Tag: Leadership

Follow Through

When you agree on an action, you need to make sure you put in the follow through to be sure it actually happens.

It’s especially important to remember this if responsibility is one of your key strengths. It’s very easy to assume that because you will always do everything you say you will, that everyone else will always hold themselves to that standard.

The follow throughs will be different depending on the person, the actions, the length of time to complete and the importance of completing them. You need to make sure that you balance the need for follow through against the tendency towards micromanagement.

I like to use a model of “trust but verify”. Your default position is that the action will be completed as agreed, but as the person eventually accountable, you will check-in on progress.

If you are going to use a formal check-in model, then agree it up front with the actions. I’ve worked with people who want to improve their public speaking skills, in that sort of long lived objective, I’ve then agreed monthly check-ins, to find out what sort of presentations they’ve been giving, the feedback they’ve had and what they are doing based on it. This formal agreement is super useful to make sure the goal is not forgotten, or people try and leave any activity until right before the final review.

For shorter term follow throughs, they can be more informal. Ask “How is X progressing?”, dig in a little bit more with “What’s left to do?”. By asking what’s left, you get a real view on the final 20%, which is a lot more useful than a brief “all on track” or similar.

If it makes sense, grab a demo or draft view, that makes the progress concrete. Give some warning on this, so it’s not a surprise. That’ll also give the person a chance to get the draft together if they’ve not picked it up yet.

Finally, make sure that your check-in is not left until just before a deadline. Reviewing the day before doesn’t give much chance to make any corrections or complete actions, it’s no fun doing homework on the bus, so avoid that feeling by making sure good progress is made early.

Following through is an important leadership skill, so practice until it’s natural and you’ll really drive the effectiveness of everyone you are working with.

Tags Coaching, Follow through, Leadership, Trust

Leadership

Make it Real

Pick the right level of detail to build a connection with your audience and you’ll make it real for them.

We talked recently about storytelling, and how it’s an important skill for anyone in a leadership position. It’s a great way to get better at presenting to people and having the ideas stick in their minds.

Finding the right level is a key ingredient to great storytelling. You are making it concrete, which is a key part of the stickiness. If something is too big, vague or disconnected, then it won’t resonate and it’ll quickly be forgotten.

It’s particularly important when you are connecting the big company ideas to the activities that your team needs to undertake. It’s great to know that a major initiative will secure a significant success at the corporate level, but these things take time to come about.

A year into the effort, an appeal to this large goal may just stir a dim memory of a flashy exhortation relating to shareholder value, but is just as likely to feel like a top down directive that doesn’t engender buy-in.

Instead, think about the specific effort you’re looking for from the team, and the concrete value it will create. Refer to the big goal, but tie it in to your own efforts. What specific outcomes will you achieve, how does that help?

“We have to do this for the big initiative” is not a good way to make it real. “We’re going to deliver a great new product that doubles the number of subscribers and will contribute a quarter of the revenue goal of the big initiative” is a much better way to connect up the efforts at the right level of detail.

Put in the effort to make it real, you’ll find your connections are stronger, your team gets the why and they strive for success.

Tags Leadership, Storytelling

Coaching Leadership

What’s Number 1?

You can only have one top priority.

There’s always lots of important things going on, there’s always a lot of demands on your time and there will always be more than you are able to do.

So, you’ve got to be really clear on what is the top priority at any given time.

The advice is particularly valuable if you work in a team with lots of different stakeholders, or even just one who’s very demanding. As much at they might want to have 5 top priority “must do” items, there is actually a list in order from 1 to 5.

As a leader, one of the major strands of your role is teasing out that ordering. You need to manage the list and set expectations across stakeholders. You want to be pointing your team at item number 1, especially if it’s “important but not urgent”.

A physical list of priority items is a powerful tool. When a stakeholder requests a change, or shares more about the value of an item lower down the list, then you can show them the impact of moving something up, and how it moves other things down.

This approach is particularly valuable as you gain active engagement from the stakeholder. They aren’t able to assume you are working on both the old and new number 1 priorities in parallel. The physical list allows you to document the change, so you’ve covered the case of any accidental misalignment as well.

With a single number 1 priority, you’re then able to focus effort towards the top most important thing, and ensuring that if anything doesn’t get done then it’s less important than what does get completed.

Don’t lose focus, show your working and make sure there’s only one number 1.

Tags Coaching, Leadership, Prioritisation

Coaching Leadership

Recognising the Craft of Others

Post author By James Osborn
Post date October 22, 2020
1 Comment on Recognising the Craft of Others

It’s easy to recognise the complexity and difficulty of your own role, especially when it’s a specific niche or requires a significant amount of expertise.

It can be harder for us to recognise that same complexity in the roles of others. Whether it’s those of you who write software assuming that design is easy, or people in finance who feel like complex products should spring into life fully formed and predictably, when you look at what “they” are doing, you quickly oversimplify.

How to you prevent yourself doing it, and how do you protect yourself from it happening?

Both sides are pretty similar, you need to go on the journey and walk a few miles in the shoes of others.

Stop and think hard about a job that isn’t yours, but you think is easy. What’s driving that thinking. Do you have any evidence, or is it just a feeling?

If it’s a feeling, seek out an opportunity to join in on the complexity. Sit in on a user research session and watch the skills of an experienced questioner gathering powerful insights. Get a software engineer to run you through the systems and show you how new features are launched. Spend half an hour with a finance professional to understand how they join together complex data sources to create vital governance reports.

Once you can see the complexity, it’s a lot harder to write them off as having it easy.

So if you are suffering the slings and arrows of someone shouting “simple”, then you need to get them inside and see that difficulty. It may be harder as if they don’t recognise the pain, they won’t be as proactive.

Appeal to their experience or see their insight. Get them into a session where they’ll see the difficulty and how you need experience to do well. If you can safely let them experiment in the space then that’s even better. Practical experience of failure will live on in their mind as a lesson far longer than seeing you succeed at something they still think is eay.

Recognise the craft and contribution of others, and help others to recognise your own craft. When everyone understands this, then you’ll form more effective teams, and crush complex problems by pulling in all the relevant experts at the right time.

Tags Coaching, Craft, Leadership

Coaching Leadership

Being Wrong

Count the number of times that you admit to getting it wrong. Pull out a piece of paper and make a tally of every time you say “I’m wrong”. Half marks if you think it but just say it, bonus points for putting it out there in a conversation where you are the leader in the room.

If you are regularly hitting zero, then you’ve not got the right balance for learning fast. You aren’t pushing enough, you’re stuck in the comfort zone and you aren’t making much progress. It’s also important to check in here with how honest you are being. Reflect fully on the past and make sure that hubris is not setting you up for a fall. Retelling the story to make you right from day 1 is not going to support your desire for growth.

If you are just thinking it, then you need to make some more space to fail. You’ve got into the space of learning, and assuming you are changing your behaviour or actions then it’s a good start. To make it great, you need to build the safety in the group to willing to admit to being wrong. That’ll speed up the learning journey for all of you, building more momentum for change.

The bonus points for doing it in a leadership context come because you are setting the example for behaviours you want to see. If you want people to innovate, to take risks and to learn, then you need to show that with your actions. Own it when it goes wrong, show people how you are changing and be a role model for that behaviour. Remember, as the leader in the room, you are always being closely studied for signs of how to be successful.

Finally, if you are always admitting to being wrong, dial it back a bit. There’s certainly a balance to be found here, where “always” is as bad as “never”. Try highlighting 4-5 positive things for each negative, and make sure that hitting one small mistake doesn’t turn an overall success into something you were totally wrong about.

If you’re never wrong, you aren’t learning.

Tags Coaching, Leadership, Learning

Leadership

Planning

The value of planning is the process, it’s very rarely the plan itself.

An effective planning process drives out the complexity of what you are trying to achieve. It shows you the priority, who needs to get involved and where the difficulties may be. You also get to say what you aren’t going to do, which is especially valuable before you’ve invested a lot of effort.

One quick test for effectiveness, check the level of detail you are working to, and measure it against the scope and duration of the plan. If the scope is more than a couple of weeks, then anything talking about specific days or people is too much detail to be useful. By the time you are looking at a year, then the plan is more of a strategy, and you are better placed to think about a focus of effort and the outcomes you are chasing, rather than the specific things and order they will be done.

Once you’ve built a plan, get ready to rip it up. Things change, and the only thing that’s uncertain is how quickly they will change. If you stick dogmatically to the plan, you’ll quickly find yourself chasing dates that don’t make sense, or pushing for features that are no longer needed.

The most painful failed projects are those that treat the initial plan as a rigid structure, rather than a guide towards a potential future.

Still, keep cycling through the planning process. Take in what you’ve learnt, what’s been completed and consider what’s changed. This means you are not starting from scratch each time, but course correcting with more information.

Iterating is key, especially in a fast moving environment. If you find planning a chore, then doing it little and often should cure this feeling. If you plan by six-month cycles, try cutting it to three and I’m sure you’ll get a better outcome.

Create your plan, throw it away when it’s no longer helping!

Tags Leadership, Planning

Coaching Leadership

Who is “They”?

An insidious tactic of someone who’s trying to disrupt your priority list is an appeal to “they”. It’s always an anonymous and shadowy group, and all that you can be sure is that “they” are important, and “they” want something.

The only way to defend against this is with a spirit of coaching, and to start following interest. Make sure to stay positive, and start out by discovering who “they” are. Is this group of people important to you and your team? Are they people that you want or need to keep happy, or are they just fishing for resources? Where do they sit in your stakeholder map?

Next up, get into the why. Why are these people coming to you? What’s stopping them going through normal channels or using their own resources to get this thing done.

Consider offering to take up the discussion directly with “they”. It’s exciting to see how often the request is actively coming from the group, versus their name used in vain to add weight to another agenda. Sometimes just asking this is enough to make the request go away entirely!

Once you give in to requests from “they”, then you’ll find your time is ever more devoted to the whims of others. With some gently probing questions, you take back the power to prioritise effectively and deliver more value sooner. Don’t let “them” win.

Tags Coaching, Leadership, They

Coaching Leadership

Ignore It?

It’s a busy world, there’s lots of noise and it’s only getting busier and noisier. If you are getting overwhelmed by notifications, distractions and requests for “a couple of minutes” then you could try out a new technique.

What happens if you just ignore it?

This gives you an opportunity to think about if the information matters, if there’s an action for you to take or if it’s pure noise with no signal attached.

It’s a method to sort items into the Eliminate quadrant of the matrix, the things that you just aren’t going to do.

Once you’ve decided if ignoring something won’t have any major impact, the next step is to figure out the minimum amount of effort to get it off your plate for good. Repeatedly ignoring things is probably not the best strategy in a business context!

If it’s a common but low value question, then write up a document and point people towards that rather than repeatedly crafting responses. If there’s a notification that you’ll never act on, then get rid of it and drop the interruptions.

Pointless meeting? Cancel it. Weekly update that’s never read? Drop it.

As with any new approach, you’ll make some mistakes at first. Start with the slam dunks, then trial it on a few less certain things. If you go a bit far eliminating things, don’t worry too much, and bring them back (improved if possible!).

So, what happens if you just ignore it?

Tags Coaching, Ignore, Leadership, Prioritisation

Leadership

Work the Problem

Technologists love solving problems, it’s one of the defining characteristics that pulls people into the world of high-tech. When this desire is put towards the right ends, then it’s a powerful force for good. There are some tools and techniques that can keep you on this path, and a few traps to watch out for.

First up, be clear what the true problem is you are trying to solve. Understand what the issue is, consider who is impacted now and what will change once it’s solved. Look at the value in the solution, the costs involved in solving it and the opportunity cost of targeting this vs something else.

Taking time to build this understanding gives a proper frame to the problem. It’ll prevent a couple of the traditional mistakes we can make, things like automating the existing bad process, or only providing benefit to the noisy stakeholders who are demanding a solution right now.

Now, step away from pure technical solutions. If you stay fully in the world of software and hardware, you’ll find you default to solving all problems by just writing code. The longer you do this, the easier it is to drift away from your customers, until all you care about is the minor version of the tech stack and wringing out another micro performance update. You’ll probably place too much weight on getting rid of old software just because it’s built in a slightly outdated way, rather than moving on because it’s no longer serving a purpose.

So, look over the problem again. If you aren’t selling enough of a widget, then don’t immediately jump on updating a feature. Maybe you are not marketing it to the right people, or your copy is out of date. Is it a complex product that has a sales funnel? Can you optimise that? Are people using it correctly or is it too complex? Maybe the right solution is taking away features rather than adding more?

When you look up beyond the purely technical, you increase the overall impact you are able to have. Work with the cross-functional experts in all the disciplines relevant to the problem and you’ll always come up with a better solution. You can be confident that when you break out the development environment and start cutting code that you’ve worked the problem and that a technical solution is the right one.

Tags Leadership, Problem Solving, technology

Coaching Leadership

Storytelling

Getting better at presenting is a common theme for the people I’ve worked with. Running a great session that inspires people, drives an important decision or shares vital information can be a weekly challenge in the corporate setting.

Improving your storytelling is a great technique to take your presentation skills to the next level. Think about the type of presentation you’ll be giving, who the audience is and the one key message that you want them to take away from the session.

You can then craft your presentation around this setup, and structure the story to have the impact that you are aiming for. We’re used to telling stories, and we all understand the structure of a range of different types.

Before diving into the detail, throw together a quick storyboard. You can’t go far wrong with a three-act structure, consider something like:

Layout the problem – Why should the audience care?
Give some options for the solution – What path might we take?
Pick the best one – Resolve the situation.

Flex the structure for your own particular situation and the style of presentation.

Once you’ve got it roughed out, run through it with broad brushstrokes. Think about how it feels. Refine it if you need to.

Now you can go into the details. Grab some relevant numbers and the data that you need. Humanise the story with specific individuals. Showing how an option will impact an entire population may not be as effective a story as showing how it will impact a specific person or group.

Next up, get into the editing phase. You tell a tighter story by cutting out pieces that don’t contribute to the narrative. Similarly you make your presentation stronger by cutting sections that don’t build towards that key takeaway.

Finally, practice the flow until you are comfortable. You tell good stories when you know the points you are hitting well. A well polished presentation will also give you confidence going into the delivery, and that’s a slam dunk boost to a better final outcome.

Tags Coaching, Leadership, Presentations