Leadership

An introduction to my leadership philosophy and techniques.

Philosophy

When we take on the role of leader, we need to fully understand the responsibilities we assume. We are getting directly involved in the livelihoods of many people. The decisions we make can have wide-ranging effects, positive or negative. Those within our immediate sphere of influence are spending a significant part of their day there. The environment we nurture can be a force for success and personal fulfillment. Or frustration, apathy, and poor financial outcomes.

With that responsibility, we need to be held accountable. If no one is going to do it with us, then we must hold ourselves accountable. We need to take full ownership of the areas we can directly control. And the only thing we have any control over is ourselves. That means taking complete ownership of what and how we communicate. As well as acting with integrity, even at our expense.

As leaders, our job is to empower those we presume to lead to success. Success for themselves and everyone else impacted by it. Our mission is to create a sustainable & virtuous cycle of personal growth and value creation. The best way I’ve found to do this is through community and culture.

Community & Culture

When I talk about community, I’m not referring to a general sense of fellowship. Though, that will be a nice side-effect. When I look to create a community, I am building shared ownership. Think, “Community Garden” rather than “The Gaming Community.”

Culture is another concept I should clarify. I’m not talking about things like free snacks, clubs, or how happy employees are. When I set out to influence a culture, I focus on values and how those values are expressed through action. At the most basic level, culture is a group’s practices.

The questions I might be asking:

• If we value quality, what practices are we using to increase quality?
• If we value flexibility in our software, what techniques are we using to ensure it’s flexible?
• If we value candor, how’re we empowering everyone’s voice?
• If we value speed, what practices are we using to increase velocity?
• If we value big ideas, how do we make sure all ideas are heard?

When our values are aligned with our actions, and the group commits to those actions, we have the roots from which we can grow shared purpose.

Shared Ownership

Ownership is the ability and liberty to decide how something will be used or what will be done with it. In Scrum, the development team owns the sprint. They decide which stories go onto the sprint and how they will be executed after negotiating a sprint goal with the product owner.

For a group to have ownership, each individual must have ownership of what they can control, trust each other to make the best decisions with the information they have, and respect the value each person brings to the team. When the group must reach a consensus, this trust and respect can allow the needed openness and candor. The team itself must decide when consensus is needed and how they will achieve it.

As leaders, we must give room for shared ownership to develop. And provide safety and guidance when the team falls short. Sustainable self-organization of teams is only possible through a shared ownership community and the culture to support it.

Accountability

When we talk about accountability, we are often referring to reward and punishment. This kind of accountability is critically important, especially for those who have power and influence. Even more so when we are talking about actions that have legal and ethical implications. This kind of accountability should be limited but not eliminated.

More often, accountability is about giving answers as to what is working, what isn’t, and what is going to be done in the future. A developer is accountable for their story meeting the definition of done, a product owner the product roadmap, and the Scrum master for maintaining a sustainable velocity. While at some point, there may be a reason to introduce rewards and punishments, each of these examples is simply about giving an account.

We must make it safe to give a full account for everyone for what they own. When we focus too much on the reward and punishment piece of accountability, we risk losing the information we need to shape a high-performing team.

Responsibility

I’d like to simplify our concept of responsibility. Our responsibilities are the things we have committed to act on. Commitment is overloaded too. Here, I’m not talking about making statements of certainty. Rather, a dedication, focus, and full effort. For example, when we commit to quality, we can’t say our software will be released bug-free. There is no way to give 100% quality assurance.

Instead, a commitment to quality might mean:

• We are disciplined in our use of test-driven development.
• We automate user acceptance tests.
• We don’t merge to master without all tests passing.
• We use canary deployments and A/B testing to verify production before full deployment.
• We focus on just enough design.

So, if everyone on the team is responsible for quality, they all commit to the actions we believe produce the highest quality software possible within our constraints and context. This commitment to action is the essence of responsibility.

A Little Bit of Ownership Goes a Long Way

A team I was managing was struggling to produce clear and concise written communication. Written communication was critical to how this team operated. To create community and shift the culture to support this new shared ownership, this is what I did:

1. Found someone passionate about writing but who was struggling.
2. Learned what their goal was in writing.
3. Showed how their writing wasn’t serving their goal.
4. Gave them a path to meet their goal.
5. Met with them weekly to review their written work they selected for review.
6. Once they improved, I gave them full ownership to train the rest of the team.

There a couple things I’d like to point out in this example of creating community. First, is that I didn’t select the person who was the best at writing from the group. I found the person who was the most passionate. Second, challenging a passionate writer isn’t comfortable. It was critical that I understood their goals, empathized and validated those goals, and then showed how these goals weren’t being met. Third, I gave a clear path forward. Fourth, I gave them the choice of what to review with me in our one-on-one meetings to further create ownership. Finally, my challenge to train the team had two significant side-effects. The first being that the person wasn’t comfortable in groups or being the focus of attention. This was a personal growth opportunity beyond the writing. And most significantly, having a team member own the training created a stronger community and culture around our writing.

Before I knew it, the team sent each other their emails for review and advice on how to have difficult conversations on digital platforms. Together, we created a sustainable, self-organizing, and virtuous improvement cycle around our business writing. Along the way, the trainer had to learn to train. The team was impressed by the quality of the training, and so more members learned some basics of how to train. A couple of years later, one of those team members is training an entire organization on how to run Scrum. A little bit of ownership goes a long way!