work, possibly working with people who know what can be done, but can’t decide which option to pursue? Alternately, have you worked with people who don’t necessarily understand what’s going on, but have no problem making a decision that they don’t fully understand? I suspect these behaviors are related to a person’s comfort with uncertainty, but I think it goes beyond that simplistic view. My experience is that these behaviors aren’t binary, but seems to exist on a continuum, with people displaying varying degrees of one of these behaviors.

Comfort is Emotional

Which type of person is better on a team? Which behavior is going to be more productive in the long-run? I think like most things, it’s about moderation. If you’re someone who can reasonably balance the risks of a hasty decision with the risks of delaying that decision, then congratulations! You’re probably really good at satisficing, which is the optimal way to make decisions.

The problem is that many people aren’t good at satisficing, and being aware that they should approach decision making a different way doesn’t help. Try telling that friend of yours in the grocery store to just make a decision and that it’ll probably be fine doesn’t work. Comfort with decision making isn’t a conscious choice, it’s an emotional one. Some people have far more fear, and others far less, of making a suboptimal decision than is reasonable.

How do you get someone to realign their emotional approach to decision making, and make them more or less comfortable than they naturally are? I’m sure there are professionally written studies on this very process by learned academics, but I’ve never successfully been able to either modify my own approach to decision making or that of others.

Complementary Pieces

What has worked for me is identifying my own tendencies so I could understand the potential problems with following my instincts. I’ve always been far too comfortable making decisions, insignificant or otherwise, and this has gotten myself and my team in trouble on occasion. I’ve compensated by seeking out others who tend to the other side of the spectrum, people who agonize over the risks, and whose opinion I respect. Whenever I have a decision to make that has potential consequences, I check with these people to make sure that I evaluated the risks properly, and that my decision isn’t reckless.

I also know that people who have difficulty committing to a decision have sought my advice for the same reason. They have usually thought through all of the consequences and have a very firm grasp of all of the possible outcomes, they’re looking for permissions to make the final decision that they already know is right. I’m the complementary piece of those people’s decision making network.

I believe that building a network of people you respect, and complement your tendencies is very beneficial in any aspect of work, but it has definitely been so for me with decision making. Whether you are paralyzed by options or not giving the consequences of a decision the respect they deserve, don’t despair! Make it a habit of checking your work with someone who approaches decision making differently than you. You’ll both be more effective together than either of you alone.

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.

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:

  1. What is the likelihood of failure?
  2. What is the cost of failure (discounting the value of lessons learned)?
  3. 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.

Communicate the Plan

We all know the importance of developing a plan, and the even greater importance of executing it. Execution of a sound plan is a large part of what separates successful, productive teams from others.

A crucial part of this simple-to-articulate but difficult-to-achieve process is the communication of the plan. I’m not referring to communication with the direct participants of the plan. That falls under execution. What I’m talking about is communication of the plan to the wider team, those who don’t have a task or a deliverable in the plan.

Muster all your resources

This is yet another thing that I’ve struggled with over my career. (Yes, I’m aware that the majority of my source material is my list of greatest screw-ups, but what better topics to discuss than those that you wish someone taught you about earlier?) My natural inclination is towards simplicity in all things. The simplest plan, the simplest changes, the simplest team necessary will lead to the lowest likelihood of introducing new issues that have to be fixed later. The least effort for the most impact is the very definition of efficiency, and in a world of finite time and resources, efficiency has always been one of my main decision drivers.

Where this breaks down is that simplicity in communication dictates that only the members of the team that need to know should be told. The more people you bring into an email chain, the slower and less efficient the execution might become. We also live in a world where our inboxes are constantly flooded with notifications that we don’t really need, and don’t pay much attention to. Why would I spam a co-worker’s email with information irrelevant to them and to our plan?

The reason is that, and you’ll see me revisit this theme over and over, people are not robots. Robots should know only what they need to in order to do their job, and more than that is a waste of time and effort. People, on the other hand, sometimes have information that members of your team don’t. They may be able to point out a better way to execute on your plan, or let you know why it won’t work in the first place.

Finding out why your plan is stupid and taking the time to devise a better solution before wasting any time on it is WAY more efficient than executing a stupid plan very well. Be honest, how many times have you been nearing completion of a long, difficult project when someone from a different team hears what you’ve been working on for the first time and comments “we implemented something like that last year, would you like to know how we did it?” or “we tried that before, how did you overcome [some obscure issue that you hadn’t even thought of yet]?” How much effort would a little communication have saved?

Send it up the chain

Just as important as taking advantage of the knowledge and experience of people outside your team, can be the confidence of leadership. Sometimes, simplicity of communication leads us to tell management “we are addressing problem X, and it will take Y amount of time.” This is exactly what they need to know, and no more. The problem is this leads to Hopeful Leadership (something I hope to address further in a future post), where they trust that there is a plan and that it is being executed, but they really don’t know.

Management may accept that it will take Y amount of time to fix X, but without the details of the plan, and regular status updates, are they going to be confident in your plan or your ability to deliver? Management’s confidence in the plan and its execution is critical to the plan’s success. If management doesn’t know the plan, how can they support you? Are they going to sit back and wait until the delivery date, or are they going to ping you for status updates, and try to “help”? It is in your best interest to not only make management aware of the plan, but keep them apprised of progress towards completing the plan.

In short, simplicity is a worthy goal, but not necessarily with regards to communication. Let people know what you’re team is working on, the obstacles you’re facing, and deliver continual updates to management. When everyone knows the plan, confidence and support go way up. If you want your plan to succeed, talk about it!

The Power of REALLY Listening

I’ll be the first to admit that I am not a natural listener. I’m much more of a talker by default, but over time I’ve learned that if you want people to listen to you more, you should ask them to do it less. It’s been a journey.

The Emergency

The other day, one of my senior engineers was tasked with solving an issue that effected a customer who needed the fix by the next day. Being a high-ability, over-achiever she took on the assignment and jumped into action. It was a part of the application that she was unfamiliar with, so she reached out to the methodical, detail-oriented lead of our offshore engineering team.

I was on a conference call at the time, so I wasn’t really paying attention to their conversation, confident that the problem was in some of the most capable hands at our disposal. The next thing I know, I’m distracted from my meeting by the frustrated shouting of my senior engineer “to just do what I’m telling you!”.

I quickly excused myself from my meeting, walked over to the engineer, and invited her to take the call in our meeting room. I hoped to both remove the unexpecfed conflict from the middle of the engineering team, and to buy a little time to figure out what the hell had happened.

When Reasonable People Scream At Each Other

I was shocked! I’ve experienced tension with co-workers and worked with some difficult personalities over the course of my career, but I had never had anything like that experience with either of these two. They had always been consummate professionals dedicated to working hard and getting the job done.

The gist of the disagreement it turned out was that my senior engineer was trying to get the offshore lead to do a screen share so they could inspect the code together to try to find the problem, and the offshore lead was adamantly against it.

The offshore lead objected that walking the code had a low-probability of success and was a waste of time, to which my senior engineer would exclaim that she didn’t care. Both of them were furious and frustrated, so it took a minute to get everyone calm enough to have any type of discussion.

The REAL Problem

Having worked with both of them for quite some time, it was pretty clear what had happened. My Alpha-type senior engineer has a tendency to take charge when stressed, and the methodical offshore lead tends to become defensive. With this important task and tight timeline, the senior had started by giving orders to the lead, which introduced stress into the situation and made the lead become more defensive (more stress), which made the senior even more insistent (even more stress), and on and on until the intervention.

The harder she pushed, the further he pulled back, until they weren’t even hearing each other. They both had valid points, and if they had taken the time to figure out where the other was coming from, considered their concerns, and shaped their communication accordingly there never would have been an issue. Instead, each was speaking their own language, worried only about their needs, and completely ignoring the other’s concerns.

Talking With Each Other

I took a moment to let the offshore lead know that I understood that the code inspection was a low-probability approach, but that it was the best one we had. If he had any better suggestions we would happily do that instead, but in lieu of a better idea could we please do the screen-share?

The senior got the solution she wanted, and the lead had his concerns heard and was given an opportunity to suggest alternatives. All together, from shouting to cooperation was under ten minutes, and we had a solution by the end of the day.

It was a great reminder that even experienced professionals are people with needs, insecurities, and desires. We may do our best to leave our peculiarities at home when we walk out the door and head to the office, but that’s completely unrealistic. If you want to truly influence someone or encourage a behavior, explaining what you need is never going to be as effective as understanding what they need.

It’s All In Your Mind

The phrase “you create your own reality’ may seem trite and overused, but it has a real practical side when it comes to leadership. Your mindset and how you frame problems dictates your approach to solving them.

Consider the following scenario:

The Newbie

Your team has been cruising for a while, and producing at a very high level, but some of your senior members have been a little overloaded and could use some help. After some interviewing, you hire a young, inexperienced person right out of college, and welcome them to the team.

Immediately the new person starts interrupting your day, breaking up your productivity with questions about everything from the team’s processes, to the simplest things about their job function, and even where to park and suggestions for where to go for lunch.

You find your productivity collapsing, and become more and more frustrated as they ask more and more questions. Can’t they see that you have work to do? Can’t they just figure it out on their own? Just as your frustration reaches a crescendo, they seem to become more self-sufficient, and leave you alone, and you are able to contribute more independently.

Who wouldn’t be frustrated by that scenario? It sounds awful. Let’s try, however, looking at the exact same situation from another angle.

Flipping the Mindset

Your team has been cruising for a while, and producing at a very high level, but some of your senior members have been a little overloaded and could use some help. After some interviewing, you hire a young, enthusiastic person right out of college, and welcome them to the team.

Immediately the new person starts digging into the problems, trying to learn whatever they can by asking questions about everything from the team’s processes, to the most important things about their job function, and even where to park and suggestions for where to go for lunch.

You find their productivity increasing, and become more and more excited as they learn more and more. Can they see how much they are contributing to the team? Can they just figure it out on their own? Just as their excitement reaches a crescendo, they seem to become more self-sufficient, and they are able to contribute more independently.

Now, doesn’t that seem like a far more pleasant and exciting situation to be involved in? All I did was change a few words here and there, mostly by switching the focus from you to the person you’re supposed to be leading, but it makes all the difference in the world.

Everything Is An Opportunity

In the first scenario, everyone has a miserable experience, the newbie probably receives perfunctory answers to their questions, and eventually stops coming with questions not because they didn’t have any more, but because those questions were so clearly unwelcome. This person is now having second thoughts about accepting the job, and will be more likely to act independently rather than ask for guidance in the future.

By focusing on the positives in the second scenario, you’ve made it fun and enriching for both you and the newbie. You have taken the mindset that they aren’t keeping you from doing your job, making the a contributing member of the team IS YOUR JOB! Every question isn’t a distraction, it’s more knowledge that they have, it’s another problem they will be able to solve in the future on their own, it’s an opportunity to positively influence a fledgling career, and a more enjoyable experience for both of you.

A conscious effort to keep a positive mindset not only leads to better productivity, better personnel growth, and a better team dynamic, but also better job satisfaction for you. If you ever find yourself doing something at work that you don’t want to do, see if you can reframe it in a way that accentuates its value, its challenges, or any other aspect that makes it less of an annoyance, and more of an opportunity.

Mindset dictates behaviors. If you want to display the right behaviors, make sure you start with the right mindset.

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.