Failure as a Service
Update: When I originally wrote this essay, the new hotness in management was self-management. I believed that “self-management” was a mirage and I published a call-to-arms for something I believe in: servant leadership.
Recently, I’m seeing “servant leadership” everywhere. But, like “remote work” everyone seems to have a different definition of it, so let me take a moment to drill down on what servant leaders provide.
Servant leaders…
- hold the organization responsible for documenting a compelling, strategically sound vision for its own future
- provide support to the people bringing that vision to life
- find ways to detect if the org is making progress toward that vision
- give decision-making power to the people closest to a problem
But there’s one more very important service they provide. Those four services work fine under the normal run of things, but when ambiguity shows up, we need servant leaders most of all. The nature of work is that the obvious decisions become policy. Organizational background noise. Before long, all consequential decisions become ambiguous trade-offs. And these often get escalated to managers.
As a servant leader, when a call gets escalated, your first step is clear: Say, “Why are you asking me, who knows less than any of you about this topic? Go make the decision yourselves and let me know what you decide.”
This usually works; soon people will stop coming to you when they realize they can’t use you to settle arguments. Then, the only decisions that bubble up to you are the ones where there’s two or more equally sound options, each with its own cost, each with its own chance of failure.
Here’s what Jim Barksdale, former Netscape CEO said about these situations:
If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.
You just have to love this quote. So perfect, so Promethean. It’s the perfect blend of cut-through-the-bullshit scientist and cut-through-the-bullshit manager. It’s also structured like a joke, with a setup and a great pay-off at the end.
If you imagine this mythical Barksdale guy, he probably looks like a no-nonsense anchorman with a bootbrush hairline and gravitas out the wazoo. And you’re not far off the mark.
When even the CEO is servant to the data, we see the tantalizing prospect of eliminating leaders altogether. Self-management. If we just measure rigorously, data and decision-making become one. No bosses, no messy opinions, just science and clarity.
Nope. That never actually works in practice.
Barksdale is actually saying, “Get all the info you can, and if the right answer is still unclear, it’s my job as CEO to make a call, and take the blame if the call is wrong.”
And here’s where we get to the one essential service you provide the people you manage in a servant leadership organization:
You fail for them.
Any high-school quarterback can tell you that when you win, it was the hard work of your offensive line, who gave you all that time to connect with your fast receivers. And when you lose, it’s your fault. When the people you manage bring you a tough call, and you choose right, they get the credit. When you choose wrong, you get the blame. And it’s OK, pookie. That’s what you’re here for.
So, let’s look at this brutal calculus:
All the important decisions of the business…
minus those that can be answered with readily available data
minus those that can be answered with easily collected data
minus those that have consensus
minus the successes, which rightly go to the team.
What’s left is a big soup of wrongness, failure, mistakes.
Do that and have it not kill you, then show up tomorrow and do it again. That’s being a servant leader. That’s what you sign up for.
Good leaders insure our losses and give us our gains. When you work for a true servant leader, you’re playing with house money, and that’s a pretty sweet place to be.
