rely on your team

Important advice to any leader is to be humble enough to admit that you don't know something. Too many people come in to a leadership position saying: Well, these people gotta respect me so I better know what I'm talking about. They miss an opportunity to learn the essence of the work they're being called upon to do because they didn't ask.

As a CEO (New York Region American Red Cross), the people who report to me are like Ken Turner, who runs disasters for 26 counties. He knows his stuff. I'm not going to pretend I know more about disaster response than he does. He taught me disaster response. He's counting on me for other skills, and I'm relying on him to get the job done. (While Taravella is interim CEO in New York, Turner will fill her position, and his regional disaster oversight will be filled by Susan Pope, a disaster program manager for the Central New York chapter.)

I learn from Ken. One of the best things I ever did is say: OK, teach me this business guys. It's counter intuitive. You think you going to lose credibility by admitting you don't know something. You gain credibility. So that's a tip for anyone aspiring to leadership responsibility: Don't be afraid to ask questions.

If you want it as a bullet point: Rely on your team. If you're being asked to lead a team, then you have to believe in that team. Part of believing in that team is to trust them and to have them teach you what you don't know.

Rosie Taravella interviewed by Stan Linhorst

"Rosie Taravella on leadership: Be humble enough to admit that you don't know something". syracuse.com. November 21, 2017. 

provide proof of life

If you are fortunate enough to be entrusted with leadership — that is, with imagination on others’ behalf — he is clear on what you are meant to do: “I am here to provide proof of life to that ever elusive, never completely believable ‘us.’”

I am here, in that line, is precondition for everything that happens after. Being there, in and of a place, is where leading begins. Then you must move. Songs need to get played, arenas to get filled up. But those are only means. A leader’s job is to embody identity for a community — to give words and flesh to elusive ideals. (Only inside a body does an ideal get to become a story.) A leader’s legitimacy, then, rests upon “how deeply you [can] inhabit your song.”

Gianpiero Petriglieri

"Bruce Springsteen, Artful Leadership, and What Rock Star Bosses Do". Harvard Business Review. 9/27/2017

natural subversion

The work of art, as Springsteen puts it, is “natural subversion.” It is through art that the unspeakable and the unheard find a voice. Establishment leaders might praise and pay for art, but they cannot control it. That is why the artist’s leadership is usually trustworthy: It either speaks to and for people, or it has no power at all.

Gianpiero Petriglieri

"Bruce Springsteen, Artful Leadership, and What Rock Star Bosses Do". Harvard Business Review. 9/27/2017

creating a safe and trusting environment

[Effective leaders have "high ethical and moral standards” and “communicat[e] clear expectations”...]

Taken together, these attributes are all about creating a safe and trusting environment. A leader with high ethical standards conveys a commitment to fairness, instilling confidence that both they and their employees will honor the rules of the game. Similarly, when leaders clearly communicate their expectations, they avoid blindsiding people and ensure that everyone is on the same page. In a safe environment employees can relax, invoking the brain’s higher capacity for social engagement, innovation, creativity, and ambition...

Sunnie Giles

"The Most Important Leadership Competencies, According to Leaders Around the World" Harvard Business Review. 3/15/2016

primary greatness of character

If you want to have a happy marriage, be the kind of person who generates positive energy and sidesteps negative energy rather than empowering it. If you want to have a more pleasant, cooperative teenager, be a more understanding, empathetic, consistent, loving parent. If you want to have more freedom, more latitude in your job, be a more responsible, a more helpful, a more contributing employee. If you want to be trusted, be trustworthy. If you want the secondary greatness of recognized talent, focus first on primary greatness of character.

Stephen R. Covey

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change.  Simon & Schuster, 2013

trust employees

In this world of intense scrutiny, where everyone is looking at what you do...one reaction is to create management systems, more process, more controls, and more bureaucracy. Relying on traditional supervision, process and controls would inhibit serving clients responsively, and stifle employees' creative energies. We cannot apply Industrial age management systems to address post Industrial age needs. There is a better alternative, which is to trust employees. Values are the glue, the bond that binds us together in the absence of controls. These must be genuinely shared values; they can't be imposed top-down. Values provide employees a framework to make decisions when management systems and procedures are unclear. It comes down to judgment, based on shared values.

Sam Palmisano

"The Future of Leadership" by Samie Al-Achrafi. The Huffington Post. 10/30/2015

the most basic of all knowledge

A report from the National Center for Clinical Infant Programs makes the point that school success is not predicted by a child’s fund of facts or a precocious ability to read so much as by emotional and social measures: being self-assured and interested; knowing what kind of behavior is expected and how to rein in the impulse to misbehave; being able to wait, to follow directions, and to turn to teachers for help; and expressing needs while getting along with other children.

Almost all students who do poorly in school, says the report, lack one or more of these elements of emotional intelligence (regardless of whether they also have cognitive difficulties such as learning disabilities). The magnitude of the problem is not minor; in some states close to one in five children have to repeat first grade, and then as the years go on fall further behind their peers, becoming increasingly discouraged, resentful, and disruptive.

A child’s readiness for school depends on the most basic of all knowledge, how to learn. The report lists the seven key ingredients of this crucial capacity – all related to emotional intelligence:

1. Confidence. A sense of control and mastery of one’s body, behavior, and world; the child’s sense that he is more likely than not to succeed at what he undertakes, and that adults will be helpful.
2. Curiosity. The sense that finding out about things is positive and leads to pleasure.
3. Intentionality. The wish and capacity to have an impact, and to act upon that with persistence. This is related to a sense of competence, of being effective.
4. Self-control. The ability to modulate and control one’s own actions in age-appropriate ways; a sense of inner control.
5. Relatedness. The ability to engage with others based on the sense of being understood by and understanding others.
6. Capacity to communicate. The wish and ability to verbally exchange ideas, feelings, and concepts with others. This is related to a sense of trust in others and of pleasure in engaging with others, including adults.
7. Cooperativeness. The ability to balance one’s own needs with those of others in group activity.

Daniel Goleman

Emotional Intelligence. Random House LLC, 2006. 358 pages, p.193,194

replacing policy with principles

The curious thing about organizations is that having more people somehow doesn't equal more output. “As size and complexity of an organization increases, productivity of individuals working in that organization tends to decrease,” he says. As headcount grows, so too does the policy-and-paperwork stuff that gets in the way of rapid iteration and scale.

Why is this the case? “I think it comes down to human nature and the way we react to problems,” Curtis says. Our natural response to any problem — from a downed server to a social gaffe — is to try to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. In companies, more often that not, those solutions take the form of new policies. “What happens when you create a new policy, of course, is that you have to fit it into all of your existing rules.” And so begins a web of ever-increasing complexity that's all about prevention. Soon, you start to hit safeguards no matter what it is you're trying to do.

To avoid this type of bureaucracy from the very beginning of your company, you should adopt two particular tactics: “First, you have to build teams with good judgment, because you need to be able to put your trust in people,” Curtis says. “Then you shape that good judgment with strong principles.”

Minimizing rules that become roadblocks in your organization will only work if you’ve built a team that will make good decisions in the absence of rigid structure. Your hiring process is where you can take the biggest strides toward preventing bureaucracy.


Interview with Airbnb VP Engineering Mike Curtis
"Bureaucracy Isn’t Inevitable — Here’s How Airbnb Beat It" First Round Review. 5/18/2015

challenge your certainty

Our beliefs and assumptions are skewed by personal biases and not to be fully trusted. Often they haven't been tested or revised based upon new information. They reflect partial knowledge and are only partially wise. Resist acting instinctively on your beliefs and assumptions, and open your mind to the subject's potential complexity. Before registering your opinion, enter into a state of not knowing. Zen Buddhists call this the "beginner's mind." Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey (Immunity to Change, Harvard Business School Publishing, 2009) would describe this as moving from the "self-authorizing mind" to the "self-transforming mind." 

Once you learn to distrust yourself, it's easier to trust others. The goal isn't to locate the most trustworthy or least fallible individual and hand all decision-making to this person; the goal is to share the load and get everyone to feel ownership in the organization's direction and operations. This doesn't mean that everyone should participate in every decision, but decision-making needs to be more evenly distributed. 

Gary B. Cohen

"Leadership: How to Ask the Right Questions" Bloomberg Business. 9/29/2009

you already have permission

Act: “You Already Have Permission”: This is a challenging guideline for many managers, because it means switching from direct control to a trust relationship with the members of the team. This allows entire teams to change and transform the product and the internal processes in a flexible way, to adapt to different goals and changing markets, and to be overall more innovative and competitive. Removing the worry of “I need to get authorization” from every aspect of the work can be challenging, but it rewards business and people’s health greatly.

This is embraced at multiple levels inside Automattic as a rule. While there is still a long term vision from the top, each person and team is left to decide what’s best for the work that has to be done. The goals of the organizations are collected and discussed, teams set their own roadmap, goals and milestones and individuals can start initiatives on their own...

What is important is to recognize that people will want to give feedback or add their own shape to the idea.

Rawn Shah

"5 Leadership Attitudes From Flat Organizations" Forbes. 11/5/2015

leadership is not a position

Real leadership requires personal influence -- persuasion afforded by a long track record of strong relationships built by trust. That reserve of trust may have been built by any number of things:

• Direct, clear communication without intention to deceive
• Consistency- actions that match your words
• Transparency and openness
• Explanations about goals and decisions
• A private life that matches the public life
• Competence
• Concern and compassion for others
• An upbeat, positive attitude about the future

When others observe these attitudes in a leader, the personal influence compels them to listen with an open mind -- and often to accept the leader's ideas and opinions as their own.

When the personal influence is missing, a positional title often demands little more than a "hearing" -- often met with open skepticism.

Dianna Booher 

"3 Things Leadership Is NOT" Huffington Post. 9/22/15

authenticity

[A]s [Director Baltasar] Kormákur addressed the 3-D goggled audience before the start of the [premier of Everest]... he made it abundantly clear that he “didn’t want to sanitize the people and the events.” Rather, he hoped to “humanize them and make them real.” He went on to explain that he shot in temperatures as low as -22F and at altitudes of 16,000 feet. He said he took the cast and crew as high as any insurance company would allow them to go. He wanted his actors to feel the stress and discomfort that’s associated with being up high, because that was the only way he could make sure that what came across in the final cut did indeed feel authentic.

They filmed a great deal of the movie in Nepal, with the balance filmed in the Dolomites in Italy and on a sound stage. I caught up with actors Michael Kelly and Jason Clarke (separately) after the screening, and talked to them about what it was like to film at altitude in the cold temperatures. They both mentioned how difficult it was to be flown right to the shooting location. They didn’t have time to properly acclimatize and were plagued with the headaches, nausea and insomnia that commonly accompany altitude sickness. Bummer for the actors, but another brilliant Kormákur move as far as “keeping it real,” since Everest climbers deal with these ailments on the mountain.

So, how did Kormákur get his celebrity cast and crew to deal with such uncomfortable conditions on top of an already-grueling shoot schedule? He did what any good leader would do: He went through the hardship with them. In his own words: “I think what’s helpful is that I will stay right there with them, in the same conditions, show them what they need to do…So they are more likely to work with you than if you’re sitting someplace warm and telling them, ‘Keep going.’”

Bingo. It’s important for leaders to show their teams that they’re willing to make the same sacrifices and endure the same hardships as everyone else. As a leader, you can never expect the people on your team to be willing to endure anything that you are not willing to endure. By getting out there with his cast and crew, Kormákur was building trust and loyalty—two incredibly important aspects of high-performing teams. And he needed these actors to perform, because they were re-creating scenes that would require them to withstand some of the most physically challenging conditions they had ever experienced.

Alison Levine

"Here's what you can learn about leadership from 'Everest'" Fortune. 9/20/2015

toxic leadership

[Tony] Fadell’s reputation for being intense, very animated, and prone to raise his voice (not necessarily in anger) spilled over to push the Nest team. Carr wrote, "A meme is floating around the office comparing Fadell's style to that of the Mountain in Game of Thrones, the towering brawler known for beating his opponents to a pulp. But surviving as a startup consumer electronic brand requires just that sort of attitude." Another anecdote reveals: "When one employee failed to live up to his standards, Fadell ordered a manager to fire the employee, saying, "You gotta Glock Glock that dude," as he mimed shooting off a handgun. He was joking, but unapologetic."

All of that fist-banging and hard driving for perfection is supposed to bring out the best in his employees, according to his cofounder Matt Rogers. "But at the same time, he is incredibly caring and passionate about their development," Rogers said.

You can’t develop much of anything under such circumstances, according to workplace experts. As psychologist Paul White notes, toxic leadership may appear successful for a while. "Over the long term, their attitudes and actions catch up with them," he says, "Trust and teamwork deteriorate in their areas; they have a high turnover rate in their department, and they will eventually destroy the health of the organization."

Lindsay McGregor and Neel Doshi, co-authors of Primed to Perform, underscore the importance of total motivation and how it erodes or boosts bottom line results. "In one company we surveyed, salespeople with positive "total motivation" produced 28% more revenue than their more negatively motivated counterparts."

Lydia Dishman

"What's Going On At Nest?" FastCompany. 2/17/2016

availability and openness

Pope Francis is arguably best known for availability and openness to the public. On his first day as Pope, he reversed the tradition of blessing the people by inviting them to bless him instead. He's since decided to ride in a bus with his team rather than in a bulletproof limousine. Pope Francis has also been seen getting around Rome in a Ford Focus and a Fiat during his U.S. visit.

Personal, handwritten thank-you notes and birthday lunch invitations to the homeless of Rome take priority in his schedule and exemplify his leadership vision.

Those who aren't spiritual leaders should also rethink what their most important responsibilities are—people over processes, names over numbers. Accessibility sows trust and loyalty among colleagues and customers, making other transformations possible.


William Vanderbloemen
The 5 Leadership Lessons From Pope Francis. 9/25/2015.

an accessory to fraud

The classic error that outsiders make in Afghanistan is to single out a proxy in whom to repose trust and through whom to interact with most other locals. Over the years of intrusions by outside powers, some Afghans have grown adept at capturing this privileged position and exploiting it to advance and enrich themselves, while dis-empowering (and thus incensing) their neighbors….

In my case I Kandahar, the self-interested intermediary was a balding, dour-faced Karzai retainer named Abdullah, who called himself an engineer, and who President Karzai’s younger half-brother, the late Ahmed Wali, recommended to me in the following terms: “If I put a million dollars in a storeroom and have Abdullah the key, and I came back in ten years, I’d find every penny of that money still locked inside.” I hired the man.

In late 2002 I departed Kandahar for an extended flurry of talks and meetings in the United States. Before leaving Abdullah in charge of the NGO, I walked him through my system for keeping track of petty cash expenditures: marking each outlay on the back of the envelope in which I carried the money, along with the date and the purpose. For an engineer, he seemed to have trouble catching on.

I returned, after several weeks, to find not a single new mark on the back of that now-empty envelope. Not one receipt, not a record of a single purchase, did Abdullah turn over. We were building schoolrooms. He had made deliveries of bricks and sand and gypsum, had paid weekly cash wages, bought the food our cook prepared for our employees…

Swallowing my panic, I demanded receipts. Abdullah went scurrying around to gather some. Sweating, I pieced together forensics that could tell a semi-coherent tale.

Years later another employee recounted Abdullah’s derisive comments about “Western accounting” and “Afghan accounting” – in which I was obviously unversed. I heard painful stories of suppliers who had never been paid. I reconsidered the probable reasons we’d been forced to leave a school building unfinished for lack of funds.

I had, in other words, been an accessory to fraud….

One way Abdullah kept me in thrall was by cultivating fear: by convincing me that Kandaharis were unabashed murderers and thieves. Himself a transplant from near Kabul, he professed a pious horror of the people among whom he was living. They would, he insisted, dismember me in a second were it not for his watchful protection.

A further technique was to keep me from interacting with anyone else face to face, without his presence in the room. Abdullah could get temperamental. Once when I decided to eat lunch with the rest of the staff, instead of separately with him, he threw a violent tantrum, refusing to speak to me for three days. I put it down to jealousy or made excuses for his psychological fragility. How rational would I be after more than two decades of war? Besides, I needed Abdullah. He got things done. What if he were to quit? What would I do?

Sarah Chayes

Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security. W.W.Norton. 2015.

thoughts for managing a creative culture

John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, VES Awards. 2/28/2010

Here are some of the principles we’ve developed over the years to enable and protect a healthy creative culture. I know that when you distill a complex idea into a T-shirt slogan, you risk giving the illusion of understanding – and, in the process, of sapping the idea of its power. An adage worth repeating is also halfway to being irrelevant. You end up with something that is easy to say but not connected to behavior. But while I have been dismissive of reductive truths throughout this book, I do have a point of view, and I thought it might be helpful to share some of the principles that I hold most dear here with you. The trick is to think of each statement as a starting point, as a prompt toward deeper inquiry, and not as a conclusion.

• Give good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. If you get the right team right, chances are that they’ll get the ideas right.
• When looking to hire people, give their potential to grow more weight

make room for what they do not know

I believe the best managers acknowledge and make room for what they do not know – not just because humility is a virtue but because until one adopts that mindset, the most striking breakthroughs cannot occur. I believe that managers must loosen the controls, not tighten them. They must accept risk; they must trust the people they work with and strive to clear the path for them; and always, they must pay attention to and engage with anything that creates fear. Moreover, successful leaders embrace the reality that their models may be wrong or incomplete. Only when we admit what we don’t know can we ever hope to learn it.

Ed Catmull

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. Random House 2014.

knowing when to end debate

There's an art to knowing when to end debate and make a decision. Many leaders are reluctant to make the final call when there are good arguments and a lot of emotions on both sides. We intuitively want the team to come to the right decision on their own. But I’ve found that people are enormously relieved when they hear that you’re grabbing the baton and accepting responsibility for a decision. Using the “CEO prerogative” — to make the final call — isn’t something you ought to need every day. As long as you do it sparingly, you can actually make your employees more comfortable, and engender more trust by pulling the trigger, logically explaining your choice and sticking with it.

Dave Girouard

"Speed as a Habit." First Round Review. 7/21/2015

“reflect credit” and “absorb blame"

Irv Grousbeck, a legendary Stanford professor of management, encourages would-be entrepreneurs to “reflect credit” and “absorb blame.”

People are smart. They spot phonies. Managers who step into the klieg lights when things go well — and duck behind the curtains when they don’t — are risking their employees’ trust, and asking for politics.

Joel Peterson, Professor of Management at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

In A Great Business, People Trump Things. Forbes Magazine. 10/17/2012

one-on-one

Several years ago my wife, Margie, was working with a fast-food chain and learned its turnover rate was substantially lower than the national average. She asked the manager what he was doing to keep the rate so low. At first, he said he didn’t think he was doing anything special, but further discussion revealed the answer: This manager made sure to take at least 10 minutes every week to talk to each employee. These conversations weren’t necessarily about job performance; they were just a conversation to check in with each employee to see how things were going.

After learning this, Margie talked to some of the staff. When she asked why they stayed, they all mentioned their manager and said they liked working for someone who cared about them... He made time for them, which in turn made them feel they were a respected part of the team.

Margie was so enthusiastic about this concept that she shared it with our leadership team and went on to develop a “one-on-one meetings” process. This process requires managers to meet one-on-one with each of their direct reports for 15 to 30 minutes at least every two weeks. These meetings are not to talk about performance or report on progress — they are meant to enhance the relationship between the manager and the employee.

The leader schedules the meeting, but the employee sets the agenda. It’s a chance to talk about anything: goals, share personal information, learn more about the company or ask for help to solve a problem. These kinds of conversations allow managers and employees to get to know each other as human beings.

We’ve found that when employees are not only allowed but also encouraged to talk with managers about their everyday lives — the good and the bad — relationships flourish and reach a new level of trust. Trusted working relationships improve performance at all levels.

As a leader, you might think you don’t have time to add more meetings, but you can’t afford not to take time for your people. If you have 10 direct reports and can’t find an additional few hours to mentor and develop them, leadership might not be the right role for you. One-on-one meetings are a significant way for leaders to demonstrate they care. Time in team meetings doesn’t count. Only one-on-one interactions deepen relationships, create loyalty and build partnerships.

Spending dedicated time lets employees know their work is important and that they are valued members of the team. These conversations are the foundation for strong, productive relationships that align people with each other and with the work of the organization in a satisfying, meaningful way. 

Ken Blanchard

"We Need to Talk." Chief Learning Officer. March 2014