Leadership Journal: Little Things That Matter
Setting clear goals, setting objectives, inspiring your team members, motivate them, are words we usually hear when it comes to team management and leadership topics.
It’s not wrong, deep down we understand how important those generic points are to our management style. But sometimes we forget the little things we do in our daily routine that reflect a good leader. An exemplary one.
These little things are being overlooked in our daily lives. It is a part of our daily habits, how we behave in meetings, what topic we love to talk about, how we talk to other people, how we treat the office boy, or how we talk about our bosses. We might fail to notice it being recognized, but trust me, our team fully observes it.
“A city upon a hill cannot be unseen”
The quote means when you are a leader or put in an influential position, everybody will see everything you do in the workplace. Your conversation will be overheard, your daily behavior will be judged, your perspective will be questioned, and it is inevitable.
Don’t preach what you don’t practice. It plants despise inside your team and may grow them to apathy. That’s why it is important to have a good persona, it draws respect to you.
ON-TIME IS LATE
When you are always late to your meeting, especially the one you set up and announce, it creates a harmful precedent. Every time you hold a meeting, your team will assume you are going to be late again, and don’t be surprised when you don’t see everyone ready 10–15 minutes in. Next thing you know the meeting starts 30 minutes late.
The worst thing in this situation is when somebody arrives late, you don’t have the high ground to blame them.
Please keep in mind that being on time means you are late. Try to arrive 10–15 minutes early so you can have some time to chit-chat or be prepared for the topic.
MANNERS MAKETH MAN
Today you are the boss, you can ask the office boy to clean up your table anytime you want, bring you coffee, and open the car door for you.
But nothing will ever justify if you treat them poorly. When you throw things at him when he makes mistakes, scold him without any good reason, or scream out loud to ask him to do things.
The only thing that stands between you and the office boy is your level and grade. Imagine when tomorrow you are fired from your company, then you won’t have the ability to direct anyone anymore, even the office boy.
You are treated the way you are just because of your title. Without it, we are just a human being, just the same as whoever is lower than us before it.
Everybody in the workplace observes how you treat people. Especially the lower level than yours.
When you treat everyone with good manners, it shows that you treat everyone equally without minding their level or grade. Candidly, it grows respect for your team when they see their leader being nice to everyone. People feel proud to have a kind leader.
TAKE CARE OF YOUR GARDEN
When I was in charge of taking care of one of our subsidiary companies, in a meeting I noticed one of my engineers use a gaming laptop for his daily work. I can’t help but notice because first, it’s bigger than the others, and second it has an Autobots look-alike logo stamped on it.
He answered me lightly: “Well, the one they gave me can’t run a simulator on Android Studio, it sounds like a jet when I open up the Android Studio”. I was laughing but confused at the same time.
I cross-check the admin team for the device assigned to him, I look at it and I realize I have no good reason to ask him to switch back to this fossil. They said it’s already been months since he’s using his laptop.
There’s also another story about the office chair. Somehow the company gave one of the engineers a crooked chair, the wheel won’t budge and the seating is not comfortably flat anymore. It felt like sitting on a tilted ship. Nobody noticed it except the person sitting on it. You won’t be able to notice it from afar, it looked like an ordinary chair, but oh boy how painful it was when I tried to sit on it.
If you expect your people to grow, to bloom, then you must tend your garden. It means getting dirty, going in the mud, and noticing the little things. You can’t expect flowers to bloom when you don’t make sure your soil is tilled and making sure it’s fertile.
But it doesn’t mean always give your people luxury, they just need to do their job properly by making sure you give them a supporting environment.
The intention of noticing little complaints and doing something about it will reflect that you are serious about leading your team. Not just as an assignment or a corporate responsibility. It shows that you truly care for them by making sure their work environment is good for their growth and productivity.
Take care of your garden, give them sunshine, and keep out the weeds.
LITTLE WINS MATTERS
Aside from celebrating huge product launch, having gala dinner for reaching the annual target, or taking home company awards, there are small wins that keep the team going.
Product launch and annual target completion are celebrated only once or a couple of times in a year. Along the way, sometimes the team needs encouragement to move forward. Either because of new tech stack learning curves or even a miscommunication that potentially causes frustration. Things happen along the journey, and our job is to prevent those things become chaos.
One simple thing you can do to boost the team’s confidence and keep them motivated is to celebrate small wins. The kind that makes them feel important. It means whatever feature or product they built proved to help “real” people and solved “real” problems.
It will be different for each product and each use case. That’s why we as leaders should make the effort to find those little things that could be celebrated as small wins.
Like sailing on a cruise ship, it would be a boring trip without anything happening in weeks. Make some fun and have some fun, so when the cruise rocks and sways, it won’t hurt for the people on it.
When you support and notice these little wins along the way, your team will have a sense of partnership with you. It means that you notice what other bosses don’t, and be there with them to celebrate. Because sometimes the little wins you celebrate are very specific to a person or a journey. Your team will appreciate it a lot when you notice it for them.
LISTENS TO UNDERSTAND, NOT TO REPLY
Two teenagers were arguing.
They both wanted an orange, but there was only one left.”I want it!”
”No, I do!”
Their mother heard them arguing and went to see what was going on.
“How about you split it?”
They both asserted, “No! I need the whole orange.”They were devising all kinds of “fair” ways to see who would get the orange. Rock, paper, scissors. Flipping a coin. Drawing straws.
But they couldn’t agree on how to decide who should get the orange.After listening to all of this, their mother said,
“Well, what do you need the orange for?”
”I need the juice for my smoothie.”
”I need the rind for my cake”Suddenly the teenagers looked at each other and started laughing.
They each could have the whole orange!
One would take the juice, and the other would take the rind.
It took their mother asking the right question and their listening to the answer to solve what seemed an impossible dilemma.
This story is quoted from the book “Listen!” by Dale Carnegie & Associates. It shows that the skill of listening is not on the “listen” part but it is all about understanding.
We as leaders are sometimes too busy distracted by some modern abstractions such as KPI, OKR, or some number on paper. We keep believing the numbers tell us about who our team is and what they are doing. Remember, we are managing and leading human beings, so make the effort to treat them like one.
Sit with them, and ask how their day was, what their weekend was like, and what their favorite movies are. Be their friend, listen to their complaints and their stories. You will soon see how they will try to start to react to you and tell you everything.
It doesn’t mean that you have to act on everything, sometimes they just need to be listened to, brag about something they love, show how cute their new baby is, or how wonderful their holiday was.
All we need to do is… listen.
I know it will suck your time, a lot. But when you have their trust and they know you listen to them, you will find a lot of insight moving forward together.
Noticing the overlooked little things can have a huge impact on our leadership journey. Because it can’t be manipulated, it’s our daily habits. It’s what we are, what we do every day in the workplace. It’s what we do when we meet our team, and what we talk about when we are with them.
Let people love you because of your personality, not for your title.
At the end of the day, our team are the ones that define us, without them, we are just individual contributors. Our leadership means success when we help them grow and make the best out of themselves.
So, enjoy the journey, kid.
