The Best Leaders Are Predictable: Why open-sourcing leadership is the best path to results
For many of us, being described as “predictable” is an insult. In my career I’ve spent more time being led than I have leading, and it is all that time being led that has had me conclude that a leader’s predictability is high atop the most-important-traits list for leadership in any company that wants to grow to its full potential.
Not the ‘wears-the-same-thing-everyday’ type of predictability. The type of predictability I’m talking about here is predictability in decision-making. Simply put, if your team isn’t able to easily predict how their leader is going to respond to a wide variety of requests, ideas, situations, problems, and opportunities, the team is, by definition, playing below its potential. Its a universal truth that no individual person can scale to the needs of a thriving organization. And so if leadership decision-making isn’t predictable — if the team has to guess and wonder about whether the work its doing is going to mean anything and then go through an approval process every time a new decision needs to be taken — precious time, energy, team-satisfaction and opportunity are squandered.
Predictability requires three core facets:
- A clear, well-communicated plan: As a leader, you’ve got to have a plan that provides clear direction for the path ahead, that is completely distributed and easily understood by team members. This plan is the map that everybody on your team needs to determine where to go next with their work — both generally, and in times of uncertainty. Its much easier to predict a leader’s direction over the next few years if they’ve published a map of the route they plan to take to get to adestination.
Creating an effective plan is a lot easier said than done. Most companies have a document that describes a plan. Its usually usually culminates in a one-page diagram, and it is very rarely able to serve as thestand-alone map that the team needs to guide itself. Often it finds its way to the management communication scrap heap. That’s usually because of two critical errors in creation:
i) The plan focuses on “what” the company is going to do, but rarely on “how” the team is going to do it. Without the “how” clearly articulated, the plan you create is shelf-fodder and won’t be adopted as a working guide.
ii) The plan has really been created to drive the essentiality of the leadership team, not to make life easier for everyone. The better the plan, the less you will be needed to tell your team members where they need to go next. To leaders lacking in confidence, this is intimidating. For these leaders, the goal is to inextricably weave themselves into the plan — as approvers, describers, decoders etc. Effective plans require servant-leaders who understand that they are building a plan to intentionally work themselves towards obsolescence and their teams towards more autonomy and independence…and real servant leadership is a rare.
If you are a leader and think you have a clear, well-communicated plan that serves as a map for your team, try two simple things:
a) give it to a trusted advisor outside of your company as a stand-alone document and see how they react to it. If they need to come back for a ton of clarification on diction/meaning…start again.
b) at the same time, stop a random team member in the hallway (the less you know them, the better) and ask them to explain the plan on the spot and — most importantly — how their everyday work contributes to the company’s ultimate goals.
I bet you will be disappointed.
This last part involves the need to connect each person in the organization to the overall objective — so that everyone understands the role that their work plays in accomplishing it. I have found that thorough team connection to the plan is the most important element, and the hardest to accomplish. More often than not, plans take dozens or hundreds of leadership team (and/or consulting firm) hours and tend to adopt management-ese language that doesn’t resonate on a stand-alone basis with the broader team. Most people would rather proceed in ambiguity than admit to not understanding the company’s plan or challenge the leader’s ideas, and so do just that.
2) Published, working decision criteria: To do their best work, your team needs to understand the process and criteria you use to make decisions. Whether from highly-structured analysis and teamwork, or from-the-gut and in-the-moment, the ability for your team to understand how you are going to analyze various types of situations and come to a decision drives all kinds of efficiency in their work. If you don’t have a decision criteria, create one immediately — the pain you’re creating from unpredictability across the entire team is far exceeding the benefit you may think you get from “fast” decisions. If you are using a criteria set that you haven’t published, circulated, and discussed, get it out there immediately. Many leaders lose sight of the work at the rock face, and thus the incalculable hours the team spends trying to impress and satisfy the wants of the person who ultimately judges their performance, and signs their paycheque. Clarity in this area may be the single greatest opportunity to improve your team’s speed and efficiency, and to making work truly enjoyable for everyone (including you).
The goal here is for everyone on the team to know what the leader is trying to accomplish, and how they’re going to approve/disapprove of new decisions.
I’ve worked with a number of leaders who have done this very well — in the best case the CEO communicated a short list of critical evaluation criteria for investment decisions (staffing, funding, new projects, reorganizations etc.), and then made a point of running these decisions through the criteria in front of the team. He would carry his decision criteria set and a stack-rank of all of the projects going on in the company at one time, prioritized by how they scored against the criteria, into meetings with him and use it openly to make decisions. His criteria-based priority list was published to the whole company, so that teams knew where their work sat in priority, and what it would take to unseat the lower-priority project with a new one (or how vulnerable their project was to being overtaken by a new entrant). The behaviour it drove was amazing — almost immediately, those looking for investment started tailoring their work towards the criteria. Consider the win/win here — the company gets more work/innovation aimed in the direction of their objective, and the team has a better chance of doing great work more efficiently.
I have worked with more leaders who are terrible at this. In the worst cases, leadership reveled in its power and decision-making authority, holding the privilege of subjective judgement like a feudal lord would wield the divine right of Kings. The result was a team that had to spend far more time focused on positioning projects to the ego, mood and capriciousness of their leader than on logical thinking and doing great work. Further, the company had a horrible track record on new investments, because there was no consistency in decision-making, and a lack of focus on areas that would create the kind of growth the company was seeking. In other cases the leadership teams weren’t deliberately holding their teams in the dark, they simply hadn’t thought about the impact that their decisions-in-a-vacuum might be having on their teams, and couldn’t understand why frustration was high, execution was poor, and commitment was low.
Make a published decision criteria part of your leadership communication, and enjoy the acceleration that comes from a fully engaged team. Don’t, and suffer the consequences as the bottleneck of your company. Its that simple.
3. Personal consistency:
“This above all: to thine own self be true,
and it must follow, as the night the day,
that thou canst not then be false to any man...”
Polonius, Hamlet Act 1, Sc 3 — William Shakespeare.
Great leadership is hard. It requires an ability to put the team before yourself, a high level of self-awareness and a commitment to walking the talk. The best published plans and criteria are useless if you don’t show a personal, consistent commitment to them. If the plan is to create a culture of transparency and accountability, you can’t make decisions in the dark and surprise your team. If the published criteria involve hard financial metrics and specific areas for innovation, you can’t fund projects based on the likeability of the people pitching the project when those clear criteria aren’t satisfied. Falling short in personal consistency with the other two elements in place is the most damaging outcome — it betrays the trust of the team in the most profound ways. When making decisions, build the time to question if you are playing by the rules you’ve defined, and make sure you play by them. Hypocrisy is cement shoes for leaders, and the fastest way to mutiny.
Predictable leadership means being the builder, communicator, and connector of clear plans, being the user of known, objective criteria, and being the deliverer of personal consistency throughout. It requires open-sourcing your leadership, and eliminating the inefficiency and posturing that comes from the inevitable guess-work required of your team without it. Predictable leadership results in teams empowered with the knowledge of what the future holds and how they can work autonomously to deliver their best work towards known goals. It creates a workplace of consistency and trust, and a platform for your team to deliver on your plan and thrive without you.
About the author:
I’ve recently started an advisory practice for scaling venture-backed technology companies. The prior twenty years was spent building my chops in management and leadership roles with some of the biggest, fastest and most-interesting technology companies in the world, working in and partnering with some great and not-so-great corporations, an entrepreneurial venture, and a tier-one strategy consulting firm. Through it all, I’ve been fascintated by leadership and all of the challenge and opportunity that it represents.
Much of my work now focuses on bringing what I’ve learned to hard-charging tech companies poised for hyper-growth, and the funds who back them. I’m working with different companies in different ways to facilitate the pivot out of start-up-mode and into scaling. I’ve found the work focused on the “how” of leadership with founders is digging up some deep personal learning and beliefs, and awakening a desire I’ve long had to write about it. And so here we are — Roar’s Notes.
Because reading and doing this stuff are entirely different things, don’t hesitate to connect with me.
