It's Halloween, but Not a Witch Hunt
Dispatch 009
The Leadership Ascent
Growing into a Leadership role requires a new mindset, a breadth of skills, and demonstrated capability.
This program builds soft skills, executive presence, financial acumen and practical tools to become a Great Leader of an empowered team.
The next group starts in January.
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Frustration. Disappointment. Confusion. A touch of anger.
Emotions welling up inside me. Breath in. Breathe out. Don’t be a jerk.
The voice inside my head screaming “THEY KNOW HOW TO HANDLE THIS.”
Mustering a few ounces of control, “This isn’t a big deal, you should be able to handle it”.
Their gut wrenching response: “The last time we made a decision on this you overrode us”
Building a team culture of open & honest feedback is great, but sometimes it turns on you! Honestly, I was glad for the feedback but it did sting a little (the best feedback usually does). All leaders want their team to be empowered, but that doesn’t mean we are actually very good at empowering.
Giving up control is hard.
Trusting is harder still.
In the bright light of day, when I want to be a great, aspirational leader my words would talk about empowerment, autonomy, and growth for the team. In the conference room under the glow of fluorescent lights, my actions displayed the opposite.
The question is why? Why did my words and actions not match up?
The problem wasn’t wanting empowerment for the team. I hadn’t sat down to proactively plan ways to demonstrate & enable empowerment. In the absence of a plan, bad habits naturally took over.
Problematically my habits centered on me knowing the answers.
Empowerment relies on training others to know answer and problems.
To fix this I had to define what I wanted from the team and then engage in some training, and both of us (especially me), had to do some unlearning. To be really clear, empowerment doesn’t mean absolute decision rights on everything. What we have to embrace as leader is that empowerment comes with decision rights.
Again: EMPOWERMENT COMES WITH DECISION RIGHTS.
Here is my process for training me and the team:
- Guiding Principles of Decision Making: You need to agree with your team on how decisions should be made. Some examples of question to consider:
Are there specific types of analysis that always need to occur?
What about other groups that need to be considered?
Is there a structure to how decisions should be considered?
- Define Guard Rails of Authority: Sharing decision authority isn’t carte blanche to make any decision, there have to be guard rails on that authority.
Make sure you establish those up front. When done right, this will mean you are involved in the right decisions. Financial impacts are easy to measure for this, but you need to think bigger. Like level of change, how many groups will be involved, or how quickly the decision needs to be implemented.
A good gut check: If you would say “Why did you think you could make that decision?” That means you failed at this step.
- Encourage Engagement as a Mentor: Giving your team decision rights still requires you to help with the decisions.
Do this by having a true “open door” policy, where they can come and ask for advice. The catch is when they are asking for advice - don’t jump the gun and give them the answer. Be a Coach.
A coaching mentality leans on open ended questions to help your team think through the situation:
Have you thought about X?
Will this have any impacts on Y?
Who else should you align with on this decision?
Help them to see all the angles of the decision they are considering.
- Catch Up Regularly in 1:1s: Ask that the team keep you aware of decisions in regular 1:1
One easy way to do this is to ask the team for a pre-read ahead of the meeting. Nothing fancy, just a bulleted list of decisions and issues they have been working on.
The diligence of writing them down will also help surface the volume of work going through different parts of the team.
- Create an Expectation for After Action Review: This is a time to critically consider how a decision process went.
Consider things like "what went well"
"where did we get lucky"
"what would you do differently next time".
One last thing - differentiate between decisions and outcomes. Over time good decisions will generally result in good outcomes but there isn’t a one for one relationship. Good outcomes can also result from bad decisions.
When bad outcomes occur - the goal is to figure out what about the decision process could have been different. More information, better analysis, broader stakeholder alignment and so on.
Bad outcomes don’t deserve a witch hunt - the deserve better decision making processes to prevent them. Focus on that.
Free Guides & Tools
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5 Step Strategy Guide
Materials for a strategy conversation shouldn't take forever. This tool will walk you through - building a deck in less than 30 minutes.
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That's it for this week's newsletter. I hope your journey towards an empowered team is fruitful!
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Keep Learning, Leading & Growing -
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Adam Malone 📬
The Sometimes Tenacious Founder
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