“Everything is Possible”
Pavel Ciocan – My favourite Developer
As a leader, I place my trust the expertise of the people that I work with and I challenge them to grow that expertise and to question the application of that expertise against the ultimate source of truth; the needs of our customer. I do that through building two way trust with my team members and giving them room for exploration and failure. My advice to anyone starting out in leadership is:
Get to know your team
You don’t need to know every aspect of their personal lives but you do need to know what their strengths are, what they find challenging, what drives and motivates them and what their best way of working is:
- Learning style. Are they able to absorb information quickly or do they need time to reflect? Do they prefer direct communication and instruction?
- Confidence. Do they need extra coaching in how to deal with the challenges of working with others? Do they need additional reinforcement? Are they able to make decisions?
- Resilience. How quickly do they adjust to change? How important is stability and structure in their role? How are they coping with past changes?
You should adjust your leadership and coaching style as you form a view on your team. Everyone needs to be challenged and supported in the right ways, and have the right work environment around them. A good leader makes this a priority so that they can trust the expertise of their staff and focus on helping them to navigate the daily challenges that high performance brings.
Make individual challenges part of the conversation
For my direct reports I like to have weekly 1-1s that allow enough time to talk through personal challenges, be it inside or outside of work, as well as any day to day issues. I try to establish a safe conversational environment where mistakes are openly discussed, approaches are challenged and uncertainty is shared. If everyone is trying their best and the fear of repercussion does not exist, there should be no reason to hold anything back and as a leader you should be able to get the information you need to be effective.
The best way to do this is to be an open book yourself. Reflect, share your insecurities and your challenges, show leadership through showing your vulnerability.
In my earliest conversations, and regularly thereafter, I like to ask the following questions (which I lifted from someone but I can’t remember who!) :
- Do you think your current or future workload is realistic for you to have a good work/life balance and stress load? Will you be able to achieve the goals set?
- Are you clear in all areas on what you are doing? Anything that you are unsure whether you are responsible for, whether you are currently doing it or not?
- Do you have a clear understanding of our future vision and how it affects your work?
The answers to these questions help you to know how stressed your team is and how actions you take might add to this, helps you to ensure complete accountability across all areas of your business, and shows you where you need to communicate further. Most importantly however, it establishes these crucial subjects as a natural part of your conversation moving forward.
Absorb and distribute outside influence
My approach to learning since leaving formal education has been to absorb as much information and opinion from those with more experience than me as possible, to question it and then to find the truth in amongst it. I try to follow the right people on Linkedin/Twitter and I listen to podcasts as much as I can (often during a run). I find it really helps to stimulate my thinking about any given challenge or opportunity at work. Where something is interesting, I share and discuss it with my team before forming a view. I also like to attend specialist conferences and find it very useful to go to conferences as participants with members of my team, to see what is new and discuss. Sometimes people need a little push to keep up with the self-learning, we all do.
A few of my favourite resources so far are:
- The No Ego Podcast with Cy Wakeman – I go back to this whenever I feel the drama creeping back up and I use so much of her advice in my day to day leadership
- Shreyas Doshi on Twitter – Product Leader whose critical thinking and strategy planning suggestions are a great example that goes beyond Product Development
- Neil Patel – Very well known but a great example of an expert in their subject that freely shares valuable advice. There are a couple of Neil’s in every field, you just have to find them.
Make sure the vision, the drivers and everyone’s place is clear
It is crucial that a vision for where you are heading as a team is clearly defined, articulated and communicated from the outset. I tend to put a lot of work in communicating the vision and the “North Star”, discussing it with key leaders in the team and making sure that it is well understood. I want people to be able to make their own decisions and make the right decisions, to do so they need to understand what is most important.
After establishing the vision I work through what the core drivers are, usually only a handful, and I work to measure these core drivers, establish a baseline and then incorporate them in my communication to staff. These core drivers need to be understood by everyone.
I then work with the experts in each discipline to break these core drivers down to KPIs that are more relevant to each individual or manager. I make sure we have everything correctly in place and aligned upwards with core drivers and “North Star”. When you have this base of reporting in place it becomes easy to monitor performance, discuss improvements and ultimately optimise.
That’s it!