Management v. Leadership

Many people confuse leadership with management.  In this blog post on Management and Leadership rom HBR, John Kotter shares his frustration with this confusion  It is important to know the difference particularly if you are a manager and you want to be a leader.

Leadership is essential for defining the right thing to do and management is critical to getting things done well. There are many great leaders who are not great managers and vice versa. 

I have seen far too many instances of a good manager coming up with a great plan and executing it but all for not, since the feature added was of little value or did not meet the customers needs.  Basically the manager did the wrong thing very well. Now, you could argue that they did their job and it was the leaders, the other guys, who did their job incorrectly. True perhaps but its a bit hollow given the wasted development effort.

If you find yourself in this position, that is, doing the wrong thing, you need to find the internal fortitude to speak up and to work toward a solution that makes sense. It may be hard, it may be challenging but it is what a leader would do. 

Keep in mind this phrase that a wise man once told me "a poorly executed brilliant plan is vastly superior to a brilliantly executed poor plan".

Stop Being Nice

I suppose it is not the right time of year to telling people this, but stop being nice. Niceness is not correlated to success. All of us know someone who is really nice, but being nice is not the same as being effective or being a good leader/manager. It may be hard to make the adjustment, but it is necessary (I know because as young woman I worked hard at being very nice). You can be genuine, you can care about people, and you can do great things all without being nice. Now, that doesn't mean being rude or offensive, but it does mean standing your ground and saying what you think. And that may just mean that sometimes people won't like you. Its time to get over needing to be liked by everyone. Check out the following:

From HBR Blog "The Morning Advantage" Dec 3, 2012 by Sarah Green

"Being liked is overrated," writes Jessica Valenti in The Nation. She's primarily writing about women — for whom likability is negatively correlated with success — but her advice is useful for the yes-men out there, too. Valenti, the founder of the blog Feministing, admits to wasting hours online responding to every commenter, giving equal time and attention to both the thoughtful people and the snarkiest trolls. "It pains me to think of what I could have achieved if I had that time back."

When we adjust our behavior to be more likable — withholding our most deeply held opinions so as not to offend, agonizing over every bit of negative feedback, eventually "tempering our thoughts" as well as our words — we stunt our selves, our careers, our impact in the world. "The truth is that we don’t need everyone to like us," she writes, "We need a few people to love us."

I'll give Valenti the last word: "Yes, the more successful you are — or the stronger, the more opinionated — the less you will be generally liked. All of a sudden people will think you’re too 'braggy,' too loud, too something. But the trade off is undoubtedly worth it. Power and authenticity are worth it." It's a piece worth "liking."

Time for reflection

Usually at this time of year, I am working on a speech for the company holiday party. My goal is always to give a meaningful and entertaining message. So I begin to reflect on the past year - all the things we accomplished, the occasional disappointment, the new people we added to the team, the people who left. The speech gets done but more importantly, I am compelled to review the year, put it in perspective, and consider what my team and I should be doing differently in the future.

At my current company, our development process includes a biweekly retrospective, where we review the engineering processes and procedures and make changes as needed. There are places to look at the company's progress from a financial standpoint on a regular basis. But there is no place in the business where we look at how we are doing as leaders. I am going to make a change so that on a quarterly basis we do take time out to do a level set to "measure and learn" so that it becomes part of the overall company process. The details are not yet figured out but it will be something simple. More importantly, I believe it will be something that is effective as we are working hard to establish a culture that accepts change and thrives on continuous learning and improvement. 

I encourage all of you to do some reflection at this time of year (and on a more regular basis).  If you need some help on what kinds of things to do, here is a year-end checklist from Inc. to give you some ideas. 

Be Prepared

As a leader you need to think ahead, work out contingency plans, see when a course correction is needed, and generally always be prepared for what is to come. At work, this comes naturally to me.

Home is a bit different. The recent devastation of Hurricane Sandy coupled with my daughter doing a talk for her English class on the Zombie Apocalypse made me think about my personal emergency preparedness. Was I ready? The answer was a resounding no. Today, I made it a priority. It was not that hard. Within a few hours I had a decent kit ready and enough food and water for my family for 72 hours. The food has been labelled so that I can either eat it or donate it to the food bank in advance of it expiring.  And I have a really cool urban multitool. I should have done this years ago. But now I am ready.

If you do not have an emergency kit, don't delay any longer. Information is available to help you get started at http://www.getprepared.gc.ca/index-eng.aspx.

Be ready when the Zombies attack!

The importance of networking

In this day and age of social media, it is pretty easy to have a large network of contacts. Without trying I have 287 LinkedIn connections and 117 Facebook friends. But I recommend having real connections with real people. It is easy to do that with the people who surround you at work, but having more widespread connections is really what you should strive for as that is a lot more valuable. Why? Well, you never know when you will want to hire someone, change jobs, need some advice, and without a wide and very real network it will be difficult for you. How do I know? As with most of my lessons, I learned it the hard way.

In my previous company, in the last 5 years, I made no real effort to get out and actively network with people in the technology community. I had many excuses which included:
-"I don't need to network, I have great people right here at work if I need anything"
-"I want to give the opportunities that I see to some of the younger people here; they should do the networking"
-"I am too tired to go to a breakfast meeting and then work my regular long hours"
-"LinkedIn is a great way to network"

As you can see the excuses were weak. Truth be told, I just didn't feel like doing it. I got lazy. And that was fine until I decided to change my career and partner in a startup. I wish now, that I had spent more time keeping up my connections instead of cocooning for the past five years. Because I did that then, now in my new company hiring was harder, getting advice on lawyers and accountants to use in the area was harder,  getting first hand experience in what we should do in our startup was harder.   My LinkedIn connections were pretty useless as I mostly had connected with people who I knew at work or people who did not live in my local community and so could not help with the problem at hand (side note: LinkedIn turned out to be a valuable tool for recruiting but not until I built a good local network and paid them for additional services).

I am not the only one in this position. In the last short while, as I build my local network, I have met many people who did not nurture their personal local network and now are having to start over. For some who find themselves without jobs, the struggle to build a real network is immediate and when you are under pressure it can be a daunting chore.

The good news, however, is that with just a bit of work, it is straightforward to fix. You need to get out there, reach out to people you once new, get introductions, go out to coffee, go out for lunch, join the local community groups, join local interest groups, talk to people you don't know but would like to know, join a breakfast group, watch the twitter feeds from local organizations to learn about events, etc. I found it quite tiring at first - too many new people, too many new things .... but the real problem was me. As usual, I was trying to accomplish something immediately with my contacts. That will never work. Just put yourself out there, but don't force it - make contacts naturally, and see what comes of it. The goal is to build a network of local contacts that you might someday use or that you might someday help. It is a two way street. Since this "epiphany" my network building has been a lot more interesting and fun. And I consider it a valuable use of my time and part of my work, not just a side activity.

From my new network I have gotten some great advice; I have been put in touch with some talented people that I might some day hire;  I have learned about interesting tools that I now use on a daily basis; and I have a newfound respect for what is going on in technology in my community. A lot of upside for a small amount of consistent effort.

If you don't have a local network, start building one before you really need it. If you have one, good for you, but don't forget to keep it going. Social media is interesting and provides a lot of unique opportunities. But good old fashioned face to face networking is irreplaceable.

What women know about leadership that men don't

I read and enjoyed this article from the HBR.

http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2012/10/what-women-know-that-men-dont.html

Trust

A while back, Eric asked what I thought the role of trust is in a dynamic organization. And can trust scale?

I believe that trust is an important part of an organization culture. With real trust:

• employees have great job satisfaction
• they can focus on doing their job well, confident that others are doing theirs well
• they can ask questions and make suggestions to help the product or the business, without being considered overly critical (i.e. they are free to speak their mind without recrimination)
• they can innovate and pursue freely in their area of responsibility

• organizations are streamlined
• there is very little overhead needed for management at any level
• no need for policing functions (as HR can sometimes grow to become in an organization)

I have worked in organizations where there has been real trust:

1. As a student, I worked for a Telecom company who was rolling in money. Our management was young, enthusiastic, and had the ability to decide what our team would do without any interference from upper management. The team was smart, the work was interesting and we made great progress. We were confident and no one questioned what we were doing. It was invigorating. But then the company's resources began to dry up and as cuts began, trust began to erode.  Although our work may have furthered the company's goals, the path to success was not clear and there was another group attacking the same problem in a different way. Instead of cooperating together, we were essentially competing, using  at least twice the necessary resources to achieve the results. Throughout the company there were many projects that were duplications, dead ends, or seemingly unrelated to the goals of the company. Groups were cut, budgets slashed, command and control replaced trust. The company did survive but it was a completely different type of company after that.  
2. Early in my career, I worked for a consulting company which gave me well defined constraints: the scope of work, the delivery schedule, and the resources. Once I was given a project, they fully trusted me and my team with completing the work, as long as we reported good progress each month. However, it was pretty easy to trust everyone, since there was so little room for any variation or any innovation. 
3. I also worked for company that had been stripped to the bare bones with cutbacks and all we had left were the people who wanted to make the company a success, a leader who we believed in, and a plan that we thought would work. We had no choice but to trust each other to do their part of the plan as we were under resourced in all areas. Everyone was motivated and criticism was all taken as constructive. After we turned around the company, trust continued for a short while, but then we started to grow quite rapidly, we hired more haphazardly, we brought in executives who were micro managers and the trust that we had evaporated. Trust had not been a core value of the company but more of a side effect of the position we had found ourselves in.

Although I have seen organizations with real trust, I have not seen it scale for any length of time. For trust to scale I believe that

• everyone needs to have clear direction and needs to be working toward the goals of the company
• it should not be as restrictive as my consulting company example, but it should not be a "free for all" like my Telecom company example
• trust must be a core value of the culture
• and you must work to ensure it stays that way; even though there may be trust at some point, if it is not key to the company culture, it can erode as in my comeback story
•  you must have a great hiring process
• you need to make sure that you hire talented people that fit in and share your values