This is the first installment of a two-part series that distills a good amount of hard-earned experience in leading and managing groups into a few basic instructions for success. The blend of leadership and management strategies I describe are effective for both product and service-related efforts. If you've ever been in a leadership position, you may find that I am articulating much of what you've already discovered through experience -- and by applying common sense. Here I present four ideas; six more will follow in the next issue of The Rational Edge.
1. Focus on building a strong team that can solve hard problems and add genuine value for the customer.
The key words here are focus, team, hard problems, and the customer.
You need to have a focus; otherwise, your energy will not be well directed. And, as it is your team that will ultimately produce the results you need, your main focus should be on building and supporting that team.
The best definition of team I've found is that of Katzenbach and Smith: 1
A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.
Your first challenge is to find the right combination of people with the right combination of skills and personal qualities. Then, to maintain a sharp edge, the team you assemble needs a performance challenge -- to tackle and solve hard problems. There is no point in forming a superb team and then letting it loose on a trivial problem.
These problems also need to be customer-focused. Avoid tasking your team with self-serving internal research and development work. If you keep the customer in your sights, there is a much better chance that you will be aiming at a real target. More fundamentally, you need to produce something that adds real value to the customer's situation. Sometimes this involves understanding what customers really need, as opposed to what they think they want.
2. Leaders inspire; managers enable. To be both a good leader and a good manager, you need to communicate the vision and understand the details.
There is a difference between leadership and management. In an ideal world, we'd all embody the best attributes of great leaders and effective managers and avoid the stereotypical failings of each.
Leaders are often charismatic, but they do not have to be. A leader who displays quiet determination and steadfast endurance can be as inspirational as one who breathes fire. What the best leaders do is transmit a sense of mission -- a vision -- to the rest of the team that inspires and sustains; and they lead by example. This encourages teams to accomplish great deeds.
Managers, like leaders, also need to understand the big picture (vision) that drives each project. But they also need to grasp the details that will allow the team to fulfill that vision. Managers need to be enablers: planners, negotiators, pulse-takers, and removers of obstacles. You cannot do this kind of work effectively without understanding the details. And the more technically challenging the problem domain, the more important this understanding becomes.
Managers and leaders need to know one another's business but remember that they have distinct specialties. A leader's primary job is to communicate the vision. The manager's primary job is to understand the details and enable the team to work effectively and move forward.
Rarely do outstanding leadership and managerial qualities reside in one person. If you are charged with setting up a team, finding one person to fill both roles may be too hard. Instead, understand whether your primary candidate is mainly a leader or a manager, and then find a complementary person for him or her to work with. And analyzing your own strengths and weaknesses will pay dividends when you select a partner to help you lead or manage your next project.
3. Anticipate obstacles, and eliminate them while they're small.
Nothing fancy here. Most problems seem small when they're either far off in the future or way back in the past -- but in their own "time neighborhood," they loom large. This is partly a trick of perspective, but there are other, more insidious, reasons, too.
The simple fact is that small problems, left unattended, grow over time (see last month's column). This is certainly true for employee discontent; left unaddressed, it festers and becomes worse. Better to brush plaque from your teeth every day than to let it build up and destroy them.
Some items, such as capital equipment acquisition, are naturally "long-lead." If you address them far enough in advance, you can handle such needs purely administratively. You can budget for capital equipment, order it, plan for it, install it, etc. Ordinarily, it's not a problem. But what if you don't do the required homework well in advance? You'll have to beg, borrow, or steal when lack of equipment becomes a crisis. The small obstacle will become a big one.
Typically, two types of management animals wind up in this situation: ostriches (problem avoiders) and sloths (procrastinators). The ostriches never lift their heads out of the sand to look for present and future obstacles, so they are perpetually being unpleasantly surprised. The sloths know about the problems but put off doing anything about them. The problems, of course, take no offense; they'll stick around whether or not anyone pays attention to them.
To lead well and manage effectively, you must aggressively seek out potential obstacles and attack them. There's no excuse for getting blindsided: good management is the art of intelligent anticipation.
4. Take the time to listen to others carefully, but don't worry TOO much about what other people think.
Not listening is a cardinal sin. If you think you're too busy to listen, then you have your priorities wrong. You don't have to listen to absolutely everyone, and you don't have to listen to everyone equally, but listening is a must.
Scientists know that they ignore data at their peril. You may want to discount certain data after gathering it. But get the data. And get it first-hand whenever possible. Raw, unfiltered data is always valuable -- even redundant data, because it allows for cross checking.
Remember, however, that you don't have to be a slave to your data givers. Sometimes you'll come up with ideas that others find strange or unpopular, and they'll let you know it. Listen to them, weigh what they're telling you -- both the words and the music -- and then choose your course. Don't let what others think dissuade you when you know what needs to be done. You are not being paid to be popular; you are being paid to get a job done. If you worry too much about the opinions of others, then you will succumb to the weathervane effect -- you will change direction every time the wind does.
This counsel may be controversial, because we live in a time and a culture that favors consensus. But consensus-based decisions can be wrong or, in some cases, represent bad compromises that a team makes when driven by severe time constraints. If your team can't achieve a strong consensus and paralysis sets in, it becomes imperative for you, the leader, to make a decision and go forward. In such cases, whatever decision you make will, inevitably, leave some or all of the participants unhappy, at least for a time. What you must make clear to everyone is that making no decision is the worst course; a decision, after all, will inevitably have to be made, and in the meantime, valuable time is being lost. You'll achieve the best outcome in these situations if you make sure that all the players feel they've "had their day in court" -- that you've heard them out. They don't have to agree with the decision, but they do have to accept it. This is fundamental to team success.
Stay tuned. I'll have more to say about leadership and management in February.
1 Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, The Wisdom of Teams (New York: Harper Business, 1993).
Recently appointed CEO of Ravenflow, an Emeryville, California-based company delivering precision requirements validation for software developers, Joe Marasco served as senior vice president and business unit manager for Rational Software prior to the company's acquisition by IBM. He held numerous positions of responsibility in marketing, development, and the field sales organization, overseeing initiatives for Apex and Visual Modeler for Microsoft Visual Studio. After retiring from Rational in 2003, he published The Software Development Edge, a collection of his essays on software project management originally published in The Rational Edge. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and an M.B.A. from the University of California, Irvine.
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