Transitional Leadership, Organizational Frameworks, and Mismanagement
Leadership during this time of change is a tricky subject, Ross Allmark, head of events and ticketing at Dice– an upstart mobile company–held a conversation with our founder, Gillian Davis, elaborating on how having a failsafe process and framework for uncertainty in crisis can build resilience within a company during times of great change.
Ross began the conversation highlighting his belief that the number one quality a leader can have is self-awareness. If you are aware of your own blindspots, you won’t get in the way of yourself and you can intentionally design the future for your team and company.
Ross moved on to talk about coming onto a team for the first time, and the importance of having emotional intelligence to observe team dynamics in coming into this new space. When you go into a team, transitioning for the first time, you need to take nothing for granted, you need to know all of the teammates intimately and understand their motivations on top of your own. If you are a new leader coming into a company, you need to look at each teammate and understand why they are in the room, be aware of their egos, how they show up, and use their power within the team.
Ross describes effective leadership as coming down to having a framework that you can fall back on while at the same time, having a realistic understanding of how much information you can hold in your brain. In fact, you can only hold four pieces of information in your short term memory at any given time. On a complex project, you need to get all of that information down in some sort of format that works for you–whether that's an organization tool for project management like Trello, Sprint, or Monday.com you have to organize and build your team’s focus around the specifications of that project to ignite your people with purpose.
Leadership is not simply getting a certificate or an MBA and declaring yourself done, it is a constant building out of your toolkit, expanding your resources, to create a larger framework for you to fall back on in times of crisis. Agile frameworks (workflow management tools) and retrospective tools (designed for the unexpected problems that threaten to derail meetings) which encourage self-reflection are key to employ in a time of change. You must continually build your toolkit to become a better leader.
Radical candor, a concept developed by Kim Scott about the balance of caring personally and challenging directly through feedback is an incredibly useful tool for getting clear about criticism and the motivations behind it. It is vitally important to reframe feedback into guidance and guidance that can flow in different directions to address all aspects of behavior within the organization, when you receive feedback you cannot simply think of it as criticism, it is signalling and messaging for guidance. Life offers very few opportunities for you to learn how others really see you, and if you are receiving advice, it is important to lean in and take it.
On top of being willing to receive and ask for feedback, strong leader’s are organized, process driven, and operational. Effective leadership is about adding a high level of team empowerment into planning–using tools where necessary–so that the company vision is upheld and reinforced. When it comes to project management, success is achieved through understanding the final goal and putting people in the right place at the right time.
In his conversation with Gillian, Ross discussed the events world, wherein it's absolutely crucial to do an “advance” where two or three days before the event you circulate a “day sheet” which has everyone’s contacts, the full schedule, the plan, and the floor plan. It is imperative that everyone has read and digested this material before the day of the event. Transparency of information is crucial and it is key that everybody knows what everyone else is doing, because high-level communication is essential when you have complex systems. Break down one part of a business process at a time to make it abundantly clear to your team how the action affects the overall success of the company. Tell this as a story so your team will retain it better - storytelling is engaging and if you can attach emotions to a singular event then you will have success with that event. It is a collective effort to engage people and make sure the work functions.
As a leader in a time of transition, you need a framework, because having no process in place will mean that your business is built upon toothpicks, built upon an incredibly fragile foundation. Without a framework, your company will function and be able to show good growth numbers, but over time, the system will inevitably crash and the price of fixing a broken process instead of investing in the present in order to build for the future is far too great. When you have a process, it simply provides a platform from which people can be creative. The outcome is that the things that usually cause your team anxiety are all mapped out, either in a clear way or because they’ve become automated, allowing your team to be more creative and flexible, and enabling your company to have faster business growth.
Ross went on to detail that the most common type of person in the media industry, is someone who is journalistic or production oriented. They don't want to be in an office managing people. The common notion is that you need to be managing some vast framework of people as a higher level employee. What that means, however, is that you have countless people managing people who literally have no inclination to be in that sort of management position. They just want to be doing the vocation–the filming, the journalism – that they started out with at a really high level rather than having the additional role of overseeing a team of other people on top of managing their own creative process. This metric of success where as you go up the ladder, people just keep getting added to your team is inappropriate because many thinkers aren’t in a position to manage all of these people. Top performers are often given a team because they build the most, but building has no correlation to people management. Time and time again, Ross has watched great producers' passion start to erode because they were being asked to people manage. People management is an exhausting task and it does not give you a lot of time to do your practitioner work – the work that fills you with energy and excitement. In his conversation with Gillian, Ross revealed that he feels this kind of mismanagement has been implemented at a scale that is almost immoral. Pain and anxiety are constantly generated in this form of leadership.
Companies need to start operating like Apple, which has the practitioners route to success alongside the people manager’s route to success, thus giving thinkers and creators the option to continue doing what they love doing while not taking on the weight that people management carries. Incorrect people management is where companies become broken. Ultimately, being a leader is about taking on a fundamentally facilitative role instead of a management role that focuses on process and deadlines, timelines, and tasks. There are some leaders who are able to do both, but it is vitally important to the success of your company to develop an understanding of your limitations as a leader and to discover the best way for you to help YOURSELF along with your team.
You got this.
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At OverTime Leader we provide executive leadership and management advisory for technology-enabled businesses and teams. If you are looking to spark a people-powered change in your business our team has a toolbox full of ways to help you get started.
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