The Art of Project

A New Manager’s Journey

by Leave a Comment

My review of the book “The Making Of A Manager”

Years ago, when I became a manager for the first time, I thought I was ready to take on the role. Reality proved otherwise. Despite strong performance in earlier roles, I felt unprepared to take on various assignments of a manager: playing a coach at work, aligning humans who like to do their own thing on their own time, managing budgets when we must do more with less resources, refining goals when customers demand agility and evolution, failing at things you are expected to perform well – and still making it. I have developed a deep appreciation for what a manager accomplishes every day at work.

So this has been an interesting time in my career to be reading a book I would have loved to get my hands on fifteen years ago. “I never thought managing was easy. I still don’t,” says Julie Zhuo, a former executive at Facebook, and the author of “The Making of a Manager”. I can relate. With years of management experience and responsibility for a team of five hundred persons, I still have moments of self-doubt and anxiety.

Zhuo starts the book with the assertion that great managers are made, not born, grounding her readers in the notion that management is a set of skills, no matter what you have been told before. Just like other professional skills, you and I can learn to be great at management. Zhuo confesses that she did not know what she was doing in the first week at her job as a manager. Her story also gives us an insider view of a tech startup: making decisions in a new industry, growing employees, and succeeding despite obstacles. The author lays out the attitudes you need to be a good manager: you like working through other people, prefer getting to outcome rather that doing things yourself, and tackle problems in the spirit of growth for your team. A right frame of mind for a manager is to believe that a group of people working together can product better outcome that one person doing it alone. In her book, Zhuo tells us the steps to get to the goal of being a good manager.

As a manager, I divide the tasks I do in two broad categories – setting up a system for success and then running the system. Collaborating with a team to decide on a strategy is an example of setting up, monitoring a project to ensure things are done on time is an example of running; Hiring the rightly skilled team members is setting up, stepping in to provide feedback to someone is running. You get the idea. I came up with the “set up and run” metaphor because I think like an engineer. If you run a machine without setting it up right, it is not going to run efficiently; you will end up with a sub-optimal outcome. The framework of set up and run is simple, and it works. I read the book with my set up and run lens, and it delivers: the steps described will help a manager do both.

Zhuo takes the reader through her own managerial journey, sharing her learnings along the way with research-based ideas sprinkled in. Chapters are well organized with a special emphasis on feedback, something most of us can improve on. The skill of receiving and giving feedback has become critical as the professional work has become more collaborative. The author defines Management in her own words: a manager’s job is to get better outcomes from a group of people coming together. If you don’t like talking with people, you will likely not be happy in a management job, says Zhuo. I agree. She asks you if you can provide stability for emotional, challenging situations; If you can, you would make a good manager.  

Many stories from the author’s career hit home for me. One of them is early in the book. Zhuo writes about a day when she brought her designers together and presented an idea to them, to solve a problem. “none of the designers were sold on my idea”, says Zhuo. Any new manager has had a moment like this where you thought you have the solution, and your team is there to implement it. Won’t it be better if present a problem and let the team create a solution? If only I knew that fifteen years ago.

The “the first 3 months” chapter is for a new manager to get the set-up work right. It reads like the framework in the First 90 days book (Watkins, 2003) calling for four different approaches to fit different company situations a manager finds after starting his job. Zhuo calls her approaches apprentice, pioneer, new boss, and successor. While advising us to be human and increase the likelihood of trust, she keeps going back to being a people leader first. Zhuo suggests treating a direct report with respect and as a whole person rather than for what she does for you. It is refreshing to read the pronouns “she” and “hers” for her coworkers; most management book authors refer to coworkers as “he” exceedingly. The author supports vulnerability (made popular as a leadership practice by Brene Brown) and strength-based management (Rath, 2007). Zhuo says there is one type of person you should not tolerate on your team; her story reminded me of the “no asshole rule” (Sutton, 2007). Zhuo also tackles the subject of firing; she mentions letting people go gracefully – advice even seasoned managers can benefit from.

Feedback works well if it is task based and specific. Zhuo advises giving feedback on time, during a project, not just during performance reviews. The advice Reminded me of an old Jim Rohn cliche, “inspect after a reasonable time, not too soon or too early.” Managers are reminded to set clear expectations for their directs, clarifying what success looks and feels like. Reflecting on my own behavior at work, I clarify what success looks like but don’t think enough about what success feels like – something for me to add to my skills. “you are not giving feedback often enough” is a good reminder for most of us. Deliver bad feedback in a spirit of collaboration, she says, hearing the other side as well. I can validate some of Zhuo’s advice from my own experience: “I would like to understand what happened” works much better than “you messed up”.

“Amazing Meetings” is a useful chapter for managers, new and experienced. Zhuo reminds us that some meetings don’t need you and some don’t need to exist at all. The advice in this chapter is easy to talk about and difficult to practice: be clear about what you want from the meeting, include the right people, and give people chance to come prepared. Most managers will understand the importance of managing norms, airtime, and feedback during a meeting. She writes about protecting your time like a dragon guards a treasure trash. 

There is a chapter on hiring, an indispensable skill for a manger. Zhuo advises readers to get multiple interviewers involved. I have found this to be an effective practice in my own experience as an interviewer and interviewee, despite not so kind words from some experts (Beshara, 2005). Zhuo tells us to hire people who can do more than you need right now. She also reminds us to invest more time to do research when hiring leaders; a leader can have an enormous impact on an organization, for years to come.  Hiring is an opportunity to build the future of the organization and not just solve a short-term problem is a sage advice to remember.

In the “managing yourself” chapter, Zhuo mentions fixed and growth mindset, made popular by Carol Dweck and practiced at many business organizations (Dweck, 2006). Discussions on the inner critic and imposter syndrome resonated with me. She reminds managers to keep growing themselves while they take care of the team, organization, and the boss. Zhuo shares her own story where she did not ask her manager for help when she was struggling. I can relate. I do that because I think if I ask for help, I have failed in my job and demonstrate that I am weak. What a wasted opportunity to improve? Asking your boss something like “how do you decide which meetings to attend?” will give you one more tool in your toolbox and will also help you understand how your number one customer, i.e. your supervisor, thinks. Every manager I have known struggles in a newly assigned job or a new project you just received. It’s normal to feel like an imposter and ask for support.  Asking questions of all the people, aka unstructured mentoring, and setting reflection time aside are examples of tips given.

I was delighted to see a chapter called “making things happen”; it’s the reason we are called on to take the job of a manager.  The chapter will be most helpful to a manager who is not a beginner but still finds it challenging to accomplish the desired outcomes. Start with a bold and concrete vision, says Zhuo, and I vehemently agree. I have worked with managers who don’t start with a vision; it is absolutely mind numbing for me every time I experience it. If you are a manager, pleaser mark my words: if you don’t set the vision for your team, nobody else will. In the spirit of making the vision clear to your team, Zhuo gives the example of Herbert Hoover’s campaign slogan, “a chicken in every pot.”

Translating a clear vision into a playbook the team members can work from, using a portfolio approach for multiple tasks, and continuously refining processes to fit the evolving needs – are true and tried methods, and they work. The discipline of Process Improvement finds its place in the book with a 1.0 and 2.0 moniker, taken from the tech industry’s versioning of their products.  Zhuo reminds us to define who is responsible for what, something a project manager can relate to. Execution is more important than strategy, a lesson worth repeating. Managers are asked to decide without clamoring for complete information, balancing the short-term and long-term objectives. To build a good organizational culture, she asks managers to walk the walk. There is a good discussion about incentives, something you would know if you had an MBA and learned the basics of organizational leadership.

Organizing is an indispensable skill for a manager and Zhuo demonstrates a good organization of the content of the book. A manager’s job is never just her job, it is orchestrated by many humans working together under her leadership, in unison. The book editor seems to have done well, and so has the visual graphic artist – the expectations and reality cartoons in the beginning of a chapter stay with you, even after the book is gone from your view. I love to hear from managers working in trenches, i.e. boots on the ground, as one of my manager friends, Lee, calls it; Zhuo delights her readers with her version of the trenches. More practitioners should take time to write about their experience; their writing creates a reality-based blueprint for professionals embarking on the journey of being a manager.

Zhuo is frank about her struggles on the manager’s journey and brings a fresh perspective by discussing her performance anxiety – something we tend to discourage at work. She is comfortable enough sharing her own cultural metaphor of a dragon to explain the concept of using time wisely. It gives managers in a globalized world a model – to use their own metaphors to communicate, and not be pressured into using the popular ones from, say, American Football.

While Zhuo’s personal stories make the book relatable, it’s the action items where the book proves worthy of your time, e.g.  scheduling an hour to think about what you are satisfied with and what you are taking away for the next week, and then jotting down an email to your team, is a practical way to make reflection a habit. “thoughts from the last week” and “goals for the next six months” are good practices worth adopting.  Zhuo recommends taking time from your schedule to attend formal training, say, for 10 hours, because the return can be high measured in terms of your improved performance, saving more than 20 hours in a year for you.  

Zhuo ends the book with thoughts of humility: “journey is 1% finished”, she says. This is a reminder, for all of us practicing the art of management, that the work of a manager is a lot more process and a lot less product – something I am getting around to, after a long career as a manager.

Works Cited

Beshara, T. (2005). The Job Search Solution. AMACOM/American Management Association.

Dweck, C. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.

Rath, T. (2007). StrengthsFinder 2.0. Gallup Press.

Sutton, R. (2007). The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t. Business Plus.

Watkins, M. (2003). The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels. Harvard Business School Press.

How I stopped worrying about work (Almost)…

by Leave a Comment

That Pale Blue Dot is our planet, all of it. Courtesy: NASA

Worrying about work seems to be universal and turns out very human. If you are a business leader, you have likely worried about your work: whether it’s about losing a customer, giving up on a project, or forfeiting a loan. I have discussed my work-related worries with friends, including many of you. I worry about work because of the causes you can relate to: wanting information, lacking confidence in others’ abilities, dabbling in worry that floats in our culture, and perceiving threats that are unreal. Once I was clear about the causes, I went about addressing them.

Addressing lack of information.

So, how do I address the lack of information? I build appropriate structures (and processes) to exchange information. An appropriate structure is a manager’s friend; a good structure can help us solve a problem not only for now, but also for the foreseeable future. What about adding a repository where anyone on the team can submit information in multiple formats – a text file, an audio, or an email? I noticed that my clients preferred different methods of giving information; I made it easy for all of them to share information about their business. These days, collaboration apps like Slack have “channels” where I can exchange information. The structures I build also helps me collaborate with my stakeholders, not just get information from them.

I collect more data proactively, even before I start a project, using informal and formal channels of communication. I have noticed that some managers wait for information to come to them; I don’t. I create structures early so the information flows to me and from me to others. What kind of structure can you create? What about adding a task in your plan to list all the stakeholders and reaching out to them in advance? Marketers use survey design to collect information about their customers, for example. Sending surveys to stakeholders across the globe has proven to be a good way to understand what they need, to help me determine what I need to do to cater to their needs.

Have you experienced a business situation where you visit a client to show her your final product, and something seemed amiss, as if the world changed since the last meeting with the client? I have. The situation occurs because a professional, i.e. I, fails to keep up with the evolving world their client works in. To understand a client’s changing needs, I have built in a specific question (or something similar) on my meeting agenda to understand what has changed since the last time I talked with her. Every time I meet a client, I ask: “Here is what I know from our last meeting; what has changed?”. I embed myself within a client’s team if feasible; I enjoy learning about her business and keeping myself up to date. If I cannot embed myself within a client’s business, I set up quick periodic information exchange calls. I also work with an agile communication approach. An agile approach allows me to look for and bring in information on an ongoing basis. This way, I create a dynamic information exchange and not a static one.

With the appropriate structures in place, is it practical to have all the information before making a decision? No, it’s not. Most managers must make decisions with less than 100% of information, because the time is ripe to make the decision. With more experience in management, I have developed more comfort with ambiguity. I remind myself that I can evolve with more information and can adapt my decisions to the unfolding realities. What has really helped me increase my comfort with ambiguity is adopting a discovery mindset (what if something fun comes out of it) instead of the anxiety mindset (what if I am missing out on something? Should I be worried?).

Addressing my lack of confidence in others’ abilities.

My worrying also come from being unsure that people will do the work assigned to them. So, how do I increase the likelihood of people succeeding in what they need to accomplish, and in turn increasing my confidence in them? I give team members as much as clarity about their task as possible. I tell them “why” they are being asked to do the assigned tasks; I communicate the purpose of their tasks. That means, they know what their task will do in the big scheme of things, to help the bigger goal of the organization. I get their buy-in early on. I listen to people’s concerns, understand them well, and address them as quickly as I’m able. I make “space” to listen to others on the team, literally and figuratively. In a communication training program I attended a long time ago, I learned about the WIIFM (what is in it for me – those were FM channel days) channel metaphor. The WIIFM reminds me to tune in to what a coworker is saying, through her words, emotions, and aspirations. I learn what motivates all the people on my team and incorporate the sources of motivations while working with them; some people want more flexibility in their work schedule, some put their family first, and some want public recognition.

In situations where team members do not directly report to me, I collaborate with their supervisors, ensuring that the supervisors and I are aligned on what tasks the project team members are supposed to do. This alignment ensures that their supervisors are not giving conflicting directions to the team members working on my project.

I also manage myself, in terms of expectations I have of other people. Are my expectations becoming my reality, as the famous Pygmalion effect, aka expectancy theory by Rosenthal and Jacobson (Kierein & Gold, 2000) would suggest? I remind myself that when I expect team members to be great performers, they grow with me to become great performers.

Addressing the floating worries.

There is a kind of worry that floats in our culture. Turn on a news channel; you will find reporters telling you things are bad and people are worried. Reporters have been trained to look for troubling stories: layoffs, murders, robberies, and terrorist attacks. Those stories hook our attention and keep us glued to the screens. Just because they keep me glued to the screens does not mean they are good for my health. When I spend hours reading and watching news, my brain receives a biased view of the world – one where things are always falling apart. The way to ensure I perceive the world completely is to take in all points of view, not just the biased troubling ones.

So, I went on a news diet. I started tracking how much time I was spending on the news media. I was consuming news three hours a day: driving to work, browsing the wall street journal, watching evening news on TV, and reading news on the internet. I noticed that most of the news articles were sensational and written for publicity. They were not helping me become a great leader or grow my industry knowledge. I decided to curtail the time spent on news to 45 minutes a day. If I find an article that is useful for my career, I make a note of that so I can block time later to read that, say, on the weekend. Also, since most of the news is bad, i.e., murder, layoffs, death, I decided to proactively look for good news. It is refreshing to know that there are good things happening in the world, and not all humans are exploiting each other. Now, I decide what to consume when it comes to the media; the media companies don’t.

Do you ever use social media sites on your phone? I did and was addicted to it. The only way to gain my sanity back was to put a distance between the social media apps and me. I removed Facebook from my phone. I visit LinkedIn for professional networking but do so in a planned manner, rationing my time. I also decided to avoid water cooler chatter that is demoralizing; even there, I have a choice to engage with people who are moving us forward. Now, I keep a water bottle at my desk so I can hydrate without adding gossip to my diet. I spend more time with professionals who are forward looking and growing in their abilities, and less with friends who indulge in rumors.  

Addressing threats that are unreal.

Years ago, as a college student studying Engineering Drawing, I learned to draw Perspective. You draw Perspective by looking at a structure with a different lens and from a different angle (vs. the angle to draw vertical and horizonal view). The fundamentals of Engineering Drawing stayed with me, years after I studied the subject.

When I use a wider angle while looking through the lens, it’s sort of zooming out. A famous example of this type of perspective is a picture of earth taken from the galaxy far away. It shows earth, the planet where you and I work, as a tiny yellow dot among galaxies, among big scheme of things (NASA, 2019). The project task I worry about is also a tiny dot in the bigger scheme of doing business for my organization. My task is important but also happens to exist in relationship to everything else, along with everything else.

I will explain what I do when engulfed in worries, in terms of Perspective Drawing. I imagine putting on a lens with a wider angle and taking in the perspective view. It allows me to see what my worry really is – a tiny dot in the big scheme of things. I take a step back and get perspective; I see what I didn’t see before – a bigger picture. When I’m worried and anxious, I tend to zoom in to a tree so much that I forget that there is a forest to consider. If I am worried that my boss is going to fire me because she doesn’t like the quality of my presentation, Perspective allows me to see that my boss judges most of tasks I do favorably, and yet happens to dislike one presentation I’m doing in the moment. Getting Perspective allows me to view the moment differently. Once I observe that view, I can do something to address the presentation: asking questions and getting feedback.

Along with Perspective, what has helped me most in my quest to manage worries, resulting from unreal threats, is also one of the oldest arts humans have practiced: Meditation (and the mindfulness that come with it). I didn’t know how impactful meditation can be before I started doing it. Practicing meditation has given me a balanced work life, better health, and above all – sanity. Just a few minutes of daily meditation practice gets me centered and keeps me there all day. When I started practicing meditation, I was skeptical. But just like everything new I embark on, I decided to test it. I said to myself, “let’s do it for a month; we’ll see what happens. If it doesn’t work out, we can stop it.” Just after one month of practicing meditation for a few minutes a day, I noticed that I was calmer. I experienced lower stress level at work and avoided frustrations.

“Fighting fire” is the word managers use to describe a difficult working day, full of problems popping up everywhere they look. When I am fighting fire, I feel like I am in it – engulfed, stressed, worried. Mindfulness allows me to step away from the fire, look at it, acknowledge it, name it, and then pause. During the pause, I can use my thinking to create a strategy to manage the fire.

I felt like I had lost a skill I had as a child; mindfulness helped me get it back. The more responsibilities I took at work, the more beneficial the mindfulness practice became; I started by leading a team of three persons and now lead a team of more than five hundred persons. Mindfulness allows me to stay engaged, solve problems, and lead people when things don’t seem to go our way. Practicing mindfulness has also taught me to be gentle on myself. When I don’t do something well and feel inadequate, I don’t beat myself up anymore. I remind myself that it it’s human to feel inadequate, to doubt myself, and to have that inner critic who compares me to perfection.

I am not alone in believing in the power of mindfulness. There is a body of research explaining the positive impact from practicing regular mindfulness. Professor John Ullman from UCLA speaks of several benefits from mindfulness, i.e., reduction of anxiety, stress, depression, and accidents (Ullmen, 2016). At work, mindfulness practice gives us following benefits: stronger focus, staying calmer under stress, better memory, and good corporate citizenship (Goleman, 2017). Mindfulness can help us live rich life, in that moment and every moment.

Worrying about work is as human as working itself. You and I do it, sometimes ruminating over and over. Structures and Mindfulness seem simple to practice, and yet they can have profound implications for us. Hope you will practice them to your advantage and tell me about your experience.

Why do I worry about work?

by Leave a Comment

Worry knot. Made of four ropes coming together. Four causes of my worries

Do you ever worry about work? I do. I worry about work, even after leaving the workplace: in the evening at the dinner table, at night watching TV, even right before I am about to go to work. I used to worry about work a lot more than I do now. I would get anxious and wake up in the middle of the night, looking at the ceiling — lying in bed thinking about that next project going south.

I wanted to understand why I worry about work so much. As an Engineer, I live by this motto: when we understand the cause of a problem, we can solve the problem. So, I went on a quest, researching the causes of my worries, thinking about my thinking, and observing my own behavior.

Turns out, I worry about work for reasons you can relate to: wanting information, lacking confidence in others’ abilities, dabbling in worry that floats in our culture, and perceiving threats that are unreal.

Wanting Information

I worry about a project because I don’t have all the information about the project. My coworkers and I spend plenty of time crafting a vision, like many organizations do; maybe yours is one of them.  It seems like we don’t spend enough time delineating the steps to make the vision a reality. I know the goal post but not how to get to it. Without knowing how, I cannot come up with tasks and assign the tasks to the right coworkers. What else can happen if I am missing information?

We don’t bring enough people into discussions. Say, you and I are working on a product and we forgot to bring the market research leaders in discussions. Can you imagine the product we’ll end up creating? Likely the one with unknown market demand. This situation is a recipe for a product that customers don’t want to buy; a product that will create unhappy customers. Unhappy customers are bad for business – yours and mine.

Missing information also means incomplete allocation of resources. Poor information results in wrong people assigned to the task. Imagine assigning the finance professionals to a task appropriate for a manufacturing team. Not starting on the right path here, are we? Sub-optimal information leads to insufficient tools to get the job done. Failing to acquire sufficient tools means I am preparing to fail to get to the goal post.

Here is one more casualty resulting from incomplete information. I know that there are gaps in the business plan, I just don’t know what the gaps exactly are. “what is missing”, I ask myself day in and day out. What is missing causes me worry. An incomplete plan leads to frustration filled workdays, eventually causing low morale.

Lacking confidence in others’ abilities

Another reason I worry is my lack of confidence in other peoples’ abilities to perform a task. I bring different people from different areas together, seek alignment, agree on shared goals, and execute tasks through others. I wonder if others will complete their tasks in time. in the past, I experienced working with team members who did not finish their tasks on time; the entire team suffered because of their inability to get things done on time. We had a training program for operational work, but not for the project work. We could neither find experienced workers nor had the money to train the inexperienced ones. I worry that something like that will happen again on my projects.

Like most cross functional leaders, I depend on others, including the people who don’t report to me, to get my projects done. I lack direct authority over coworkers who don’t report to me. I fear that they already have too much to do, in addition to the tasks from my project. Also, I have no control over how they allocate their worktime. That means I must influence them without authority. What if I fail to influence them?  What if the project tasks conflict with what their immediate supervisors require them to do? I am naïve to think that they will work on my project and not on the one assigned by their supervisor; there is no motivation for them to do so.

Dabbling in worry that floats in our culture

Here is yet another reason I worry: a culture of worry, around all of us, breeds worry. News of layoffs and shuttering businesses dominates headlines in the news media. All you have to do is to browse business news headlines and you will know what I’m talking about. Have we become a world of news-fed anxious professionals? Coworkers running around in the office building, anxious about missing targets, abound. Water cooler conversations are full of negative doomsday scenarios and overblown issues. Even if I don’t participate in those conversations and just listen passively, I feel like I’m adopting my coworkers’ worries.

Even small issues get blown up for attention in workplaces. If a customer is unhappy, we act as if the sky is falling. Colleagues anxiously describe the worst possible outcome instead of solving the real problem the customer is complaining about. Is seems like we are all competing for the game of “who can worry more?”

Perceiving threats that are unreal

I also worry about work because I perceive threats that are not real. Have you heard of Murphy’s law? It goes something like this: “if something can go wrong, it will”.  Now, the Murphy’s law is not an absolute truth but sometimes my brain takes it as the truth.  

Imagine a beautiful, sunny morning. I am driving to a client site to make an important presentation. My brain tells me that my client will be disappointed in me because my presentation will be bad. My client will then fire me. If my client fires me, I cannot afford to live because my salary will be gone. I will fail as a professional, as a spouse, as a family man, as a human being.

What if the next client presentation is not scheduled anytime soon? I am just working in my office, on a project for my boss. Suppose I’m about to meet my boss to report the progress on the project. And a thought bubbles up in my head, “… my boss is going to dislike my work.” And then other thoughts, equally discouraging ones, emerge: “This is my first time doing something so complex and I will fail doing this project. What if my boss dislikes my work so much that she fires me?”

Are these threats real? Absolutely not. On multiple occasions, I started something novel at work and succeeded in doing so. But, of course, my brain conjures the worst-case scenario and then goes on to tell me the subsequent worst-case scenarios. I feel overwhelmed — my brain is spinning in a feedback loop, feeding worry with more worries. First it invents small worry-filled futuristic scenario and then, assuming the first worry is real, invents more worrisome scenarios. The brain does not stop here; it spins even faster, bringing in additional worrying scenarios. I conjure up big perceived issues from small real issues. For example, if this project fails, I’ll have no future prospects: no career, no life.

As you can see, I am using my brain’s ability to plan and live in the future — to imagine a lopsided, worry filled future. Mental and physical symptoms follow with the feeling of worries. These perceived threats can come from many sources and invoke a fight and flight response from my brain. The fight or flight is the mechanism that our brain activates to prepare us to react to a real, or perceived danger (Cleveland Clinic, 2019). When we perceive danger, our brain goes into survival mode, trying to keep us alive. It releases hormones, increases the heart rate and blood supply to muscles in case we need to make a run, and even shuts down some cognitive functions (Bynum, 2013). Of all the causes I uncovered, this one seems to be the most widespread and also, dare I say, the most human.

Once I understood the main reasons behind my worries, I felt clarity. The clarity that comes from awareness. I felt prepared to solve, or at least mitigate, the problem.

References

Bynum, W. (2013, April 26). What Sets Your Heart Pounding; Adrenaline plays a role in a wide range of our bodies’ functions beyond the fight-or-flight response. Retrieved from Wall Street Journal (Online): https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323741004578414633777951680

Cleveland Clinic. (2019, December 9). What Happens to Your Body During the Fight or Flight Response? Your survival response explained. Retrieved from Cleveland Clinic. Brain & Spine: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-happens-to-your-body-during-the-fight-or-flight-response/

Benefits of Inclusive Leadership

by Leave a Comment

Recently I went to my physical therapist, Dr. Patel. I was suffering from pain in my knee and back. Dr. Patel analyzed my body movements for a while and then explained to me how I can heal my pain without drugs. His method was simple to understand and graceful to execute. His strategy, that I finally implemented to manage my pain, was to work multiple muscles in unison, in a coordinated manner — to lower the load on my knee and back muscles. Turns out not all my muscles were doing the work to move my body in a coordinated manner. The knee and back muscles were doing more than their fair share of work, resulting in the pain. Dr. Patel taught me a few personalized exercises to “recruit” multiple muscles. We included the glutes, the quadriceps, the hamstrings, even my arms, to move my body. Once all the individual muscles worked in unison, the work of walking became efficient, engaging, and graceful. My body healed.

The physical therapy not only healed the pain but also taught me a lesson that I apply to my day to day leadership in business. When I am running a business, I need to recruit different team members and create an environment that enables them to work in unison – this is the essence of inclusive leadership. All of us are valued for our unique strengths, irrespective of our backgrounds. It takes all the team members working together to make progress on a project, just like it takes all the muscles to efficiently move our body.

In an inclusive culture, all the team members are valued, and in turn feel engaged. You, the team leader, stand to gain immensely by practicing inclusive leadership skills. You would retain team members longer, improve team productivity, and might even build a better product.

Why do I say that the team members will stay longer (than the average length of time a worker stays with a leader) with an inclusive leader? Because they will love working where they are respected for their expertise. Have you worked for a boss who did not listen to your ideas to solve a problem while the problem kept getting worse? I have. We all want respect and recognition for what we bring to the table. When your team members are respected and feel engaged at work, they are less likely to look for other opportunities elsewhere. That means they will stay with you longer. That also means you don’t have to spend time and money to hire and train new employees. Recruiting a new team member can cost thousands of dollars ($4129, according to the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM.org)). As a business leader, you are responsible for using money wisely and efficiently. Practicing inclusive leadership is a win-win solution for you, the team member, and your organization. What is not to like? 

So, how can you Improve productivity through inclusive leadership? By enabling every team member with their unique strengths to connect and coordinate well. Imagine everybody Pitching in – John, Maria, Vishnu, Jose and Lashawn. They will not only bring their strengths but also compensate for each other’s weaknesses. Your team will increase the chances to cover their individual blind spots. As the team leader, you will increase the quality by decreasing the blind spots: this is really the name of the game. The overall errors go down and the team productivity goes up.

There is a side benefit. You also grow as a communicator, increasing your ability to communicate to different team members. I will cite my own experience. I am an engineering and business management professional. It’s easy for me to communicate to the engineers and business professionals – I am on my own turf. I must work harder to explain myself to people who tend to have different communication style, say, someone from social sciences. But doing so helps me grow as a communicator. This growth prepares me for more complex leadership assignments.

An inclusive leader also enables her team to build great products for her customers. Let’s say you are a manager of a team that is building a medical device product for new mothers. The product also comes with a service component. To be successful in building a product that works, the team needs different perspectives – of a mother, of a doctor, of a nurse, of a buyer, of a health insurance firm etc. To be good in all aspects of business, you need a team that is diverse, works well together, and creates great products. Do you want to end up with a device that looks good but does not work mechanically? Your customer does not. I am sure you don’t either. We all want a product that functions well, looks good, and works till the end of its shelf-life.

Not only my experience tells me that inclusive leadership creates a win-win experience for you and your team, but research also supports these benefits. A team with an inclusive leader is 20% more likely to say that they make high quality decisions and 17% more likely to report that they are high performing (Espedido, 2019).

Some of you might be thinking it is a lot of work to practice inclusive leadership. I agree. It is a lot of upfront work. But that is true about anything worthwhile you do as a leader – to set your team up for success, to craft and communicate the vision, to course correct early when the team is not moving in the right direction. You might also think that practicing inclusive leadership is not necessary. Of course, it’s not. It is also not necessary for you to future proof your leadership career. If your current leadership role is the last one in your career, you can totally ignore my advice. But if you want to be a leader who is ready to take on increasingly rewarding assignments in the future, you should practice inclusive leadership. The world is getting more diverse, your customer base is getting more diverse; being an inclusive leadership practitioner will prepare you to take on the leadership challenges of the future and keep on growing. I am here to nudge you, to prepare for that future.

To me, it just makes sense to practice inclusive leadership – for you, your team, and the market.  It’s not easy to be an inclusive leader who creates an engaging environment. But when you create that kind of environment, the rewards are well worth the investment of your effort. When you do so, you win, your organization wins, and we all win – by bringing our best selves to work.

References

Espedido, A. a. (2019, March). Why Inclusive Leaders Are Good for Organizations, and How to Become One.

SHRM.org. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.shrm.org/about-shrm/press-room/press-releases/pages/human-capital-benchmarking-report.aspx

Leadership: the most important skills to invest in

by Leave a Comment

“The most important investment is the investment in yourself”

– Warren Buffet, Investor

Buffet is calling what you and I put into learning (and growing ourselves) “investing”, a term only an astute investor like him can coin. He is also assuring the learners that there is a return on that investment – the best one, in fact. Business managers like you and I will do well to heed his advice.

Imagine a workplace where you are given the training money to invest in yourself. The HR department does not control the training budget, your boss does not control it. You do. You get to decide which training classes you go to, which seminars you attend, and which books you read. Let’s also assume that you get to choose between two broad sets of skills to invest in – 1. leadership skills, sometimes referred to as soft skills, and 2. technical skills, also called hard skills.

As a business management professional, who believes in developing yourself, you should first invest in improving your leadership skills. Investing in growing your leadership skills will help you to do more with less, advance in your career, and earn more money.

Do More With Less

Let’s say you get better at your work and increase your individual productivity. Yes, go ahead and deploy all those productivity boosting methods, e.g. GTD (getting things done), Pomodoro Technique etc. How much can you increase it?  I would argue that you can increase it significantly, say, by 50%. That means, you can write 1.5 times the code you write now, or you can create 1.5 times the ledger entries you create now. A 50% increase in your personal productivity is good; some of you can exceed that. There is a limit to how much you can get done though.

When you grow your leadership skills and become an effective leader, there is virtually no limit to what you can accomplish. As a leader, you can motivate your team to get a lot of work done. Let’s say, you become an excellent leader and direct a team of 20 persons to achieve a goal. If these 20 persons are 10% more productive because they are more motivated, you could get at least 200% more done[1], i. e., literally 4 times the outcome of your most productive self above. 

Not only it’s a matter of simple math like I demonstrated above, it’s visible in front of us every day at work: leaders practicing leadership skills to organize, inspire and direct a team to accomplish more tasks than one person doing it alone. There is a reason this practice is so ubiquitous in organizations – it works. I am grateful to have led diverse team members, implementing more complex projects than what I did working alone.

Leadership skills can “accelerate” the effectiveness of your technical skills. Do you cook for a living? You can build a team, teach and lead them, and produce a lot more cooked food.

Increase Your Potential for Advancement

Are you interested in self-growth? I am. If I am better than my last year’s version, I am happy.

Year ago, I was a technical professional interested in a people leader role. I was becoming better at my technical programming and analysis career, but was not getting close to a leadership role. Fortunately, multiple mentors helped me “see” the value of investing in leadership skills. After developing my ability to build relationship skills and influence stakeholders, a.k.a. leadership skills, I attracted an opportunity to serve as a people leader. Since that first leadership role, I have had many more leadership assignments. If I can do it, any business professional can do it.  I increased my self-worth and value to the marketplace by developing and practicing leadership skills.

If you work for an employer, i.e. you sell your services to just one client, you can increase your options for advancement by investing in yourself and growing as a leader. Even if you sell your services to many prospects and work on a contract basis with multiple clients, developing leadership skills will allow you to sell your services to more prospects. Author and Consultant David Maister argues in his acclaimed book The Trusted Advisor that for a consultant, the key to professional success is the ability to earn the trust and confidence of clients not just the technical mastery of one’s discipline.

Leadership skills matter even for growing into a senior role without a formal leadership title. If we are going to advance you from a junior scientist to a senior expert scientist at a drug company, we would rather have the you who can collaborate with the review board, the grant owners, the product developers and the quality managers, not the you who can only work alone.

Earn higher rewards

Early in my managerial career, I started looking at senior business leaders and noticed that they earned a lot more than I did. According to salary.com data, a senior level manager can earn 2.5 times more than a junior manager. When I looked at the senior leaders I knew and interacted with, I could not find one with more technical skills than a junior manager like me. But when I observed their leadership skills in action, something became quite obvious to me: they were operating at a very proficient level in those skills and behaviors. To become eligible for those senior level roles, you will need leadership skills – even in highly technical fields like Accounting [2].

Some might argue that you should not invest your resources in developing your leadership skills. If you take that advice though, you will be putting a limit on what you can get done in your career (and life, I would argue) and the value you can create for yourself, your clients, and the marketplace. Our collective work life is much fulfilling when you can inspire others to work as a team and achieve great things together. It might make sense for someone starting in a new career to devote time to learning technical hard skills; they need a job to start their career. For most of us who want to grow their career, the leadership skills are the first set of skills to invest in.

[1] In the least improvement scenario, the productivity boost will be 20×10 = 200 times. The boost can be higher if the increase in one person is scalable and directly impacts the productivity of others on the team.

[2] Being a technician is not enough: Develop leadership and communication skills by David Maturo. The Pennsylvania CPA Journal, Jan 2007.

The art of moving people toward a goal.

by Leave a Comment

Years ago I worked for Jose, a client who received more results from his co-workers than most professionals I have worked with. Jose demonstrated a habit day after day, like a clockwork. This habit helped his team (and him) get one critical outcome at work that leaders like us strive for – progress. 

I didn’t know the name of this habit then.

Recently, I read a reporter’s tribute to Paul Ingrassia who served as an executive at Dow Jones. “Paul was one of the rare leaders who cared as much about the success of others as he did about his own,” writes the reporter John D. Stoll. How did Paul do it?

Towards the end of meetings, after the task assignments were complete, Paul would ask his coworkers, “are we going to announce this on Tuesday or Thursday?”

The tribute to Paul Ingrassia reminded me of Jose. Ingrassia’s coworkers remember him for the same habit as I remember Jose for.

The habit Jose displayed with grace in multiple settings is – the presumptive close. I still remember him asking us during a meeting, “we have a customer forum next month. Your deliverable is needed for us to shine in the forum. Can you have the first draft in my inbox, say, Wednesday?” A coworker can propose a different day, but now there is a date on her mind. The anchor date is set now – it is Wednesday.

Next time you are collaborating with different stakeholders, try the presumptive close. It moves people towards a goal; sometimes that’s the most important task of a leader in charge of execution.