ZachEvans

Believer. Husband. Dad. Coach. Healthcare Thought-Leader. All-Around Good Guy.

Leadership

Lessons Learned From A Bad Boss

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I have made no secret of the fact that I think Michael Hyatt is a great leader and a wonderful writer. He has further proven this point with a recent post on “The Value of Working for a Bad Boss“:

  1. Everyone on the team matters. No one deserves to be treated poorly.
  2. Bosses create an emotional climate with their attitudes and behaviors.
  3. The higher up you are, the more people “read into” everything you say and do. Stuff gets amplified as it moves downstream.
  4. A word of encouragement can literally make someone’s week. Conversely, a harsh word can ruin it.
  5. Hire the right people then trust them to do their job.
  6. Don’t ever intentionally embarrass people in front of their boss, their peers, or their direct reports.
  7. Don’t attack people personally. Instead, focus on their performance.
  8. Get both sides of the story before you take action.
  9. Tell the truth; then you don’t have to remember what you said.
  10. Give people room to fail and don’t rub their noses in it when they do.
  11. Be quick to forgive and give the benefit of the doubt.
  12. Measure twice, cut once.
  13. Don’t ever ask your people to do something you are unwilling to do yourself.
  14. Respect other people’s time, especially those under you.
  15. Don’t believe all the nice things people say about you.
  16. Follow-through on your commitments, even when it is inconvenient or expensive.
  17. Don’t be ambitious to get promoted. Instead, focus on serving and doing a great job.
  18. Be responsive to everyone at every level. You never know who may be your next boss.
  19. Keep confidences. Make no exceptions.
  20. Do not complain about your boss to anyone who is not part of the solution. If you can’t keep from complaining, then have the integrity to quit.

I have personal experiences working with and for bosses that have done the opposite of most of these points. How about you: Do you have similar experiences or do you have any to add to the list?

We All Shouldn’t Grow Up To Be Firefighters

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We have all done it. We smell the smoke, search for the fire, do everything we possibly can to put it out, and then fail to ever search for what caused the conflagration in the first place. We spend our careers (and sometimes our lives) moving from one crisis to another without even thinking of doing a root cause analysis. It is exciting, it is exhausting, and it is an excuse that keeps you from truly leading.

Seth Godin believes that we have too many emergency room doctors filling our offices around the world and I agree with him. As he puts it, “It’s a mindset, not just a job.” Truth is, we need people like this. Individuals that are great at stopping the bleeding and prepping the situation for the long-term solution that is needed. But what happens if we just stop at triage? The cut may be closed–we have stopped the bleeding–but we have yet to address what caused the injury in the first place.

Only being a firefighter (or only having the world view of the emergency room doctor) robs individuals (and organizations) of three things:

  1. You do not take the time to think. If all you do is react–and react quickly–you never take the opportunity to step back and evaluate what is really going on.
  2. You do not take the time to change. If you do not understand what is really going on, you will never have the opportunity to implement real and lasting change.
  3. You do not take the time to lead. If you are unable (or unwilling) to challenge the status quo and offer up changes, you will never really lead. You will simply manage.

We have become an instant-gratification society, one that is obsessed with the quick-fix. While this leads to early wins in the battles, it can often lead to long-term losses in the war. Are there times when we can do nothing more than react (both personally and professionally)? Absolutely. Should this be our default response to any and every challenge that comes our way? Absolutely not.

Making the Leap

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Wednesday, January 2nd 2002. I can remember it like it was yesterday. I had gone home to eat lunch with Mandy and arrived back in my cubicle at EJ Footwear to find a yellow Post-It Note on my monitor letting me know that the CEO wanted to see me. Now, I knew who Jerry Cohn was and we had said hello in the hallway a few times but I had never had a significant conversation with him and I had certainly never been invited in to his office.

What was going on here?

I knew that the e-commerce department had not been living up to its forecasts and that we were starting to feel some pressure to perform better so, naturally, my heart skipped a few beats as I started walking down to his corner office. I was totally unprepared for the conversation I was about to have.

Within about 90 seconds I was told that my boss (who had been with the company 25+ years) had just been let go, I was offered his job, I was told to move in to his office, and I was instructed to begin searching for my own replacement just as quickly as I could. Almost as a throw-away comment, I was also told that I know had two direct reports—employees nearly twice my age—and that they would be told of the new reporting structure within the hour.

That was it. That was all of the instruction I was given. Welcome to the Wonderful World of Management. Surely my undergraduate degree in management would see me through, right? Right?

Most people, as they move up a career ladder, do not have quite a dramatic introduction in to management that I had. Often it is a calculated march up and across an organization. Other times a star performer is tapped by upper management to take on expanded responsibilities including, often times, starting to manage ones former peers. This pattern repeats itself over and over again with usually, and unfortunately, little to no thought if the new manager has been trained to be a manager.

A recent article from IBM pointed out several challenges that come with moving from an individual contributor to a manager as well as three steps new managers should take to be successful:

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While I like and agree with these thoughts, I think that they fall short of helping a new manager—especially those promoted from within—understand how their role has fundamentally changed.

You are no longer one of the guys / girls. Your work relationships will change whether you want them to or not. Especially if you are now managing a team of which you were once a staff member. Your former teammates will not speak as openly to you; some may even become a bit hostile towards you and your new role. You will also have to curtail the amount and change the timing of information and news that you share with your former co-workers.

Social interactions with your former teammates will change / disappear altogether. Think about what you talk about frequently when you go out socially with your co-workers? My money is on your work and bosses. There is nothing wrong with this, it is normal and healthy but now that YOU are a boss, you probably will not be invited to these kinds of outings any longer or, if you are, expect some awkward silences and moments.

You have to be willing to hold your new team accountable. Having difficult conversations is…difficult…at best. Having those same conversations with friends who now report to you is even more challenging. Managers should not play favorites (although this can be really hard at times) and you need to hold all of your team accountable for their work. No exceptions. Expect some to try to take advantage of you, however, and prepare in advance for how you will deal with those situations.

Expected to resented, if not vilified, some of the time. This is especially true if you won the promotion over another team member. Some may grumble that you did not deserve the opportunity. Others will grouse about you not being ready. Yet others will simply complain because they like to complain. Regardless of the reason, you need to develop thick skin because, now that you are in a leadership position, you just had a large bull’s-eye painted on your back.

Whatever you do, take on that management opportunity with your eyes wide open. Leading others can be an extremely satisfying challenge and one that will change you forever.

Summer Camp Love

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I love being outdoors but the idea of sleeping outside under the stars or in a tent has never been appealing to me. My father-in-law and two brothers-in-law hiked in to the Grand Canyon a few years back and they asked me if I was interested in going. While I loved the idea, I could not bring myself to the overnight camping part. I said, “Thanks, but no thanks”.

So my idea of summer camp included an air conditioned room and a soft bed. While I knew plenty of kids that trekked off to church camp to spend their days and night battling mosquitoes and sweating through shirt after shirt, I chose to attend Uplift and Impact. I would spend a Sunday through Friday on a university campus and sleeping in a dorm room while enjoying camp activities with hundreds of kids from around the country.

I was blessed to have several amazing experiences and met some pretty fantastic individuals. I also was exposed—on multiple occasions—to the feeling of summer camp love. If you’ve never experienced this phenomenon, it goes something like this:

  • Sunday: Arrive at camp
  • Monday: Meet a cute boy/girl
  • Tuesday: Spend an inordinate amount of time together
  • Wednesday: Hold hands and take a long walk during free time
  • Thursday: Have a first kiss
  • Friday: Have an emotional/tearful goodbye expressing undying love and promising to write EVERY DAY

At summer camp, you see, days are like weeks/months. They had to be because, at least for the camps I went to, we only had a week and for hormonal teens is an awfully long time. It helped me understand something at a very early age: Timelines are relative. It was an important lesson to learn.

Too often we get stuck in a rut thinking that processes and timelines are static. They are not, especially when it comes to change. Planning for change is essential and having an understanding of how change happens makes you more likely to be successful. Being dogmatic about a schedule for change, however, will only end in heartache and frustration.

As leaders, one of our greatest challenges is leading change (of any size and scope). Being able to differentiate between when a “summer camp love” schedule is appropriate and when a “glacier movement” schedule is needed is a key determinate of success.  The success-defining moment in leading change happens when you need to move like summer camp but your team wants to move like a glacier.

But more on motivation later…

Accomplishment Through Others

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If the essence of management is accomplishing objectives through others then this should be the Golden Rule of managers everywhere: What can I do to help you be more effective? I personally have always put this thought in a slightly different way: What obstacles can I remove to help you accomplish what you need to do to be successful?

Whichever sentence you prefer, the sentiment is still the same. Managers (and leaders) only succeed when they are able to accomplish work through others, which means that they need to be primarily focused on making their employees more effective. In order to do this, managers need to proactively look for ways to remove obstacles but they also need to create an environment of trust so that their staff feels comfortable asking for help.

Asking for help is difficult for most of us (me included). Especially in America, where we pride ourselves on pulling on boot straps, it’s difficult to raise your hand and admit that you cannot handle something on your own. It’s through this very action, however, that teams become stronger and truly more than the sum of their respective parts.

Managers and leaders (the good ones, anyway) know that the higher within an organization they rise, the less actual work they do personally. They recognize that they are only as good as the teams that support them and, because of that, should spend a large portion of their time making the jobs of their employees easier.

What is the one thing you can do today to help your team be more efficient through the removal of an obstacle?

 

What to Do When You Mess Up

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A recent article that I read offered up three somewhat trite examples of how to “impress people with how you handle it when you’ve given them a bad experience.” The author advised readers to:

  1. Throw a parade (What does being boring have to do with being wrong?)
  2. Great error pages (Online only, I guess.)
  3. Give a refund (Money doesn’t solve everything.)

While I may be less-than-impressed by the examples given, I can at least applaud the sentiment behind them: Taking responsibility.

Put another way: Own your messes.

A colleague recently submitted a request for some summary data from a project I was leading. I was in a hurry and responded with a spreadsheet we used on the project team to track the un-summarized data requested. While this response met the letter of the request it didn’t meet the spirit of the request.

Do you know what happened? My boss (who had been copied on the email thread as a courtesy) called me on it. My response? I agreed, followed-up with my colleague, made it right, and I’ll try to not make the same mistake again.

Could I have responded with a litany of excuses about how busy I am or how my colleague could have just as easily summarized the data? Sure, but I don’t think that’s how you demonstrate leadership to those around you. Also, you (usually) end up looking bad by making excuses.

Everyone makes mistakes from the entry-level analyst right up to the CEO. It’s going to happen and denying that fact just makes you look like someone who likes to put their head in the sand. The key to it all is how you respond when you mess up.

Own your messes.

Leadership in IT

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Being an IT leader is hard. Actually, being a leader of any kind is hard but with the confluence of IT and business over the past decade or so, IT leaders are being increasingly stretched. This phenomenon is just one of the reasons that I’m thankful that I started my career on the business side of the enterprise prior to moving in to IT.

As a recent article on O’Reilly Radar pointed out:

…today, CIOs and IT leaders must be able to partner with other members of the C-suite and in addition to running the operations of IT, be able to grow the business through IT enablement.

Gone are the days where IT was nothing more than just the “fundamental foundation of almost all business” and because of this IT leaders need to upgrade their skills beyond simply working on the next generation of IT certification or adopting new methods to manage a project team.

A firm grasp on basic accounting and financial matters is a great place to start. So is understanding your organization’s sales cycle and larger strategic vision. Spending time with your marketing team is also a good idea so that you have a better understanding of what’s currently driving the marketplace you compete in.

Businesses can no longer afford to have their operations exist in silos that never touch and neither can IT leaders.

UPDATE: A very interesting article on why “Putting Information on the Balance Sheet” and IT leadership’s need to take a more active role in managing it’s value.

Change for Change Sake?

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Are you an early adopter of…anything? Do like to have the latest and greatest of…everything? Do you live for the Zeitgeist? Do you even know what the Zeitgeist is?

How you answer these questions probably doesn’t matter. Why? Because change is all around us, is coming at us at an ever-increasing pace, and will be a huge part of your life (personal, professional, or otherwise) for a long time to come.

Adopting change isn’t important, however. What is important is how well you manage change. (And remember, there were early adopters of Betamax and HDDVD, too.)

UPDATE: A good article on why “Change is Good, But it’s Also Really Hard.”