Month: June 2021

If you are a leader, you have a hard job.

 

Whether you’re in the C-suite or a recently promoted manager, you have a lot on your plate. Fighting fires. Balancing priorities. Working toward the ambitious goals of your company, organization, or team.

 

Plus, you’re often asked to solve problems where there’s no obvious answer, let alone a “right” one.

 

Like “return to work.”

 

Leaders all over the world are trying to figure this out. They come from organizations with different technological abilities, different kinds of work, and different norms. Some organizations are bureaucratic. Some are agile. Some are distributed and others are centralized. Some are rigid. Some are chaotic.

 

I’ll come out and say it right here: I don’t know how you should return to work.

 

But I do believe that teams should work in a way that supports their creativity and helps them advance their clearly defined objectives. I think this is more important than an arrangement built around face time.

 

But what this looks like depends on the culture and context of the organization.

 

To zoom out a bit: I think the return to work is an example of the continual change and need to adapt that leaders at all levels face.

 

It’s natural to think in terms of one monolithic solution with a “go live” date. But when I’ve talked with leaders about this, I’ve tried to encourage flexibility.

 

I think that the question deserves a process instead of a solution.

 

Here’s what some elements of a healthy process might look like:

 

• Engage. If you set aside the idea of a “right answer,” then you can get curious about the response to a change. “How would it affect you if we did XYZ?”

• Consider a combination of flexibility and constraints. Have different groups negotiate with each other around what they need and what they can provide.

• Be local. Let teams solve these problems in ways that work best for them—while helping to highlight the ways that cross-team and cross-business unit work can impose additional constraints.

• Support leaders in this journey. One of the toughest jobs of a leader is to help their teams resolve competing commitments; the transition to in-person work is but one example of this.

• Distribute innovation and centralize learning. Create a way for leaders to brainstorm and consult with each other, so that leaders can try things, get feedback, and share their wins (and misses).

 

You’ll notice that this process emphasizes engagement over top-down thinking. It seeks to help leaders influence and be influenced without getting stuck on the idea of the right answer.

 

By focusing on a combination of business outcomes and by understanding how others experience the problem, we can make tremendous progress in a short time.

 

It can even be fun!

 

P.S. A couple of weeks from now, I’ll send you some info about a course I’m launching on how to grow your influence at work by engaging with others in a different way.

 

Stay tuned—and if there’s someone you know who would find this interesting, send them this and let them know that they can subscribe here!

 

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I had a meeting with a leader and his team the other day where we reviewed the effectiveness of some of the experiments they had planned.

 

Regular readers will know that I emphasize experiments in place of rolling out organization-wide solutions. Experiments are flexible. We can often do them without much buy-in across the organization, and they get us info fast (whether or not the result is what we expected). Experiments aren’t “quick wins” of the old change literature; rather, they are ways for leaders, teams, and organizations to build their muscles around collaboration and their ability to sit with uncertainty.

 

A few weeks before our chat, one of the senior folks on the team suggested gathering together a small group of operational leaders from different sites for a focused conversation about the indicators that they found hardest to meet.

 

Everyone thought it was a great idea—but, when we checked in, it hadn’t gone anywhere.

 

I got curious—and I asked if the group was willing to explore why they hadn’t moved this idea forward. My instincts told me that what we had on our hands was good, old-fashioned resistance.

 

The stated reasons that we don’t pursue a good idea are often tactical in nature. We don’t have the time. There’s no budget. We don’t have the right people. Folks are tied up with something else.

 

These are good reasons. But they’re often not the underlying reason. By definition, people make time for what they do (whether it’s something urgent or important). The same goes with budget and political capital.

 

This group of leaders was dealing with a competing commitment, an underlying desire to keep things as they were. Teams and organizations are really good at doing things in just the way they do them now. Changing that is hard.

 

And sustainable change can’t be done by pushing; it needs to be invited.

 

So, instead of thinking in terms of what wasn’t happening, we got curious about what happened instead.

 

The team saw that it was avoiding splitting the group of operational leaders into In and Out groups. They didn’t want to play politics, to exclude folks.

 

They didn’t want to make “enemies.”

 

Do you see how not wanting to offend folks by not including them is actually a really useful behavior?

 

It is useful, but, like all choices, it comes with a cost. Many of the operational leaders resisted the work this team was undertaking. They held fast to their opposition. By including them, the change process would stay stuck until those leaders loosened up.

 

The team reflected on this. They saw why they’d been reluctant to try this new approach—and they also more clearly saw the costs of sticking with the way they’d always done things.

 

In doing so, they were able to reflect and make their choice. They decided to move forward with the small group work, knowing that there might be backlash but also knowing that they were already dealing with a group of resistant leaders who felt excluded.

 

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