Imagine this (it shouldn’t be all that hard):  You are a widget manufacturer.  You’ve been tasked to figure out how to make 1000 widgets.  You’ve been planning for weeks.  You’ve gathered data, run the numbers, made estimates, and come up with a plan you believe in. You’ve left a little wiggle room for inevitable unknown obstacles.  You’ve put it all into MS Project and up on the screen in Powerpoint slides.  You are an experienced team – you’ve done this all before many times --  and the guys doing the work are battle-hardened  veterans who know their business.  Everything looks good.

Now it’s time to present your plan to the executive team. You lay everything out in a Powerpoint presentation that you’ve reviewed seventeen times.  But when they hear the plan, they say:  “Sorry, but that’s all wrong.  You say you can make 1000 widgets in fourteen months.  We say it only takes eight months to make that many widgets.  Get to work”.

Terrific.

Now you and your team know how long it will take to make 1000 widgets – 14 months.  But somehow your “leadership” has decided that it only takes much less time than that.  Never mind that these guys have only been with the company for a year or so, and have no real experience with the difficulties and the process of building 1000 widgets.  They are the bosses and their style of “leadership” seems to be to assert their all-knowing authority over the guys who actually know what is going on.  It seems to them that “leadership” means being a hard-ass and “pushing” the team to get more out of them than is possible.  Bottom line:  They didn’t listen and they didn’t trust you.  Why did they ask you to do all that planning when they were just going to tell you the schedule anyway?

We all know what happens next: after about seven months, it becomes hopelessly, overwhelmingly, manifestly clear that there is not going be 1000 widgets on the loading dock in a month.  Now everyone is scrambling to adjust course.  This, naturally, is a vastly worse situation than if they had merely planned on the 1000 widgets being available in 14 months from the start. Or agreed to make the number 500 in seven months instead.

True leaders listen to their people and believe them.  Good people tell you the truth they know they will be trusted.  The last thing you want to do is create a situation where your folks start “gaming” you and telling you what they think you want to hear.  This is a direct result of not trusting them.

If you are a leader and you don’t believe what you are being told, then it is overwhelmingly likely that you are the one with the problem.  You either need to radically change what you are doing or get new people – and again, it is very, very likely that you are the one that needs to change, not your people.  And if you have the wrong people, that is probably your fault, too.

The people in the trenches are the ones closest to the issue, and they know best what is happening “on the ground”.  Believe them, and you can adjust your plans and needs accordingly from the start.  Don’t believe them, and your plans will get adjusted anyway.  You can’t  make a baby with three women in three months, and if your plan requires that you do that, your plan is in trouble no matter how much of a hard-ass you are.  And the team knows that you can’t get a baby in three months, and they will be the ones who suffer for a bad plan.  They learn not to trust you and their morale goes into the tank.

Building and maintaining trust in both directions is a critical requirement for a good leader.  Trusting your people will engender their trust in you. It’s a virtuous circle.  Sometimes you even need to trust them even when they are wrong to help build future trust and to show that you believe in them.  If they trust you, they’ll follow you. Their morale will be up.  They’ll do the extra work and they’ll put in the effort because they want to.  People who are trusted and believed do that as a matter of course.

And isn’t that what we want our folks to do?

I had two very interesting conversations this week. I’ll describe them, and then I’ll have a question for you at the end.

First Story: 

Here at Gateway, we have a top notch Human resources (HR) Department.  I’m normally very wary of HR – especially given my recent experiences – but our folks here are great. They are squared away, generally concerned about all the employees, and they are very helpful and welcoming to new hires, me included. 

One of HR’s roles is recruiting, and we are actively working to find developers and QA people.  Earlier this week, I was meeting with one of our HR people on that topic, and she was telling me about being excited that she and her husband were buying their first  house.  They are a young couple with a baby, and so getting their first house is a big milestone.  However, there was a snag:  her husband couldn’t get the day off for their closing date.  And here’s the kicker – her husband works at a bank!  You’d think that a bank would now what a big, exciting, life-changing event a house closing is, but I guess he couldn’t get the day off for it. 

Second Story: 

One thing that happens for all new hires here is that we get an orientation from the two owner/founders.  They tell us how the company was founded, how it grew, what the company core values are, etc.  It is a really cool thing, because you see that our owners really value the company and us as employees.  One of the things that they stressed – and something that has been clear to me even before I started here – is that they really want to create a “job for themselves”; that is, a place where they themselves want to work.  That drives much of their decision-making about benefits, compensation, etc. 

Okay, so to follow up on that.   Two weeks ago, we had a new part-time developer start here.  She’s an interesting case – she’s got a Masters in CS but hasn’t had a job for the last eight years because she was a full-time mom.  Both of her kids are now in school, so she decided to re-enter the work force on a part-time basis.  She’s had her eye on Gateway Ticketing for a while as one of the few software development companies in the area, and we were very happy to find a skilled, capable developer to add to our staff.  It’s working out great for everyone. 

So, being “the boss”, I stopped by to see how things were going.  I asked her how her kids were doing, and she said they were fine – her hours are such that she is there when the get on and off the bus – but that they were concerned that she would have a meeting or something that would keep her from meeting them.  With great pleasure, I told her that there was nothing going on here – no meeting, no task, nothing – that was more important than her meeting her kids at the bus.  Why did I tell her that? Because I have kids, and I know that that is how I’d want the company to react if I were in her shoes. It was great to put that company value into action.  And our new hire seemed pleased to know that the company felt that way.

Okay, so now the question I mentioned up top:  Which company would you rather work for – Gateway Ticketing or that bank?

There is a very strong and steadfast rule in the United States Marine Corps:  Officers go to the end of the chow line.  No self-respecting Marine officer would ever think about getting in the chow line ahead of his troops.  He’ll make sure that every single guy, from the lowest Private up to his own Lieutenants get fed before he takes a bite.  It’s only right – rank hath its privileges, but rank also ensures that the men are taken care of before he is.

This is a tradition as old as the Marines.  One of the primary responsibilities of a leader is to see to the “health and welfare” of those under him.  The needs of the leader should be secondary to the needs of the troops.  Troops that see you at the end of the chow line know that you are placing them above yourself.  They’ll follow you. They know that if you are wise enough to let them eat first, you are wise enough to take care of them in other areas. Officers that “pull rank” and barge to the front are saying “I’m more important and I don’t care about you.”.  People don’t want to follow that kind of “leader”.

This same attitude can – and should – translate over to the “regular” world.  Do you have a better, more powerful computer than your guys?  Did you take the first widescreen monitor for yourself?  Do you order in sandwiches for the executive team when they meet over lunch, but don’t do the same for your team who work evenings and weekends?

A leader should ensure that his team has the best equipment.  As a manager, you are mainly doing email and web surfing, with maybe the occasional spreadsheet.  For those of you in the software development business, your developers are doing builds, running complex IDE’s and debuggers, etc.  That is, they are doing the things that require processing horsepower.  If you are taking the hot new machines and the big monitors because “I’m the boss”, well, you are jumping the chow line.  The productivity of your team, not to mention the morale boost from seeing that you put their needs above yours, are well worth you working with an adequate machine. 

So you want to be a good leader and have people follow you and be part of the team?  Get at the end of the chow line.

When I was in the Navy, a large part of my job was to provide daily briefings to a senior officer.  Very often that senior officer was of flag rank (an Admiral or a General).  It is the job of intelligence guys to keep an eye on things and make sure that the decision makers had the latest information.  That usually took the form of a daily briefing.  Intelligence is a 24/7 business, and so I would have a team working overnight to prepare a briefing every morning at, say 0700.  I usually ended up giving the briefings, because the average enlisted guy doesn’t want to stand up in front of the “big brass”. 

Now, this is a leadership “two-fer”.   First, you get to take credit with your team for “taking the bullet” and being the one to stand up in front of the man, give the briefing and fielding the hard questions.  Second, you can use this as an opportunity for giving credit where credit is due.

Few things can be more frustrating for a team than when the boss takes all the credit for the team’s work.  This has happened to you, I’ll bet.  You come up with an idea.  The idea is shot down.  And then two weeks later, your boss repeats that idea right back to you as if he thought it up.  Or you find out later that he told his boss your idea as if it were his own.  Good leaders have strong egos and don’t need to steal ideas. Instead, if they pass the idea up the chain, they go out of their way to give you credit for it.

Thus when giving those morning briefings, I never passed up an opportunity to give credit where credit was due.  I often tried to work in phrases like “As a result of the excellent analysis done by Petty Officer Johnstone….” or “I don’t know, General, but I know that Chief Lyle has the answer.”    This went a long way.  My team (who was sitting in the back of the room) could see clearly that I knew they were doing good work and that I didn’t want to take credit for what they had done. 

Some people might hesitate to do this because they think that they look bad if they don’t know everything themselves.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The most effective leaders are the ones that nurture and develop effective people.  By giving credit where credit is due, you show that your entire team (led by you, remember) is up to the task.  Your team sees that their work is appreciated and recognized.  They see their boss standing up for them and promoting them. This engenders loyalty, trust, and more hard work.

That’s a win for everyone.

One of the things that I want to do on this blog is to talk about leadership.

I’ve had a lot of experience with leadership.  I was an officer in the US Navy for twelve years, and as such I had many opportunities to both lead and be led.  I’ve also been both an observer and an actual leader and manager in the software business. In both worlds, I’ve seen how critical good leadership is, and how easy it is to be terrible at it.

I’ve been led by some great leaders and by some really bad leaders. Since I knew that I would some day be leading people, I spent a lot of time thinking on and contemplating leadership – you can hardly be an officer in the Navy without doing so.  Paradoxically, it is the bad leaders that taught me the most about leadership and what it means to be an effective leader.  By seeing (and suffering under) the actions of a poor leader – these things generally fell into the category of caring more about themselves than their people – gave me a strong sense of “I’m never going to do that!”, which then, in turn, helped me to figure out what the right thing to do is.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve served under some fine leaders and emulating them is something I try to do, but it is the leaders that weren’t good at leading that really taught me the most. 

Now I’m not claiming to be a great leader – I don’t think that’s the case. But I do think that I’ve had a modicum of success as one, and I think that I have a few nuggets of wisdom to pass on to you fine people.  I’ll be drawing on a lot of my military experiences as well as those in the software industry to share my thoughts.

So pursuant to that,  I’ve created a “Leadership” category here in the blog, and you can follow that tag here if you want.  I won’t be blogging exclusively about Leadership – you might be surprised to find out that I have a lot to say about a lot of things (shocking, I know) --  but I do have a lot of thoughts on the matter that I feel compelled to share.