joereitz
Leadership is one of those topics that everyone with direct reports assumes they know a lot about. What we often forget, though, is that leadership is not a one-way street; it requires the led to subscribe to a common cause.
There’s an old expression:
How do you know someone was a Marine? Because they ****ing tell you.
I’m not one of those Veterans that believes they know about leadership because they served, but I do want to get in front of the dismissive tone you often hear among corporate types that military leadership is different than corporate leadership. It isn’t. Whether you have a clever acronym of leadership principles (JJDIDTIEBUCKLE, anyone?) or a list of corporately-sanctioned axioms, there’s one truth on the topic: good leadership is creating an environment in which your team(s) can be effective and succeed, without undue fear.
That’s just as true in a war zone as it is in a conference room, but I like to emphasize “undue fear.” It’s not that any of us can operate without fear – that’s a weirdly unrealistic expectation. Life is hard, every decision has exceptions and caveats, and the sheer weight of moving forward can leave people with the hardiest of constitutions feeling over-encumbered. Even if you do boldly move forward, the second-guessing that comes from others or even yourself often unleashes a second wave of immobilizing doubt. So how do you avoid “undue fear?”
I think, like most things, it’s about practice and discipline. In a B2B sense, it requires you to have a clear North Star. Often, that’s expressed as “Customer Obsession” – the idea that if you keep the needs of your customers at the center of everything you do, everything else tends to work itself out in a positive way. In my experience in Marketing and Marketing Operations, I’ve found that to be generally true. One thing I learned at Amazon, though, was that guiding principles tend to be more nuanced than that. Keeping with their stated leadership principles, while customer obsession is surely important, you also have to balance the ability to “deliver results,” “think big,” and still (somehow) maintain a “bias for action,” among a growing list of other things the company perceives to be important.
Individually, those are all good principles. Together, they compete for priority. It’s easier to think of principles like these as rankable, but in practice they’re more fluid. For example, does every situation have a direct customer impact? No, not always – so in that case, you can place greater emphasis on simplifying how something works, delivering maximized impact, or something else. This creates an infinite loop of indecision for the individual contributors in your charge, though. How do they know which North Star is the North Star of the moment?
The short answer is: this is why work is so challenging sometimes. It’s not just the world that’s spinning, but the galaxy and rest of the universe as well. There’s no universal answer, magic 8-ball, or easy button. Your leadership, you, and your people are invariably going to eventually prioritize the wrong thing. But coming back to the concept of “undue fear,” it’s on you, the leader, to create an environment where getting it wrong is okay. Preventing undue fear means creating an environment where failure is not only okay, but an inevitable and accepted part of the innovation process.
This means you can’t be overly prescriptive or a micro-manager. You need to be able to communicate the desired results, and trust the team you hired to deliver. Borrowing a metaphor from military experience, do you think people leave the firing range for the first time as expert marksman? Some do, because they are exceptionally talented and fast learners (and huge assholes [kidding… mostly]), but most certainly do not. What happens to the rest of the trainees? They trudge back out to the range, snap in, and practice more. Eventually, fear, doubt, uncertainty… it all erodes with practice.
If you’re a leader, the point here is if you take care of your team and establish trust that there is patience and a willingness to experiment, you’re going to:
- have a lot better team culture and cohesion, and
- ultimately get better results from your team.
Even if you’re the shitty person that only cares about the latter, that’s an easy tack to take. So jibe ho!
