Effectiveness
Michael Sippey put this very succinctly in A grand unified theory of work. and it reminded me that I wanted to share what I’ve observed about the most effective leaders.
A couple of years ago, I went for dinner at a startup that was starting to grow its engineering team and looking to hire a new VP of Engineering. I mentioned to them that we recently hired a leader into that role that entirely changed our hiring and our company’s trajectory. They asked me what made him so effective, and my answer was that he was masterful at:
- Finding the biggest problem/opportunity, and
- fixing/seizing it.
It’s simple but not easy.
He spent the first few weeks listening deeply to understand what was holding us back from hiring and from building great things, eventually landing on the fact that we lacked a clear and common vision for engineering and product. A symptom of this was that we were stuck in a cycle of local optimizations for product improvements. The effect of this was that we couldn’t hire based on our true, underlying vision, and couldn’t invest in projects that would have huge payoffs only in the longer term.
Only after determining that this was the single most important issue did he set about working with our co-founder/CEO to crystalize that vision and then getting everyone in the company bought into it. In our case, this was a shift from being a company that did ad retargeting really well, to being one that would help businesses deeply understand each customer and provide the most effective, personalized marketing to them. This helped us have the courage and conviction to invest in key long term technological bets that would later be a big reason for why we were acquired. Having a clear vision and an ambitious product and technology roadmap also helped us to attract top technical talent and led to a period of arguably some of the best engineering hires in the company’s history.
After that, it was on to identifying then solving the next biggest problem, which was to create a better organizational structure so that teams with clearer mandates could move as fast as possible. And on and on the cycle went — finding the next highest impact work and executing on it.
Keep in mind that I was at this startup the entire time, and so were a bunch of other great and more experienced engineers, some of whom have become great leaders now, but none of us were even able to diagnose this, let alone solve it.
As we go about our daily routines and reacting to issues that crop up, our most common mistake is that we don’t spend enough time on step 1 — finding that single biggest problem or opportunity. As a result, we often end up spending time on what’s urgent but not important, or whatever is convenient to work on, and forget to zoom out to clearly evaluate what the most important work actually is.
Correctly identifying the biggest problem/opportunity is an incredibly difficult skill that can take an entire career to hone, and solving it is often even more difficult, but having this framework is an important first step to becoming more effective.
What’s the single largest problem in the organization that you’re a part of, or that you lead? Is it a lack of trust amongst team members? A lack of faith in the future? Teams being spread too thin and unfocused? If we constantly find the biggest issue/opportunity and solve/seize it, by definition we are doing the highest leverage work that we could possibly be doing, and hence being as effective as we can be.
Thanks to Ailian Gan, Nicholas Gorski, and Islam El-Ashi for editing this post.
