The Most Impactful Thing You Can do as a Leader!

From a team perspective, the primary service we can perform as leaders is to enable the success of our teams, to be servant leaders. To do that, we have to know what success looks like, ensure that the team has the tools and knowledge they need, that they are developing mastery and growing, and that we have created an environment conducive for them to motivate themselves.

There is a lot to unpack here!

Knowing what success looks like starts with our mission and vision, then working with each team member to negotiate their goals to support the mission. Once we do that, we can work with them to create measures. The goals should be stretch goals. They should cause the team to learn new skills or expand existing skills. Having a learning organization is central to keeping up with our ever-changing world. It’s also essential to consider the area(s) of mastery team members are developing so their goals align.

Now that we have a direction and goals, we can do a gap analysis to ensure that team members have the tools and mentoring they need and a learning plan. We are setting them up for success and fulfillment. Measures of success should be reviewed regularly. This may vary due to the complexity of the task or the goal date. A weekly check-in is a good idea. If we had waited to look at measures until near the end of the project, it could have veered off track. It’s also important to take an agile approach and adjust or even eliminate tasks as business needs change. If you have to change direction or end a task, make it a collaborative decision. Don’t make a pronouncement. More on that shortly.

Team members’ mastery is essential for an organization to stay relevant. The rate of change in society and technology is ever-increasing. If we think of an organization as an organism, we can’t just have some portion of the organization growing and learning. The whole team needs to participate. The whole organism needs to evolve. Not just the head or the feet.

Underpinning all of this creates an environment conducive for the team to motivate themselves. Extrinsic motivation, command, and control, or carrots and sticks, is an outdated and harmful practice for team members who do creative work. In the knowledge economy, that should be all of us. This leads us to intrinsic motivation, the engine of personal purpose and self-motivation, our “why.” Dan Pink, in his book Drive, says the team needs Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose for us to motivate ourselves. We need autonomy about the work we do, when we do it, and who we do it with, we need to be constantly challenged and growing toward a deeper mastery, and we need to be part of something bigger than ourselves. These things are necessary and not sufficient.
All of this is important because if our team does not feel safe, valued, and relevant, if they don’t trust their leaders or each other, their fight or flight reaction will be triggered, and their ability for creative thinking will be impaired. Any time this happens, it takes a lot of effort to build trust and feel safe again. Because of how our brains work, it’s much easier to make us feel unsafe or threatened than to do the opposite. This is one reason why trust and transparency are so important. We are less resistant when we feel safe, trust our leaders, and are involved in change. And we want our teams to embrace change, not actively resist it.

This is why servant leadership is so important. Leaders must build relationships with their direct reports, trust, and demonstrate care. They have to be dedicated to the well-being and success of each team member.

Being a servant leader is more like being a coach than a boss. And a well-cared-for team will walk over hot coals for such a leader!. Some of you are probably thinking, what about the shit work? That’s easy. We all do it, each of us takes a turn. We do it for the good of the team. When I was in IT leadership roles and a truck pulled up with equipment, I was the first one out the door to help unload, and with a smile on my face and a spring in my step.

Building these relationships with the team, understanding their passions, what motivates, them how they like to be recognized, and what they are good at is hard work, helping them create goals and measures is harder still. At our core, we all want to be of service, and this is the way leaders can be of the highest level of service. It’s the most important work we can do.

The Super Happiness Challenge!

Investors Panel

A friend forwarded me a link to a pitch session yesterday morning, and as I’m in networking mode, trying to find an amazing job, I signed up and attended. I didn’t know much about the event before I arrived and the first thing that struck me was that all of the folks pitching had startups that did good things, that aimed to make the world a better place by increasing what Project Heha calls “Super Happiness.”

I’ve been to quite a few pitch sessions, and this was by far the most inspirational pitch session I’ve ever been to. I was brought to the point of tears many times over the course of the afternoon. To see so many people trying to do good in the world in one place was humbling and quite inspirational. 

The Super Happiness Challenge was an international competition that started accepting applications in May 2017.  There were two tracks, an Idea Track, and a Startup track.  Five finalists came from as far away as Iceland and Africa to pitch. The event was hosted by GSV Labs, great people with an amazing space.

From my perspective, the winners in both categories were obvious choices, and the judges had difficulty deciding, especially between the grand prize and runner-up prizes.

All one needed to enter the idea track: “The idea track is open to individuals who have an innovative, creative solution that promotes happiness.” Most of the idea track entries were pretty far along. Many had apps or significant achievements. The winner, Smart Garbage Medical Insurance, created a micro-insurance system where slum residents in Tanzania collect plastic refuse, which widely pollutes the slum, it’s collected monthly, and turned into plastic timber, which is sold to make things like decks and fences. The proceeds go to buying insurance. So far, they have insured 75 families!  It’s a triple win, people most at risk get insurance, the environment is improved, and a new building material that is much more resilient than wood is created. What an innovation! 

To enter the startup track, one needed to, have a startup along the same lines. All of the startup entries were impressive, not just from their ability to do good but also from their viability. The winner, WeFarm.org, blew the top of my head off!  They have created the world’s largest farmer to farmer digital network.  They have over 420,000 farmers connected in Kenya, all via SMS.  Farmers are rated, and AI is used to connect folks who have questions to those who can answer them. We are talking about folks who have, until now, no access to the internet and no way to communicate outside their personal networks. WeFarm is also using this service to sell supplies like seeds and insurance and plans on a peer to peer market soon.

For those of you who don't understand how big a deal this is, 80% of the folks in Africa have cell phones, and only 30% of the population has internet. Similar numbers exist for other developing regions. This demographic represents the biggest opportunity for service providers, eCommerce, and social media worldwide. It’s a nearly untapped market, and luckily the brilliant folks at WeFarm are using their foresight for good.

I’d take a job at any of the companies that presented at whatever they could pay me. They were that good and got me that fired up.

This is the brainchild of Project Heha, started by Sammy Lee.  Sammy took the idea of propagating sustainable happiness to new levels and, in the course of doing so, has created a multinational, multibillion-dollar company.  The phrase, “a rising tide lifts all boats,” was never truer. 

We need more of this in the world! 

Commitments not Commandments

Are you giving commandments from on high, or is your staff making commitments for work they think is essential?  I’ve been doing some consulting work for a nonprofit, mostly project management and business analysis. They have some SAAS software for managing cases that was purchased over two years ago but is only being used by a fraction of the staff. Almost all of the staff is collecting information via paper forms that are entered into a legacy system, exported, massaged in SQL Server, then uploaded to the cloud where it gets some final massaging.

There is a lot of duplication of effort and many opportunities for process improvement and reporting. We’ve formed a core project team, and I’ve taken on the role of project manager. We are working together to figure out who does what, and I’m asking for commitments from them, not telling them what they will do or when it will be due. I’ve found that working this way gets much better results than giving orders.

Photo By: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fishgirl7/

It all comes back to intrinsic motivation. Based on empirical research in the fields of psychology, behavioral economics, and cognitive neuroscience, we know that the more control a person has over what they do at work, how they do it, and when they do it, the more likely they are to have a personal stake in the outcome. The more engaged they’ll be, the more likely they’ll be to develop innovative solutions.

It’s much more work upfront and requires knowing the team deeper. But the upfront work pays dividends. The team feels more committed to projects, and the pressure to complete a task is internal to the person, not external. Working this way ensures that no one over-commits or gives an unrealistic timeline. Giving the team ownership and choices makes them more invested and enhances their feeling of success.

Bottom-up is almost always better than top-down. If you want to get the best out of your team, help them to see why the work is important, encourage them to take on tasks that play to their strengths and be the coach that gets commitments instead of the manager who gives commandments.

The Science Behind Scrum

Scrum is a flavor of agile software development. In agile the development teams are cross-functional and self-managing. The development cycles, called sprints, are short, four weeks or less. By the end of a sprint, the code must be functional, tested, and working. Scrum functions on something called empirical process control. Traditional software development (command and control) uses defined process control based on the theory of how something should work. This is at the heart of why so many traditional software projects either fail or generate bad code. Defined process control is meant to work on projects that are not very complex, tasks that do not need to be exact, like making hat pins. Empirical process control is used in serious engineering when tolerances need to be exact. 

Instead of planning out your software design months in advance and guessing at what will work, like traditional software development, scrum encourages experimentation via transparency, observation, and adaptation. The saying “fail early and often” comes to mind. With scrum, one is constantly learning and improving skills, efficiency, and quality. Scrum is conducive to creating flow states which leads to mastery. A scrum is a self-organizing team or rather a team without a manager, a team that picks what work it will do and how it will do the work. Whether its creators know it or not, scrum has a lot of self-determination theory.  Scrum is, in many ways, intrinsic motivation in sheep’s clothing.

I am floored that I just figured this out. I had heard of agile development and scrum but I had never read anything about it, nor have I come across it in any of my research. Scrum is rife with positive psychology, self-determination theory (SDT), behavioral economics, and cognitive neuroscience.

None of this is mentioned in any of the literature I have read, and by this point, I’ve read quite a bit. What is the benefit of using scrums to develop software? Scrum teams develop software up to 15 times faster than traditional project management processes. Holy performance increase, batman! Granted, a minimal number of teams ever get to that level. Gains of 400% are achievable by any team willing to do the work. Not only is the work done quickly, but at the end of a development iteration or sprint, the code developed is ready to ship, and it generally has fewer bugs than traditional methods.

I watched a Google Tech Talk: Self-Organization: The Secret Sauce for Improving your Scrum team by one of scrum’s creators: Jeff Sutherland. He talked about how having people co-located creates a social bond. The idea is that if people work closely together, they will care about each other, be a better team, and do better work. This comes out of behavioral economics, which tells us that we have two kinds of relationships, social relationships, and transactional relationships. Social relationships build trust and result in win-win situations. Transactional relationships build rewards and result in win-lose situations.

Agile development teams do 30% of all development. Though my research for this post indicates that only 50% of teams that call themselves agile are fully agile, and only 10% of scrums are scrums. Most teams implement some kind of less successful variant. This kills me! Implementing agile or scrum means that management has to change too much or give up too much power to fully adopt these practices, that or teams are resistant to change. Speed and quality matter, not how compliant you are with a framework.

The sacred protector of the team and scrum theory is the scrum master. Part leader, part servant, his job is to ensure the team is fully enabled to succeed and remove any impediment to their success. She does this by being an expert on the framework, genuinely caring about the team, and focusing on doing whatever it takes to make the team successful and keep them focused. It certainly would not hurt if the scrum master understood SDT, positive psychology, and behavioral economics. Though I think all leaders should.

I’m ecstatic to find evidence-based practices worming their way into the workplace! As a side benefit, it gives me something new to research and writes about. Hug your local agile programmer; they is making the world better.

We Know What Needs to Change

We know what to do. With the empirical research that’s been done on Self Determination Theory and Optimal Performance, we have more than enough data to tell us what works as far as engaging and motivating employees is concerned. We also have over 20 years of business success to back up the research.

As Dan Pink points out in Drive, there’s a knowing-doing gap between “what science knows and what business does.” The problem isn’t that we don’t know how to make work engaging, rewarding, and innovative; the problem is getting businesses to adopt these ideas.

We are still operating under Business 1.0. Corporations as we know them began about 150 years ago, and management practices have not changed much since then. Most of our businesses operate on a command and control, carrots and sticks model.

A dozen or so companies have started to transition to Business 2.0 practices, and a few have made the transition. They’ve all found their way into my previous blog posts. So what does life look like the inside of Business 2.0 companies?

• Employees are measured by their results, not the number of hours they work.

• They work on things they are passionate about, with who they want when they want.

• They are fully engaged and look forward to working.

• Busy work and nonproductive meetings are the exceptions and not the rule.

• Managers act more as coaches who help their workers find their passion, and potential and push them toward higher competency levels. They work with employees to create goals just beyond the reach of their skill sets.

• Titles become less important than the work, and roles change with projects.

• Employees have some choice in their compensation which may reflect the level of risk and reward they are comfortable with.

• Information is shared freely across the organization. It’s not compartmentalized.

• Feedback is continuous, not just given during an annual review.

• Turnover is less than five percent per year.

• They have a clear vision that guides employee decisions so that decisions can be pushed closer to the customer.

• They have rich, caring cultures that foster trust at all levels. They are more sustainable and transparent.

It sounds like the fabled Shangri-la! It’s hard for me to fathom that more organizations have not adopted practices that would foster these results. I realize that these ideas may seem unrealistic or even threatening to folks working in the average workplace. Most of us find change difficult or at least uncomfortable.

No one is more intimidated and fearful of this change than executives. They have the power, and people in power rarely give it up freely. The paradox here is that by giving up a large chunk of that power, they’d end up with more profitable and sustainable companies in the long run.

Are You at Your Best?

Do you strive to get better at what you do? Whether it’s fixing cars, selling shoes, or programming software? Or are you already at your best?  Getting better at something you care deeply about is called personal mastery.   Peter Senge, in his book, The Fifth Discipline, says,” Personal mastery goes beyond competence and skills, though it is grounded in competence and skill. It means approaching one’s life as a creative work, living life from a creative as opposed to a reactive viewpoint.” Mastery is a lifelong practice. 

“The ability to focus on ultimate intrinsic desires, not only on secondary goals, is a cornerstone of personal mastery,” says Peter Senge.  The key to mastery is following your passion and creativity, not going to meetings and putting out fires.  When you’re able to do what you want to do, when you want to do it with who you want to work with, you’re much more likely to achieve mastery.  This is at the heart of intrinsic motivation, or motivation that comes spontaneously from within us - doing things for the joy of doing them.

Very few of us are fully engaged at work because workplaces use top-down management and carrots and sticks to motivate people.  You can’t sell, enforce or cajole mastery - it has to be something we choose to do. 

It’s the reason I’ve been successful in my various careers.  I’ve been able to define my roles and that of my teams. I’ve had the trust of upper management to do things the way I think they should be done, to hire the right people, and make what I think are the best purchases for my workplace.  For the last 20 years, I’ve had a large amount of autonomy, which led to developing personal mastery.  As Somerset Maugham said, “Only mediocre people are always at their best.”