Blog

A manager is someone who tells people what to do. A leader is someone who inspires people to do great things.

Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn (via forbes)

Blog

Permission to Lead

At the office I so rarely visit I have a quote that I’ve
printed and pinned to the wall. It comes from Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who was a
U.S. Naval officer and an early computer programmer (she developed the first
compiler for turning source code into object code).

In a couple of my recent
posts
I’ve made mention of a cultural evolution that’s underway in my workplace. It’s
not a revolution – it’s us collectively choosing to be much more deliberate
about using the values we already hold to better deliver benefit to our
customers. As a part of that we’ve defined ten core values, or mantras, or
whatever you want to call them. I don’t know whether or not my employer would
want me to reveal them in a public forum like this. Probably not yet, at least,
given that the evolution is in its infancy: we’re still in the process of socialising
them internally and defining what they mean to each of us individually, to our
workgroups and teams, and so on. In lieu of the ones from my organization, here’s
an example of a similar-in-spirit core value from
another company
(Zappos.com):

  • Do more with less

Today one of my colleagues and I were talking about our ten
and poking some gentle fun at them. We were coming up with a handful of jokey
possible additions:

  • Try turning it off and back on
  • ā€œThat’s what she saidā€

Anyway, I said that ā€œit’s easier to ask forgiveness than it
is to get permissionā€ should be added to our list. I was joking. But should I
have been?

I like Grace Hopper’s quote so much because, on the face of
it, it’s about rebelliousness and lack of respect for authority. That’s
typically someone’s immediate takeaway when they first read it, and those are
qualities I like to pretend I have. Except I don’t, really – I pretty much do
what I’m told.

It’s been a good while since I printed that and first pinned
it to the wall of my cube, though. I’ve gained some seniority in that time, and
as I was thinking about this today it occurred to me that nobody really tells
me what to do anymore. My leaders set direction, provide clarity around what’s
important (and why) where necessary, provide guidance where I need it, and then
they trust me to do whatever it is that I do.

Dig just very slightly beyond the surface of Grace’s quote,
and this is, I’m sure, exactly what she was talking about. Grace was, after
all, a senior military officer: I highly doubt she was advocating for a lack of
respect for authority. What she’s talking about is ownership, and
accountability. She’s saying that if you don’t have the necessary autonomy to
demonstrate those qualities then that’s a problem so serious that you should be
taking immediate action. If there’s red tape or dumb business rules that are a
barrier to doing what you know to be the right thing then you absolutely need
to be finding a way through it, and sooner rather than later. I think that’s
something worthy of inclusion in any organization’s core values.

Thinking about all this also got me thinking back to how the
quote became words that I choose to live by in the first place. A couple of years
ago I worked at my company’s call centre, on a team responsible for operations
and process improvement initiatives. I used to provide coaching to a handful of
junior teammates. From time to time we would identify an opportunity for
improvement in one of the ancillary, supporting business processes, but being a
process on the edge of the core business we’d sometimes struggle to find
someone from the key leadership to identify as owning the process and provide
sponsorship for improvement. I’d always provide the same wisdom: ā€œIf there’s
one thing I’ve noticed about where we work,ā€ I’d say, ā€œit’s that if you act
like you’re in charge of something then you’ll very quickly find that you are.ā€

I think at the time I thought I was joking about that too,
and that little running joke is what led me to first put Grace’s quote up on
the wall. Even if I did think it was a bit of a joke though I did endeavour to embody
those words, and with the benefit of reflection it now seems as though I’ve advanced
my career since then in part off the back of simply acting like I’m in charge
of stuff. Interesting.

Really though, this shouldn’t be surprising. My vocabulary
has become more sophisticated in that time too: I now see more clearly that ā€œacting
like I’m in charge of stuffā€ is just a slightly tongue-in-cheek synonym for our
theme of ownership and accountability.

Once upon a time I used to wonder to myself why merely
acting like I was in charge of stuff so often proved to be such a powerful tool
in my toolbox. When you frame it in those more sophisticated terms the answer
is clear. The reason it worked so well at my workplace is because we have a
culture that recognizes, values and rewards leadership attributes like these no matter the level of the employee they come from.
The question I should have been asking is why wasn’t it like that at previous
companies I’ve worked for?

Thankfully, the answer to that one doesn’t matter to me
anymore.

Blog

Evaluating Performance When Only Results Matter

It’s mid-year performance review time where I work. I am not really participating.

image

It’s partly because I’m a dangerous rebel with a maniacalĀ aversion to authority figures, and partly because my peers and our leadership team have talked it through and we all agree the whole thing would just be a bit of a waste of everybody’s time. Mostly it’s the latter, but anyway.

There are several reasons why this exercise wouldn’t represent time well spent: For one, I have a new role at work – a spot on the org chart that I actually acquired just yesterday. It’s a title bump more so than some kind of seismic shift in my career, but nevertheless discussing how I performed in the position I held last week is a little bit moot, and even more so is discussing how I plan to progress upward. I don’t plan to progress right now, I plan to more firmly establish myself in the metaphorical chair in which I newly sit.

The biggest reason it would be a waste of time, however, is that we work in a results only work environment. I’ve written about ROWE plenty of times before, but in as few words as possible the ethos here is that as long as I’m delivering results then what I do with my time is up to me. If I’m not delivering appropriate results then I get fired – which is entirely fair. Throwing out the more traditional (outdated!) clock-punching approach to work means the more traditional approach to performance reviews goes out of the window as well, however. In order to know I’m delivering the results that are expected of me my performance becomes a constant, ongoing conversation with my leader. Even if we wanted to we couldn’t possibly confine the discussion to twice-yearly meetings and still continue to be effective, so why continue to hold the twice yearly meetings if we’re already addressing this stuff as a matter of course? They’re not necessary.

So if all this is true (and it is, you can trust me), why am I asking for a twice-yearly performance evaluation that focuses on my methodologies and ignores my results?

The reason speaks to what I see as the biggest gotcha in a ROWE – you have to be fastidiously careful about what a ā€œresultā€ is. In my workplace ROWE has been around for a little while now, but it’s a concept still well within its formative years. I’m confident that on balance we’re doing it very well, but I don’t know that we’re yet sophisticated enough within the framework to not be making mistakes, or that our implementation of the framework has yet evolved to become sophisticated enough for our organization.

If I worked on an assembly line producing children’s toys then the results of my work would be obvious, veryĀ tangibleĀ and very easily definable, butĀ this is the knowledge economy here! Nobody I’ve ever met or heard of produces toys anymore, with the notable exception of Bertha, the toy making machine.

image

I digress.

I work in a project environment, which I believe has the potential to compound the problem I’m talking about. I’m taking plenty of liberties with the details here, but basically what happens in my work life is a project comes along and my leaders assign it to me. I then go away and do some things, and eventually a ā€œresultā€Ā (hopefully but not necessarily a completed project) pops out the end. My leaders of course take some interest in how that all happens, but nevertheless that bit in the middle is the Jason show to all intents and purposes.

I agree entirely that the end result is the most important part of that story, and that’s absolutely the result on which I should primarily be judged. It’s certainly not the only result here, however.

Every meeting I go to has a result for which I hold at least some degree of responsibility. Every conversation I have, every action I take, every action I don’t take… there are results to all of those, and you’re kidding yourself if you think those results are entirely unimportant.

The best way to explain my point is probably with a negative example: it’s possible to achieve results by treating people like idiots, micro-managing them into the ground and generally making their lives miserable. I’ve never worked for a boss that managed that way and I hope you haven’t either, but they’re out there, and they’re where they are because they’re presumably achieving the results upon which they’re evaluated.

I have no desire to be that guy. It goes against my own moral compass most importantly, but it also doesn’t measure up against the way that my employer (or indeed any enlightened organization, I would hope) defines leadership. Eventually behaviour like this would come back and bite me, and this is my career we’re talking about here, my livelihood.

There are many reasons, then, that being that kind of leader isn’t an avenue I would ever wish to explore. But could I get away with it in the short term? Sure! Could I do it long enough to achieve a positive result or two? Probably! Could I be doing some scaled-back, less villainous version of it right now without even realising it? Ah! Now there’s the important question.

There are things I do to actively solicit feedback about myself and my methods from the teams with which I work, but I can understand why somebody may not feel comfortable giving me criticism to my face and could be holding something important back as a result. Nevertheless, criticism is what I want. It’s how I’ll ensure that I continue to be a leader as opposed to a boss, how I’ll grow, how I’ll evolve, and how I’ll firmly establish myself in my new metaphorical chair.

So that’s why once or twice a year I’ll be asking my leaders to reach out to some of the people I’ve worked with and provide them an opportunity to give feedback about me in a safe, anonymous environment.

Because results matter. All of them.