Tag: LZ

Don’t Control. Challenge.

Post author By jrlsage
Post date September 28, 2016

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.

Tags Challenge, control, LZ, map, Push

Blog Post

Call in a Point Man to Keep Things on Track

Post author By jrlsage
Post date September 16, 2016

Secure the Landing Zone (LZ)

When delegating a project, it’s easy to let things “take their course.”

This structure can work if the team has worked together and the members have self-selected roles.

In most circumstances, ad hoc groups (especially in startup and complex corporate structures) don’t get things done.

Projects are full of little decisions. After a certain point, dealing with these decisions lead to confusion.

That’s where a point man is valuable.

The point man isn’t the leader, per se. She/he creates the structure for how things work, makes sure the meetings happen, and connect and gather resources. In bigger organizations, this is a project manager type role. In smaller groups, it makes sense to have a senior person do this.

This role, clearly defined, gives people room to do their job. It also gives you, as the delegating person, one point of contact to be responsible for the project’s entire scope.

If the leader’s job is to clear the landing zone, it’s the point man’s job to secure it.

Tags delegating, LZ, make, pointman, roles, secure

Blog Post

Get Out of the Way

Post author By jrlsage
Post date September 13, 2016

Once you delegate, leave.

There is a natural instinct to help someone when you ask them to do something when you are good at it.

Resist this urge.

“Hey, when I did it before, all I had to do was…”

This causes problems.

Your actions block the other person’s creativity by framing them in a particular thought pattern
You are teaching them not to think because you have the answers
And you take away agency because those direct reports are just “following orders.”

Once you are clear about your ask and you clear an LZ (landing zone), the best thing to do is to get out-of-the-way.

Tags ask, delegate, LZ

Blog Post

Make a Landing Zone – Give Your People a Chance

Post author By jrlsage
Post date September 8, 2016

A starting point

Helicopters are a unique tool for the military. They create quick access and pickup in war zones. The downside is, they are vulnerable.

To account for that vulnerability, before the helicopter lands, it needs a landing zone (LZ).

Landing zones are the primary reason helicopters survive.

Success means extra resources(more troops, supplies or tools) or an emergency evac (a clean escape).

In combat, to survive is to succeed.

Failure could mean the loss of resources and the death of everyone inside. That is a massive blow to morale.

I think people who delegate tasks need to treat the starting point like a LZ before the helicopter lands.

Create an environment, before you assign the work, where the person you give it to have a point of departure.

Failure may not mean the end of life. It does, however, create distrust and defensiveness in the organization. These [distrust and morale] erode morale

Before you delegate out the task, give someone a place to start. Create the LZ.

Tags Create, delegate, end of life, landing zone, leadership, LZ