Inch-deep, Mile-wide!
What makes leadership so tough? Is it channelizing efforts (or) building & maintaining relationships top-down (or) gaining a detailed hierarchical understanding? Here are a few quintessentials.
Disclaimer:
OK, since the phrase (inch deep mile wide) used here in the title seems to be trending on Google (during the time of my writing), please allow me to clarify that this has got absolutely nothing to do “the economy” neither “the financial / capital markets” nor with the “ongoing recession” in a few countries across the world & the report covered by the investment bank UBS, Switzerland.
“Great leaders don’t need to act tough. Their confidence & humility serve to underscore their toughness”!
- Simon Sinek
A Leader’s World
Are you planning to take that big leap forward over making that long pending move into Leadership but have been really skeptical?
(or)
Have you been recently recommended to take up a leadership role going further in your career but are uncertain how it’d all span out for you?
(or)
Have you recently taken up a leadership role and had a rough time facing jitters leaning into pondering about the negative side of the move itself?
If you happened to score an “YES” on any / all of the 3 questions above, be rest assured you aren’t alone. This has happened to even the best of leaders who are up there & touted as the best in the world today.
Nothing comes for free in the world & nobody is offered anything for free either. It’s often deemed as a huge struggle, in fact a battle with your own self, it’s “you against you” scenario as you seat sails, jump into the ocean looking forward to a totally stormy bumpy ride with an aim to be able to steady the entire ship in the short-term when reaching the other side ought to be a long-term goal.
Needless to mention the sooner you do it, the better it’d be for you & the others involved.
But, hey!
Ragnarök happened & Jormundgandr - the giant serpent was obliterated by Thor wielding Mjölnir - his hammer striking it on its head as described in “Twilight of the Gods”.
[PS: Pardon the Nordic mythology reference, I just don’t seem to get enough of it]
Though the situation here doesn’t happen to be all that evil, there happens to a systemic method to overcome this leviathan of a situation, you may at times feel like you have thrust yourself into.
Let’s dive into the “how”!
Inch-deep, Mile-wide View
One may have come across the term “culture fit” off late and how teams are really worried about it from the Day-1 of the hiring process and how that’s carried as a mandatory step towards vetting candidates across interview rounds.
That’s because of one crucial aspect which is:
culture = mindset
culture often defines the mindset of the person as it gets rooted into one’s workflow suppressing & taking over everything else so as to set, determine & begin to define one’s identity
And a sad reality about this whole culture fitment thing is, just in case the person being hired comes from a totally different org. operating over an entirely different business vertical, one may find it very difficult to even identify with a few things like process, reporting hierarchy, power distance. Everything would look so new & it could take quite some learning curve, let alone being able to gel with it from Day-1.
Org. Structure (Who’s who)
Various organizations follow hierarchies as defined by their management who sometimes seem to go totally by the book, or some may even go to the stage of mending, chopping & changing, introducing their own which could be a derivative of some existing hierarchy & what could be termed “hybrid hierarchy”.
And, talking of org. charts, it’s good time to visit a few popular ones used.
It’s great to start off your new leadership role by spending time in understanding the organizational chart so as to get yourself accustomed to the whole hierarchy, delving deep into the who’s who, who does what, the reporting patterns, power & control passing up & down, so as to build a concrete scope for yourself.
Scenario 1:
Consider a growth stage start-up with about 80-100 people all-in, go to a leader and ask them for the names of software engineers / support team members it’s highly unlikely that they may know it unless they have been able to spend some quality time there and have put an effort to connect with everyone personally over what could be a team building exercise away from work like say one of those team outings.
But, that’s not really in their purview and it’d totally be foolish to judge a leader’s capability on the basis of that factor.
Why?
Because a leader’s job has much more to it than to individually connect / handhold / personally spend time with the teams and guide them through their problems.
One already possesses an understanding of the business, the factors influencing decisions that have been taken thus far, the broader picture of a strategy that was charted out with a purpose of aligning to goals both product-level and the high-level / organizational-level.
That ought to suffice for a start.
Scenario 2:
Walking around in the premises of that plush office you joined recently as a leader, you see how you’re bumping into a few familiar faces in there day-in, day-out but you really don’t know who they are as you haven’t been formally introduced. So, it’s just that bit of a smile met with a long awkward silence perhaps. It is easy for a leader to start thinking, why do I have to know the other person?
What really matters is does he know me?
Well, maybe that’s true to some extent!
But actually, what you ought to focus on as a leader is the familiarity in terms of internal teams, functions, roles, outcomes that they are responsible for as a unit and also the external entities, partners, distributors, third-party integrators (if it applies to your case).
Here are some tools that could be your best friend & bail you out if done well.
1. TEAM CHARTER
A TEAM CHARTER would come in handy as it would be ideal in helping both you as a leader and your teams to build a shared understanding of:
the higher purpose
who’s doing what
how they’re going to get there
so that they could collaborate better and you could have better alignment.
💡 PRO TIP: You needn’t look too far as MIRO has a great template for this to start off from. Filling all of those boxes / placeholders ought to be good start to get an understanding.
It could be broadly divided into Purpose, Roles & People, Values & Agreements.
Some elements that constitute the matrix do deserve special mentions:
As is evident, the TEAM CHARTER ought to be your goto as soon as you take over the role as a leader. And, if such a thing is not present already, it ought to make perfect sense for you to start off from there, it could help you greatly if you could include this into your first 30-days schedule.
Ok, now you may have built some clarity over mission, teams involved & the values that bind the teams and also to some extent the EPICs / features in the backlog they are working on right now.
But, as a leader would that be enough to make one feel comfortable?
No, probably not.
Why?
Because you would need some more granular clarity & understanding over how the teams are collaborating in building some (x) and whether they are justified & could help you in getting to those goals.
Also, to be absolutely sure you could obviously use some more clarity over the individual success criterion of each idea / silo / feature addition that are set by teams and be able to analyze whether they align towards the higher goals, the higher purpose over a zoom-in / zoom-out.
And, that’s perhaps where something like Driver Trees could come in handy.
2. DRIVER TREES
Driver trees aka KPI Trees are known to be the answer one is looking for when one talks of overall team alignment top-down as it starts off with:
depicting the high-level objectives
defining the strategy that’d helps achieve that objective
defining various tactics / metrics / levers that matter &
finally getting into a granular level over defining all KPIs to be tracked
So, it begins from defining the What and gets to a level of defining the How.
When these driver trees are known to be great for alignment & focus there couldn’t be any other great way for leaders to build a total understanding of the work, workflow teams happen to be putting in.
(Refer figure below)
One may ask, what’s the point?
Why does a leader need to get into the nitty-gritty of the Metrics / the KPIs? Aren’t they the job of the individual teams and their members?
Of course, they are.
But, think about it this way.
How do you get to a stage of comfort over your new job / role in leadership? In a normal scenario, what do you do?
You may have to take numerous calls and make time for all of them even in spite of some not falling under your direct purview. And, in spite of all of that there may be no guarantee that you’d get the clarity you’re gunning for as something may go amiss, someone may be absent in that weekly meeting & a ton of things that could be totally out of your control.
The “Driver Tree” on the other hand could lay it all out in the open and you could use it as an effective means of putting the pieces together & quickly build a detailed understanding.
As for the who’s who & the responsibility & accountability bit, at a very high level you already have that covered over the “Team Charter”.
Are you worried about taking up leadership opportunities for you seem clueless & don't know your way around it?
(or)
Have you recently switched to a leadership role & looking for pointers over how you'd get more comfortable?
Here's a follow-up thread to the article that covers the pragmatic side of building clarity by using these tools over a case study.
https://typefully.com/BgpInv/OrznN4x
#leadership #prodmgmt #LeadershipMatters