There are No Maps in Leadership
We were talking the other day about our leadership style, and what worked (through trial and error) for us. We came up with four points that we thought were critical.
Josh and Laine’s Plan for World Domination Leadership:
- There is no map
- Don’t be a jerk (unless necessary)
- Be good
- Find a partner/community
1. There is No Map
It would be cool if there was an all-encompassing, always-correct set of directions for How to Lead Good. But…there just isn’t. There are guidelines, and there are a million books, and there are…well, blogs, hi, hello… but the sheer volume of material on how to lead people well is a clue that there is no easy answer.
Every situation is different, and even a single situation changes rapidly. Being a leader means leading people, and people don’t conform to lists of things they’re supposed to conform to very well.
Leaders will talk about 5-year time horizons, or 2-year strategic plans, but we think it’s more important to just figure out where you need to go next, figure out the steps to get there, and focus on those steps – while also being willing to throw that entire plan out the window if and when the need arises.
Being a leader means leading people, and people don’t conform to lists of things they’re supposed to conform to very well.
Story Time!
At our last organization (we worked in the IT division), our software release process was set to monthly, with some teams releasing even less frequently. This was enforced by policy, but mostly it was enforced by culture. Fear of instability and risk (and associated potential blame), and many years of backlogged tech debt made everyone shy away from going faster – despite business priorities queuing up, associated pressure from the business divisions, and the beginnings of apathy about actually getting things done.
This cultural fear of speed was a huge pain point, and it had many related pains – like production hotfixes being painful and scary.
We didn’t actually realize that the overall problem was a cultural fear of speed until we were well into solving many of those related pains. Only as we stepped back and looked at the big picture did we start to notice that all roads seemed to lead to one parent pain of the many baby pains – and we adjusted what the ultimate goal was, from “solve team pain” to “do Continuous Delivery.”
We realized we were making the cultural, political, and architectural changes so that teams could release changes to the software they were tasked to deliver when they were ready and when the business divisions said go. This is essentially Continuous Delivery (CD).
There’s no map…until there is.
Given this, we made a map, a battle plan, with CD as the goal. We laid out the steps/remaining baby pains that would need to be resolved in order to get there. In general, developers liked the plan a lot – it had the bonus of giving them permission to solve the problems they already wanted to solve.
But…when we started, there wasn’t a map. We didn’t even have a map, and certainly no one else told us that CD should be the next big goal. There won’t always be someone with a solid, clearly communicated vision telling you what your goals should be, or when and how to accomplish them. Unfortunately, it’s often a stretch to even find someone who can tell you what the next big step is.
This is especially true in the kind of aggressive, catalytic leadership we evangelize and appear to have been made for. We just looked for the biggest bottlenecks, boulders, and pain points in the way of people and teams executing in their purposes, and we worked on solving those.
When the larger issues rose to the surface, we found that those issues weren’t necessarily what we expected them to be. We also thought at first that the baby pains had to be solved in a particular order and then we watched in awe as a team just…solved what was hurting them the most, and ended up at the same CD place. We had to be willing to adapt our plans, and adapt how we explained them to teams trying to accomplish the same thing.
Focus on a team’s purpose, find the pains in the way of them executing on that purpose, help them solve those pains, and then look for connections. Basically…try stuff, keep trying stuff, see what works, and adapt and build a map to match.
2. Don’t Be a…Jerk
This originally had a slightly different title, but we went with this because we wanted to keep our PG rating…
Don’t be rude, or mean, or callous. Don’t dismiss people’s concerns or their ideas. Don’t try to crush them because you don’t like them or because you feel they should be something different than they are. If you’re a successful leader, two things will happen:
- people will annoy you for various reasons – including the people you’re leading
- you will have power and influence
These two things are ripe conditions for crushing people. Don’t do that.
Critical Exception: Defense
If someone is hurting your team, or your community (usually by violating this rule and being a jerk, but sometimes it’s just by being a stubborn blocker to execution of the team’s purpose), it’s okay to push them to change hard enough that they might think you’re a jerk. “Crushing” is still probably too much – but good critical conversations with them, and being willing to escalate the issue to their management, are both necessary components of leadership. Fighting for your people is a necessary component of leadership.
People being successful and joyful executing in their purpose at work is too important to let someone block that without a good reason. Besides, maybe you’ll give the blocker some awesome permission and then they’ll be happy and execute in their purpose too.
3. Be Good
This is not re-hashing the last point, which was to not be a jerk unnecessarily. This point is about being good – skilled, and determined, and successful.
People don’t follow leaders who lead badly.
This does not mean don’t make mistakes, or don’t have dumb ideas, or don’t ever do anything that you’ll later realize wasn’t the exact right answer.
It does mean learn and grow, both in leadership and in your field. It means be open to new ideas and hearing when you’re wrong, and it means don’t stick to things out of pride after it’s clear that you’re wrong. Often it also means championing other people and their work and their successes so that people can learn from each other.
It means means focusing on a) the people you lead, and b) the current goal (yay maps!). It means being willing and able to explain the goal to others (maps, again, along with a willingness to be clear), and listening to input and guidance and questions from others, so that you can together find the best goal and the best way to get there.
4. Find a Partner and/or a Community
You need other people. Leadership is hard, and whoever said “leadership is lonely” as though that were a fundamental truth that should remain true was probably really sad – and also they were wrong. Leadership can be lonely, and it will be lonely if you don’t find some people. So…find some people.
Specifically, find people you can trust – putting your career in someone else’s hands is scary, and if you talk to these people honestly, that could be what you’re doing. Talk to these people about your problems – the things you aren’t sure about, the questions you have about what you’re working on, and the current big goal. Talk to them about the frustrations and pains of trying to be a leader, and accept their support and help in return.
Build relationships with people who will ask you questions and point out issues (people who lovingly won’t put up with your crap, ideally). Learn to get a feel for the people who are trying to help you vs. the ones who are trying to stop you. In my experience (Josh), I thought 90% of people were pointing out problems to stop me and 10% of people were supporting me…but over time I learned that was stupid, and it was more like 99% support and 1% trolls. Mostly I learned that cause Laine (L: stubbornly and repeatedly…) told me.
Find people who care about what you care about, or who care about you. Talk to them and include them in your plans. If you’re working on something good and important, or people know that you’re willing to fight for them, odds are very good that people will rally to you, and that community will help and support you, and you can help and support them, and together you’ll be stronger.
Really…
If leadership is your purpose, then leadership is a gift. It’s a gift given to you to be able to do it, and if done well, it can be a gift given to those who you lead. You get the opportunity to help people and teams become what they were always supposed to be. These four steps are the best way we know of right now to figure out where and how to lead people – but we actually expect that our understanding of it will change and we’ll have to learn how to adapt.
META. 😀