El Kahuna

Leadership is a hard topic.  I often say that when I am interviewing people that I am looking for “IT”.  I can’t describe “IT”, I can’t tell you how to get “IT”, but I know “IT” when I see “IT”.  Leadership is something like that.  I know a leader when I see one.  I don’t see many.

Dilbert Style Leadership

So what is leadership for me.  Good question.  In a word, Motivation.

At a simple level a leader is someone who identifies a set of goals / objectives and has the ability to motivate a group of people to achieve those goals.  A leader has the ability to demonstrate to people how accomplishing the group’s goals allows them to achieve their goals.  A leader finds ways around roadblocks, celebrates success, and shoulder’s blame.  I believe the “best” leaders do so by example.

I’ve never been fond of Machiavelli style fear as a motivator.  Perhaps that is because I have had the pleasure to work with talented craftsmen.  It is my experience that such people are often immune to carrot / stick style motivation.  They respond instead to that feeling that one gets when accomplishing things.  Instead of fear of losing their job or not getting a raise / bonus, they are motivated by accomplishments.  Set them challenging goals and allow them to achieve those goals and you have a highly motivated group of people.

Too often people equate power with leadership.  As I have progressed(?) in my career I have found that far too often those in power lack any real ability to lead.  They tend to be so busy managing perhaps they forget to lead.  Perhaps they never had the ability to begin with.  Perhaps it is inevitable that we promote those who have to ability to manage instead of those who can lead.  It is my experience that those who can lead are often unaware of their own abilities.  They often don’t want the responsibilities and constraints that come with management.

Instead of a management track and a technical track, perhaps companies need a leadership track to identify, promote, and reward leaders.  Don’t conscript them to the repression of management.  Allow them to set goals.  Allow them to build teams.  Allow them to succeed.  And then get out of the way.

Wow.  Two years.  What a slacker.  Well during that time I can assure you that I have been paving a path to heaven (good intentions and all).

So, let’s try this again and see how long it lasts.

I hate learning things I already know.

And yet, I seemed doomed to repeat some lessons.  Communication.  Open and Honest communication as Kent Beck put it in his Extreme Programming Explained book is, in my mind, the cornerstone for any team to be successful.  It is a truth so obvious that we sometimes take it for granted or forget about it.  I try to lean towards over communication with my teams.  Though I’m not always successful, for I too get caught in the trap, I have found that this strategy leads to more team cohesion and improved performance.  People feel more free to communicate with me and each other.  Ideas flow more freely.  Expectations are challenged and reset more often.  Friction gets reduced.

I am coming off a … rotation where I allowed that principal to be compromised.  A situation where we were unable as a team to co-locate (which increases the need for communication) working with a remote groups (more communication) in different timezones (more communication).  A situation where we eventually discovered that communication was not a strength of the guiding umbrella organization.  As a result, friction increased, directions changed, and expectations were not reset when necessary.

Initially we tried to use our agile methodology roots to try to make a go of things.  Stand up meetings, retrospectives, acceptance meetings, trying to bring the wider team into these practices.  But at some point we realized as a team we were only talking to ourselves and not communicating with the wider group.  Even the communication within our team was suffering.   The distributed nature of the wider group lead to issues and problems that grew.  Issues that had we all been together would likely have been resolved with less effort, less force of will.  Eventually these issues lead to people leaving the team out of frustration.

This problem of communication was recognized and vocalized almost simultaneously by different parts of the organization.  A plan was put into place to replace our remote development team with a local team.  And while that plan took far too long to put into place.  And while it has lead to the disbanding of “my” team.  It was the right thing to do.

And yet.  Will it lead to a real change?  The guiding umbrella organization still has communication issues.  A localized team will hopefully lessen the impact of those issues, but it will not remove them.  It will not cause people to change existing behavior, in fact it may reinforce those behaviors (you must have known that, you were in the office that day weren’t you?).  People tend not to change unless there is pain.  While there is pain, I’m not sure that people see the root of their pain as poor communication.  They may choose to work harder (not smarter).

But ultimately this is about me.  How will this experience change me?  I have often been accused of being an a$$hole unwilling to compromise.  Did my desire to make this rotation work taint my views?  Did I choose to compromise on the wrong issues?  I think so.  A friend recently asked me for advice on leading a team.  I put Open and Honest Communication at the top of the list.

It is going back to the top of mine.