Defining Leadership: A bottom-up approach

Over the course of my career, I had the opportunity to interface with a number of leaders in a corporate and academic environment. Having experienced both sides, being a manager and being an individual contributor, I describe a few lessons that I learned: What distinguishes a good and a great leader.

Classic Leadership Failures

The classic management theory encourages leaders to rely on the carrot versus stick approach for motivation. The carrot is a reward for compliance and the stick is a consequence for the opposite. In my experience, this approach does not work in most environments as it removes the motivation for a person to do the extra mile. A leader is more effective when she shifts from delegating to empowering a team.

Motivation is less about people doing great work and more about people feeling great about their work.

The second classical leadership failure is when a person, or a group of people, are penalized for their mistakes (by penalized, I mean both practically and psychologically, e.g. scolding an employee for a mistake or removing the person from the line of responsibility). Organizational behavioral scientist Amy Edmondson of Harvard first introduced the construct of “team psychological safety” and defined it as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.” In her TEDx talk, Edmondson offers three simple things individuals can do to foster team psychological safety:

1. Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem.
2. Acknowledge your own fallibility.
3. Model curiosity and ask lots of questions.

Therefore, when the leader embraces the error as apart of the learning process and instead of cultivating the culture of fear, cultivates the culture of innovation then people not only feel better for their work, they are also relieved from working anxiety. Curiosity motivates people to experiment and learn from things that go wrong.

Thirdly, in the flurry of day-to-day business, they’re sometimes not given enough time to really reflect on the cause of an error (an error can be personal, a system or some other error) and what to do differently next time. A leader needs to shift the focus from the error towards how to phase out the errors through automation. Nonetheless, not all issues can be automated. Some of these errors can be classified “business as usual”, such that no one is afraid of taking a risk, trying out a new idea, a new product or a new service. That’s how one can quickly find solutions that really work in the future.

“Leaders can become more powerful role models, when they learn than when they teach.” Prof. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School

Share context and avoid control

In many cases, new leaders try to become hands on because they feel they could do the work faster and better. In other cases, leaders try to become prescriptive when they delegate some work to other people. Both cases have significant issues as the people that are supposed to do the work are not growing, and they cannot innovate. However, there is a balance on how much context, and the type of the context that will allow the team to generate and act on great ideas. Context is equivalent to focus and focus starts from the top. For example, keeping a priority list of what are the most important things to do, and defining what success means when one or more goals are achieved.

Context is also about sharing information with others about the importance of the work. This allows the team to see beyond the monetary benefit. A leader needs to motivate by sharing context about the work the team is doing or plans to do and what the organization is trying to achieve. For example, I have found that the following questions are useful for a leader to prepare:

• Why are we doing it?
• Who is going to benefit from our work and how?
• Who are the stakeholders and how to engage them?
• What does success look like for the team for each employee independently?
• What is the role each employee plays as part of the team?

All this context motivates people to understand how and why their work is of relevance and importance.

“Leadership is about keeping your team focused on a goal and motivated to do their best to achieve it, especially when the stakes are high and the consequences really matter. It is about laying the groundwork for others’ success, and then standing back and letting them shine.” Chris Austin Hadfield, Canadian astronaut

Be Curious

A leader must be the one who is curious, observes, participates in discussions, collects and processes data. Data are structured and unstructured. Structured observations can be collected when a proper framework for collecting them has been created. For example, observe engagement in meetings, observe how much time it takes for an artifact to be delivered, observe innovation and so forth. There are many tools that can be used to put the data in a structured form such as Jira, Trello, Asana, etc.

“I’’m not smart, but I like to observe. Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.” William Hazlitt

Unstructured observations come from “listening” and from bringing observations closer. Attending conferences in a related subject, creating a framework to invite expertise, opening conversations internally and externally etc are some great examples. Similarly, listening to your people can be done structured and isolated from noise through regular 1–1s, or informal conversations over coffee/lunch/walk or a combination, interviewing external candidates even listening to other engineering teams.

Listening to the team members on what are the hurdles they are facing, listening to people that are interviewing about their experiences, as well as listening to peer colleagues that solve a similar technical platform. Listening to engineers is probably the majority of the communication and the leader’s approach has to be such that the ICs are lifted towards explaining their thoughts in a useful way. Interviewing has to be thought as a multi-dimension discussion, where one of the goals is hiring but another goal is improving. Listening to peer colleagues can happen by establishing a community or a framework, such as a conference, a Google Group, a Slack room, where ideas can be exchanged.

Last but not least, great leaders speak less and listen more. They speak when they have questions, poke holes at ideas, challenge peers, and they can figure out how others are thinking about things. A great example to achieve that is the 5 Whys, a technique that originated in quality control in manufacturing. Leveraging this methodology can assist in determining the fundamental root of most problems.

In summary, being curious also shows engagement and enthusiasm. If you are not engaged and enthusiastic about your work and about your company, it is unlikely that you will be a great motivator of others.

“I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” Albert Einstein.

Build a great team

Focus early on building a great team, such that you can have enough time for growth. According to Conway’s Law, the first hires will also determine the culture and dynamics of the team. A few great hires can lift the whole team and your career as a leader. Spend as time as you need to hire people. Use platforms like LinkedIn, call people, go out for coffee. Be proud of the people you hire and not the ones you missed. Use the work of the people that are currently in your team as a banner for recruiting. Allow your people to talk about their work as this can bring the engineering aspect of the message closer to the ears of the candidates. I recently wrote a related blog about being a successful interviewer.

“When you believe you are the smartest person in the room, you have done an awful job hiring.” Unknown.

Help your team grow

Being a leader means that your path changes from looking first at your personal growth to looking at your team’s growth. As a leader, it is important to recognize contributions. Leader's consistently underestimate the power of acknowledgment and in some occasions try to shadow the team’s best effort or in a worst case claim it as their work. It is far more powerful to understand that the leader is a teammate, each teammate is very important in achieving delivering the promised goals, and the leader shows appreciation for the great achievements of the team and the individual. If a leader is surrounded by successful people that will result in the whole organization to lift, and fundamentally in the leader’s career progression.

A great team is about the people. People are not machinery but are living, breathing, emotional and intelligent. Ambition may be the driver, but inspiration is the fuel. Leaders must trust their team. Teammates are driven by ambition, they want to grow, and they should be given independence. The team is also dynamic, and feedback is a compass that enables to validate direction.

Growing the team members requires a constant effort and setting a clear plan:

1) The leader must trigger the initial conversation. “Breaking the ice” is very important to understand the motivation for each person.

2) Leaders and employees agree on a written development plan, discuss regularly and update as necessary.

3) Leaders and employees identify and seize opportunities to take action or brainstorm on elements of the development plan.

Automate by culture

A leader teaches his team to have the autonomy in making a decision. For example, the team does not need to ask for permission, but rather provides information about the intention to do an action. In this case, the team members own their message. If the team owns the message, then it will be easier for the team to act on any given fire without the leader’s intervention. This can increase the leader’s time to solve higher-order problems.

In summary, the leader needs to learn to be confident with the team and set a vision. Finally, the most essential part of a leader is how and when she communicates.

“Leaders are about engineering the process not the technology” Raffi Krikorian former VP of Twitter Platform

Summary

In summary, the above are a few of my observations. There are not conclusive, I am confident there are many other aspects which cannot be captured in a short blog. I am curious to learn so please feel free to reach out with further material. Below I mention a few interesting resources.

Resources

Want to learn more? The following are good short reads or videos to start:

• Every Problem is a Scaling Problem by Raffi Krikorian
• What does a VP of Engineering do, again? by Raffi Krikorian
• Functional vs Unit Organizations by Steven Sinofsky
• Stop waiting for perfection and learn from your mistakes by Werner Wogels
• 10 Senior Leadership Lessons I Wish I Learned Sooner by Julia Grace
• Motivating Employees Is Not About Carrots or Sticks by Lisa Lai
• Guide: Understanding Team Effectiveness by Julia Rosovsky