Got Leaders?

Have you got enough leaders on your team?

It seems that many organizations have a surplus of managers - people of authority, and a surplus of complainers - those that see change is needed but don't act on it.

Unlike managers, it seems that we never have enough leaders. What defines leaders?

Leaders are people that initiate change and drive themselves and others to action. 

Leaders are the people that bring energy to your organization and as such, it is easy to see that you almost never have enough.

Leadership can happen at any level, from top level senior employees to the most junior of the juniors. You may see that the bathroom always runs out of toilet paper half way through the day and you ask the cleaning crew to put some extra toilet paper. Leadership could be asking your co-worker to add a test after they introduce a defect in the product. Leadership could be emailing two people who may be unknowingly working on the same feature and suggesting they coordinate.

Activation Energy
Leaders provide the necessary activation energy, a catalyst or trigger, for action to happen.

A while ago, we had family visit our house. My wife left on some errands and all the adults were neglecting the kids and chatting in the living room. My wife returned home as it was time for dinner. She give everyone a quick look that clearly stated "rest time is over" and asked us to take care of dinner. A minute later we had several adults setting the table, warming up dinner and getting the kids to eat.

For the hard-core developers among us, I like to think of leaders as threads in a computer system. If all you have is a data structures, nothing really happens. Your program does nothing. But, introduce threads into the system and suddenly the program is active. Add more threads and you can do more things.

Nurturing Leadership
As managers, and even more so as leaders, there is a lot we can do to increase the leadership on our teams. While different people have different leadership abilities, we can influence almost everyone around us and help them unlock and/or increase their leadership.

Enable Leadership - With hierarchical reporting structure, we often create an environment that naturally suppresses leadership with junior staff members. There is a hidden message in how we operate that leadership equals authority or managerial title. However, by providing day to day examples we can show people that leadership can happen all the time and by everyone.

On one of my teams, we had several senior developers and one junior developer. The senior developers were very strong technically but were not very organized. They were often late to meetings, forgetting some tasks. The junior developer was a very organized and methodical person. We presented the developer with a challenge - "you may be junior and inexperienced but you're on time and organized. Could you help keep the rest of the team on track?". The developer took on the challenge - he would setup the conference room 5 minutes early and call the team in. He would send reminder emails on upcoming tasks. In addition, after having a positive experience influencing his team, the developer found other ways in which he could help the team despite being junior.

Protect Leadership - As people discover and explore leadership, it is important to provide a positive experience. Failed attempts at driving change can quickly lead someone to decide to give up on leadership. When we lead and try to drive change, we inevitably put our self at risk of failure and criticism. It is important that the environment is accepting of failures and mishaps.

Example: My son wanted to be helpful - "Dad, you forgot to lock the car so I locked it for you." Only problem is that I left the keys in the car when I went to get something from the house. I can still talk to my son about verifying that the keys are with us before locking the car next time but perhaps more important is to avoid instilling fear in him of taking action. He probably already felt bad when we had to go and find the spare keys, no need for any extra pressure on him.

Another example: working at a start-up, a lot of people put extra hours. People often work in the evening and even on weekends. Every so often, a developer has a pet project that they want to drive. They care about it enough that they're willing to do it on their own time. However, given that they already put extra hours on their regular work it means that picking up a pet project will actually influence their regular work.  In addition, introducing new functionality means others will have to help with testing, perhaps new bugs / defects will be introduced. Gut reaction is to often persuade the developer to focus on current priorities. But, before we kill their enthusiasm we may want to think about how this will impact someone that has enough excitement about the company and the product that they're willing to put extra time to make it better.

Caring
At the end of the day, people don't drive change if they don't care. This means that a) you want foster good relationship and create a positive atmosphere so that people will care and b) you want to have the right people who care about the right things.

Looking at this from another angle - if people do not seem to drive improvements in your organization or team you may want to find out why. Wrong set of people? Wrong culture and atmosphere? Lack of leadership nurturing?

The right people - Some people care because they have a sense of professionalism and of doing their job well. Other people care about the users of their software and want to make sure they have the best product. Some people love other people and enjoy driving positive change. For each person on your team, you may want to identify their main drivers and motivators and ensure their motivation is not suppressed.

Building a strong team
Leadership is a critical element of building a strong team - a team that can operate independently, that is self motivated and improves on its own.  We build good leadership by getting the right people and nurturing them to lead.

You know you're there when you sit at your chair, drinking your coffee and things are just happening.