- Empowerment: how will you know when you're doing it right?
- 3 practical steps for empowering your technical teams
- Getting technology done: managing contractors and outside support
- (Re)structuring your team
- Getting big things done even when you can't change the big picture
- Corrections done correctly
- Advice for new managers: defending your core values
- The hard way: expressing your values and expectations in a formal presentation
- New leaders set the tone
- If leadership is a journey, how will you know when you're there?
January 31, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Leading from the trenches
This post is inspired by material in my book, The Only Trait of a Leader.
Everyone in IT knows that your ability to work well with others is at least as important as your technical acumen. But while “teamwork” is a mantra for just about everyone, leadership is often left to higher ups. Here's the thing: leadership matters to you, right now, even if you don't want to have your name on a parking place some day.
Thanks to thousands of years of social conditioning we think in hierarchies. If we aren't at the top of a hierarchy then we don't exert our leadership because “it's someone else's responsibility.” But leadership is not about titles, fame, money, power, or position. It's about followers. A person is a leader because other people follow the example he or she sets. It really is that simple.
Being an effective leader is good for your career in the trenches or in the board room
Even as an individual contributor or small team lead you care about what you're doing and you'd like to see things done the way you think is best. Developing leadership skills will help make that happen. As a person who builds teams I cannot tell you how much I value—and how rare it is to find—people who can see the big picture and know the part they play in it. Developing your leadership skills can help you make sure that you can be successful doing the things you love, even if you never want to manage a team larger than yourself.
In addition to adding a secret weapon to your Ninja Worker arsenal, developing effective leadership skills can also get you into management faster if you want to go that way. Pursuing a management track isn't for everyone. But if it is for you, mastering leadership skills is one of the fastest ways to promotion.
Let's look at a couple ways that you can start developing your own leadership skills right now, even if you're just starting your career in IT.
1. Seeing the big(ger) picture
One of the most common traits that employees lack at the beginning of their careers (and sometimes later on, too) is perspective. Most of us are confronted each day with more things to do than time to do them. A key to your success—and the success of your entire team—is recognizing which things are important enough to take priority and actually get done. In order to do this you've got to be able to see the bigger picture.
Try to understand how what you are working on right now fits in to the picture at least two levels up from you. You might “just” be working on a piece of software to write out the new output file format, but if you know that piece of software is needed before the product ships, and if you realize that this product is supposed to turn your company's fourth quarter revenues around, you will be totally focused on getting that work done.
2. Understand what could be better today
A trait most often desired in strong leaders is vision: the ability to look around and see how things could be, not just how they are. Developing a vision that is powerful enough to inspire others while remaining concrete enough to actually accomplish takes practice. You can start getting that practice right now.
Look around at your work environment, tools, and processes: how could things be better? What one change could you envision that would make you more productive? Or more relevant to the company? How about for your whole team, or division?
You want to be careful here, especially at first.
You might get fired up about some of your ideas and want to run straight to your boss and fill him in on all the great stuff he should be doing. There are often reasons, and sometimes good reasons, that things are the way they are, and you or your boss may not be able to change those things right now.
The key is to take the time to do the thinking. Then, as time goes on, look for appropriate opportunities to share your ideas with those around and get their feedback. Then, when you're at that staff meeting and out of the blue the boss says “How can we make things better?” you'll be ready.
3. Responsibility
Take responsibility for your own actions. For example, when someone compliments you for a job well done, accept their thanks or congratulations humbly.
By the same token when you make a mistake, don't make excuses or try to avoid the blame. Admit your error, learn from it, and don't fail in the same way again. And if you want extra credit, go find the people you inconvenienced and apologize.
4. Recognition and reward
We all like to be recognized for our contributions. But this recognition doesn't just have to come from the boss.
When a coworker meets a milestone or stays all night to pull the team out of a jam, say “thanks” or give a word of congratulations. It doesn't have to be fancy or formal.
This is a great habit to form early in your career, and giving this kind of peer support also provides a low penalty learning environment to discover what kinds of praise and recognition people respond best to.
5. Mentorship
One of the most valuable aspects of leadership is the strong desire to develop others so that they can reach their full potential. But, again, you don't have to wait until you are the boss to start doing this.
As you learn and develop, look for opportunities to pass your skills on to others. Helping others develop is immensely fulfilling, but its also great for your team and can help establish you as a trusted expert with your peers and a valuable leader to your boss. Just don't spend so much time helping others that you don't get your own job done!
Posted by John West on January 31, 2007 07:27 PM
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I have a lot of personal experiences that appear to contradict what you say, but do not have the time to inventory them here in writing. But I do have a letter from a gentleman who expresses a number of the problems most elequently. In a few ways he seems to echo your viewpoint.
From:
Date: Mon Jan 22, 2007 11:15 pm
Subject: Wanna to be a manager for software company?
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If you want to manage badly enough, then you will manage, badly enough. Hence, before you jump in, stop and think about why you want it. Are you tired of engineering, or were you perhaps never very good at it? If so, technical management isn't much of an escape, because your engineers will know, and they won't respect you. Do you want to manage because you want authority? If so, it's a trap: you'll still be on a leash held by the folks above you.
Or maybe you just want to be a little higher in the pecking order, so you can peck downhill? If so, then you're what we call, colloquially speaking, a "pecker".
Think hard about why you want to be a manager. I've worked with a number of managers with a different motivations, and all of the underlying reasons, including my own, seem suspicious to me now. Especially now that I work for a company (BASE Limited) that works, and well, with almost no managers or management overhead. Now that I've seen it working, I question the motivations of anyone who wants to manage.
I'm suspicious of all the mother-hen types: they want to nurture their teams, but tend to smother them. And I'm suspicious of the overly-organized types: they want to bring process to chaos, but process stifles invention, and it can be used to disguise incompetence for an entire career. I'm suspicious of empire builders; too often they lower their hiring bar. I've heard or seen a hundred reasons for becoming a manager, and I now view all of them with suspicion, because each reason is a potential psychological problem waiting to manifest itself on a soon-to-be-unhappy engineering team.
I know some of good managers, even great ones, and none of them are managing. They're leading, and there's a world of difference. You've heard a hundred clichéd descriptions of leadership, but you probably also know at least one or two people you consider great leaders, so you know intuitively how it can work via their examples. And if you know enough great leaders, you know there are vastly different styles at work.
I won't try to characterize those styles here; it would take us too far afield. But I think the best managers don't want to manage: they want to lead. In fact most leaders probably don't think about it much, at least at first, because they're too busy leading: rushing headlong towards a goal and leading everyone around them in that direction, whether they're on the team or not. Leadership stems from having a clear vision, strong convictions, and enough drive and talent to get your ideas and goals across to a diverse group of people who can help you achieve them. If you have all that, you're close. Then you just need empathy so you don't work everyone to death. If you're a great leader, you can put the whip away; everyone will give you everything they've got.
Put in that light, management no longer seems so glamorous, does it? Ironically, "I want to be a manager" is just about the worst sentiment a would-be manager could possibly express, because the statement has absolutely nothing to do with leadership. A leader doesn't fixate on management, which is after all just a bureaucratic framework that attempts to simulate leadership through process and protocol. Great teams building great things don't worry about process. They just build whatever it is as fast as they can.
The more HR-oriented a tech organization becomes, with manager training and manager forms and manager evaluations and manager this and that, the harder it is for a real leader to get any work done. Often as not, the actual leaders in the organization (at all levels, from individual contributors up through senior VPs) tend to be very slightly unpopular with HR, because they're always bending the rules and not doing things strictly by the book.
The true leaders in an organization are seeing the world through a very different set of eyes: the eyes, almost, of someone reading a story unfolding, except they're the ones writing the story. They can see clear as day how the world should be different in some way, and they're doing whatever it takes to get from here to there. And they're enlisting all the help they can get along the way, because getting others on board with your ideas is one of the best ways to accomplish your goals. They'll align their own goals with yours if they agree with you strongly enough.
Great companies recognize that leadership is orthogonal to management, and that people can be highly influential leaders with or without direct reports. The management hierarchy isn't generally helping the leaders. If you're lucky enough to have truly great leaders in your org, the best thing you can do is get out of their way and let them lead.
Any time I hear someone say "I want to be a manager", I just want to smack them. But maybe it's just me.
Thanking you
Saydujjaman
Manager
BASE Limited
www.baseltd. com
Tel: +880 2 8622075,8622076
Mobile: +88 0152383918
Fax: +880 2 8612455
skype: saydujjaman
