Blogs, books, videos, articles are everywhere suggesting ways to be a great leader. There is so much written but to be honest I haven’t seen any progress in the last years.
Could it be that the current suggestions are either too general or too complex to make them really useful? Take for example the talk from one of the current experts on Lean Environments John Shook. In this talk, he suggests that the leader has to do mainly two things:
- Get each person to take initiative to solve problems and improve his/her work.
- Ensure that each person’s job is aligned to provide value for the customer and prosperity for the company.
While his advice is great, we can easily get lost on all the details behind his suggestion. Moreover, after watching his video I had a good feeling about understanding leadership but I was not really sure how to start.
Some time ago, after a complexity workshop lead by Dave Snowden I found a different approach to leadership based on complexity. Inside complexity the role of a leader is more about:
- Managing uncertainty through changing contexts.
Managing uncertainty might need adding a degree of inefficiency so that the system as a whole has the potential to evolve. Again, I understood the concept but I still didn’t know how to start.
Finally, after analysing and comparing different definitions I put together a sentence that helps me understand the role of a leader and at the same time tells me how to start. In short:
The main responsibility of a leader is to provide the means for his/her team to let them move forward.
If you have kids you might understand the sentence above. The job of a parent is to provide the means for his/her kid (food, house, education) so that they can have a better future. It might be still not specific enough but the main idea for me was not to have a perfect definition of leadership but to have a way to remember what I am supposed to do so that I can use it in my daily work.
Providing the means requires action. It is always active and not passive (I’ve met some team leaders who step away from the team with the excuse of “letting the team self-organise”). A leader should always be ready to provide any support. And they can do it by listening to the team and observing what is happening around them. There are plenty ways for listening teams and individuals. For example retrospectives, one-to-one meetings, coffee talks, etc. For observing, you will have to be part of the team, working together side by side, this way you would be able to see things that are hidden from the outside. Again, think about kids, how important it is to listen to them , be close to them and to see what is happening around them. This is a never ending job and it changes every time the team matures. The way you take care of a 2 years old kid is different to a 6 years old right? Everyday you have to listen and everyday you have to observe to find the means for help them.
Examples of providing “means” for something
I don’t want to make this article really abstract so let me use the word “tools” instead of “means for” but with the warning of not confusing it with something only physical. Of course we have physical tools, for example, if a person wants to cut a tree you might give him an axe. If he wants to write something, you can provide him with pencil and paper. Ir order to develop an application a developer needs at least a computer.
A second kind of tools are those that are not physical. For example:
1) Processes. Imagine everybody working in a different way without coordination. By setting a process you can help the team move into one direction.
2) Time. Imagine for example people that are working the whole time but they do not have time to learn. In this context giving them time each month to improve would be the tool that you could decide to use.
3) Motivation and support. Maybe a colleague wants to do something but he doesn’t dare. He might need your support.
4) Visualisation aids. Your team might have problems making decisions or noticing what is the current status of the project. By using boards, graphs or statistics you can bring new perspectives to the team so that they can make better decisions.
5) Bringing people together. Maybe people in the team are finding it hard to work together. In this case you can organise meetings, events or even retrospectives that might improve how they relate to each other.
6) Removing an old tool. In some cases you might just need to remove a tool that didn’t work as expected.
7) Love. Sometimes thats the only thing that someone needs to move forward.
From the point of view of complexity you could see these tools as constraints or enablers that help you change the probability of something to happen. We talk about probability because you can not know in advance if your tool will work but by using it you at least increase the probability of something to happen. If the desired results do not work then you replace that tool with another.
Some people have asked me if the team should decide if they want to use them or should you force them? I haven’t found yet a straight answer but I like to think again about the example of a parent with his/her kid some tools have to be enforced and some don’t.
To summarise, the role of a leader is an active role which involves listening to the team and observing everything happening between and around them. It is not about leaving the team alone to make all decisions or to tell them what to do. It is about helping them with providing all the means for whatever they need. This can be seen as navigating a boat in which the people you lead are the captain and you help them reach their destination, you help them dream about the future and make the trip as nice as possible. This is something that I least I would go for :-)
Have a nice day :-)
