Tag: Challenge

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Leadership is Saving Face

Making a decision is uncomfortable.

We’ve sat in that meeting before.

The one where you know things aren’t right. The direction is off, the figures don’t align, and you know for a fact the customer isn’t happy.

You have three choices:

  • Do nothing – This avoids tension and keeps you from joining “the table.” Live with the internal tension as it chips you away.
  • Stop the meeting – Hollywood’s version of “telling it like it is.” This may work but it has a significant political cost. Don’t pay the asshole tax unless it’s necessary.
  • Discuss after the meeting – Allow people to save face. This is uncomfortable to discuss, yet, has the highest return in long-term trust.

These options are in the order of tension you expose to the moment.  Tension creates challenge when deployed.

Those leaders who challenge, even when not the boss, win.

That takes tact. Let people save face when possible.

 

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Don’t Control. Challenge.

Put people’s feet to the fire, but don’t hold them there

Control feels good.

The feeling you get when someone does a task exactly what you want them feels fantastic.

It comes with a serious trade-off.

Trying to run people’s lives is exhausting. It doesn’t scale. Most importantly, it caps their ceiling. You limit their potential.

The alternative is to challenge them. Put your person in a position to win, make a landing zone, and let them go.

Make no mistake; there is more risk involved. If you can’t write the map, you rely on them to give you a post-mortem. This ambiguity causes errors. When you combine mistakes with some ambiguity, it feels worse.

There is a major upside here.

In my experience, every time I controlled what they (person working for me) did, I’d get maybe, half of their potential.

When I compare that to when I challenged them, I got closer to 75% to 95%.  Then, every once in a while, I’d see the person’s potential level up.

My reward for dealing with the ambiguity and giving them agency was someone who I could trust. For that trust, they would delight me.

Agency matters. Let them have it.

 

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Comment On Life

I get really scared when I comment on stuff.

Really scared.

I always think the next comment will be the one that gets me banned from a website. I am going to inject myself into a conversation, and the rest of the internet will turn to me and scream”GET OUT ADAM”.

I would be forced to pack up all my little internet stuff in boxes and forced out of the internet, with 2 security guards coming by and disabling my ethernet cards and getting a high quality photos posted in every computing store. They would send out official emails to Amazon and Ebay to make sure I couldn’t buy anything. I would then have to scheme on getting smaller things and rebuilding an internet life using third-party buyers, using public wi-fi, and being on the internet run, trying to stay one step ahead of the internet police.

Typing all of that out made me realize just how insane that is, and just how crazy my brain is. I can go from step one to step 255 with no tether to reality (If you need any evidence, see above…internet police….) Instead of taking each step as a challenge to move forward, my mind would rather imagine problems from things that don’t exist.

No community can move forward without response from people, I know that logically, but I still stop myself from commenting on anything because I discount my thoughts before they leave, even with commenting on the internet being such a low risk exercise, most people will avoid it just to let the bad linger. This is why my newest challenge is to comment on every article that captures my imagination, with my real name, to find out what will happen.

I am sure there will be a lot of opportunities to connect to people, and worst case, the internet police will make sure I never have to look at my comments again :-).

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