Tag: leadership

Are you a teacher or a teller?

On September 16, 2021

Recently I was given Cameron Schwab’s book “What leaders can learn from football“, which was followed up by a webinar with Cameron to apply the book to the current COVID remote working situation. I’d like to share my key takeaways.

Boards are more distant than ever

There is an increasing gap between boards and the team. Boards are asking how we take advantage of this seismic change, how do we be more bold? Teams however are over the groundhog day of lockdowns, constant ambiguity and juggling their lives. How do leaders bridge that gap?

Firstly leaders must build a foundation of trust. This involves empathising with their teams. Listening. Starting every conversation with “how are you?”. Take 2 minutes to check in and connect. Recognise the struggle they are going through. Empathetic conversations don’t have to take a long time. You have to aspire to be a better human and it will resonate. Trust is the outcome of showing your authenticity and mettle through tough situations.

Name your 6-7 most meaningful relationships inside the company. That’s your measure of trust, buy in, clarity and connection. That’s your key to leadership success. You can’t maintain any more relationships than that.

Once trust is built, then as leaders our most important role is to reduce ambiguity for our teams. Leaders are makers of meaning – they create a story of “us”. They are makers of place – creating a sense of belonging. You belong to this team because of your attitude/character, your capabilities and whether you connect in personally.

The contradiction of a board is they have the least detail on the company, but are charged with making the really key decisions. What does winning look like? What do we need to be good at? Can we get an alignment between ambition and capability? If not, we have set expectations incorrectly.

Leaders overpromise to their board because of this, they overstate capability to match the board’s ambition. You need to be honest about what we are going to do – We can’t do everything, the most important thing is choosing what to do. Prioritising.

How will we know if we prioritised correctly? If there’s a gap between ambition and measurement. Do the board agree your measurable goals are ambitious enough?

Teaching and Learning

Your team cannot outperform your leadership. Leaders set the culture, which drives behaviours, which drive results. Your main responsibility as a leader is to create an atmosphere where your team can do their best work.

Transparency is the key behaviour, keeping your teams informed so they can solve problems and role modelling the standard of behaviour expected.

Again the building block of is trust. Carve your mistakes into the wall. In this way you use your own learnings to build trust into the team.

Leaders need to be connected in the future. Make sense of the world quickly and be decisive. Be a transparent learner and then great teacher. If you’re wrong it’s ok, bring those learnings into your team. Be able to adapt quickly. Be a great storyteller around that. Cross a bridge of vulnerability to teach your experience.

Authenticity from the top

Leadership has never been more important and expectations have never been higher. In business, we promote people to leadership before we teach them leadership. In sport, leadership is taught and expected from the start – every player needs to step up during key moments and lead when the ball is in their hand. An extraordinary number of people climb the leadership mountain and then find they don’t like the view. You have to get to the point where as a leader you can walk into a room and not have to fake it or you will burn out. People can smell fake leaders.

Work flexibility

By telling teams they can work flexibility, you’re actually putting the onus on them to go figure it out. The reality is that for some people remote work is an advantage, for others it’s a disadvantage. Not everyone is treated equally by this, but they should be treated fairly and with empathy.

The people who complain that culture is hard remotely, probably had a good culture by accident before. You need to be more deliberate. Put the challenge to high performing teammates, what can you do to help others? Leaders need to disperse responsibility to the team. Be surprised by the insights teams have into each other, then can leverage their perspectives and insights.

Developing my Leadership User Manual

By Scott Savage

On August 25, 2021

In Management

Leadership User Manuals were popular back in 2018 as high growth companies tried to scale their leadership. Claire Hughes had probably the most famous example she created after leaving Google to join Stripe, where she took a very comprehensive and tactical approach.

Although I’m in a much smaller growth business, I do think it’s important for growth leaders to be self-reflective and communicate widely with their teams. To achieve this, I drafted and then asked my team to refine a leadership user manual of my own. This exercise in itself is a great test of psychological safety on your team! I’ve decided to share my manual publicly below, for me to reflect on in a few years, to inspire others to share and to provide an even higher level of personal transparency.

Scott’s User Manual

How I view success

Enjoying what you do (almost) every day. Australia is a land of privilege and we have a responsibility to do something that both makes ourselves and others happy. Even when you don’t enjoy it, feeling that at least you chose this path and are learning through the process.

How I communicate

When you’re not hearing much from me – You are doing a good job, and I appreciate your work.
“Please do this” – You need to do this now, and I shouldn’t have needed to tell you. Tell me when it’s done.
“To be perfectly honest” – This is an intervention because you’ve strayed way off track. Come back to me with what you will do next before you do it.
Bullet points – It helps me to structure my thoughts logically.

Things I do that may annoy or be misunderstood

I change my perspective on what should be done between meetings
I introduce a new idea or priority without much warning
I give directives without context
There are usually 2 reasons why I change my decision:
- New data – When I hear new data, it might cause me to change my decision. I then sometimes skip steps in bringing my team along with exactly why I changed my decision. If this happens, please challenge me with “What data made you change your mind on this?”
- An important stakeholder has had input – I will always name the stakeholder and be transparent with their feedback. My instinct is to test responses with the stakeholder immediately so I can better guide my team. When I then communicate to my team, it is very directive because I feel I have already tested a response and aligned on a narrative.
Not being clear on whether the problem you are raising is a delegation or an FYI
- I’m sharing because I value transparency, but if there’s no immediate ask then it’s a stretch goal for a future quarter

What gains and loses my trust

Gains – proactivity
- When you admit a mistake or weakness and ask for help.
- When you preempt an extra question – I appreciate knowing the details.
- When you follow through with something you said you would do
Loses – inconsistency
- When I get information just before/after a stakeholder update. I lost face because I didn’t know something was wrong. I appreciate knowing the details.
- When you stop doing something that was your responsibility because I stopped paying attention. I trust you to own your area especially when I’m not watching.
- When after a pattern emerges (e.g. repeated issue) you don’t at least seek to put a system in place.

My strengths

Bringing order to chaos – structure, prioritisation, frameworks, data

My growth areas

I need to be more explicit when giving feedback, particularly around whether it was acceptable or not
As per misunderstandings, I need to provide more context when changing a decision

My expectations of my direct reports

Own your shit – Surprise me with ambitious goals, follow through on what you said and show me that you know the key details. Autonomy should be your goal, and then my role is to challenge you with greater opportunities.

Logistics

My calendar is always up to date and public, I always accept/decline and appreciate edit access so I can reshuffle if necessary
Anyone can book my calendar at any time. I love drop in 1:1’s, particularly for a coffee or walk around the city.
1:1’s are your time to drive the agenda. If I have no questions then I’m feeling confident in your ability.

Giving and Receiving Feedback

If I’m doing this well, then my feedback will never be a surprise. Tell me if you are surprised or if it’s consistent with past feedback to help me calibrate here. Surprises should never happen.
If you are not getting enough feedback, I hope you feel safe enough to ask.
If you ask and don’t get what you want, keep asking. I respect persistence when I don’t have a good answer for you.

Communicating context to drive specific behaviours

By Scott Savage

On June 23, 2020

In Business, Startups

Words like “consultant”, “workdriver” and “special projects” still create a PTSD style effect in my head. These words drip with corporate context, very clearly and precisely signalling whether you were succeeding or failing. The email announcing a VP moving to “special projects” triggered a global cascade of watercooler conversations where we each dissected and calibrated their missteps and realigned our own. It feels like a high performing culture because you’re communicating in flow – there are barely any words exchanged but you can replay together how a pattern of behaviour over years became fatal for said VP. It’s almost a cult like sensation. People worry about leaving because they fear never experiencing this level of flow (read: intelligence) ever again?

Tim Fung from Airtasker reminded me of that on his webinar this morning. Why do leaders communicate? His example was a mistake he made, sending an email whilst under stress that the expected working hours were 8:30am – 6pm. On reflection, he wasn’t trying to communicate an expected outcome – people in seats. Instead his company was under serious financial pressure and the next few weeks required a mammoth effort to keep the dream alive, but he failed to communicate that context and lost good people because of it.

So what was Tim trying to communicate? Well the zeitgeist answer would be that he was trying to communicate a cultural expectation. But if your company goals are service quality and people focus, perhaps that internal culture would be counterproductive? No, this wasn’t an attempt at ongoing cultural change.

Tim specifically reflected that the goal of this communication was to set context. He wants to know that when a specific context is shared, a certain set of behaviours are triggered at scale. For example if an “investor presentation” is announced for a few weeks time, an increasingly large ship needs to transform immediately. The operations team cut costs, HR cancels all off-sites, engineering ships the shiny MVP that wasn’t quite ready. This is not a cultural theme that persists during the year, but instead a carefully communicated and indoctrinated context that dictates specific behaviour.

I suppose most of the time this context, just like culture, is set through repetition. But what if you could construct context more deliberately? If there are 3 regular events that are critical to your business every year, how could you communicate the context of those events in a crystal clear way? For example if you are Apple and your company’s innovation appetite pivots on the annual WWDC event, how do you describe that context to a new hire or even a customer?

Pivot points get a lot of discussion in the startup world, but I think these context events are the pivot points every company needs to know, and communicate heavily and precisely.

Leading Product through COVID-19

By Scott Savage

On May 5, 2020

In Australia, software, Startups

Last week Liam invited me to participate in a webinar titled “Pivoting Product and Product teams through a Crisis”. It was a real honour to be invited, as the panel was made up of a number of great product leaders from Sydney. Mable in particular has seen some big swings in supply and demand, as well as winning a very exciting Department of Health contract.

If you’d like to view the webinar, please see this YouTube video:

Pivoting Product and Product teams through a Crisis

Real men pay salaries

By Scott Savage

On April 15, 2011

In Business, HR, Personal

“Real men don’t earn salaries, they pay salaries”. This quote from “A Sparrow Falls”, the Wilbur Smith book that I am currently reading, really struck me like a slap in the face. Why was it so painful? How do I get to the stage where I am paying the salaries?

Lately I have been trying to build my management and leadership skills. Amongst other things, this involved taking a Leadership training course at Google. It emphasised a number of pretty deep concepts, things like being an authentic person and this importance of bringing this authenticity to work with you (which is a fairly intimidating concept). There were of course articles from the Harvard Business Review to cover, including the four steps in the art of persuasion. These being:

Establish Credibility – demonstrate you know your stuff
Frame for Common Ground – find the stuff you both agree on
Provide Evidence – demonstrate something new that builds on your common ground
Connect Emotionally – expand the current ground with them at your side

Next steps? Find mentors. I loved watching an interview of Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter and now Squareup. He isn’t an amazing presenter, however I feel that I present in a similar way and have a similar view on the world. Reading his Vanity Fair interview and numerous Venture Beat articles, it paints an inspirational picture of a guy who throws every part of him into his goals and passions. Is this authentic leadership? He built everything himself form scratch, based on his passion and getting his hands dirty. The noble story of the engineer, putting the product first and that product now paying the salaries.

Or what about someone like Greg Ellis, the current CEO of REA? I watched his CEO Hub interview today on Business Spectator. He built his career like a pyramid. Rather than rising to the top with a single skillbase and being forced to add to it while riding product growth, he worked the other way around. Build marketing, sales, HR, legal and other skills at the best companies you can find, and then find or make one of your own. Is this any more or less a noble to be paying the salaries?

Or maybe it’s like Alan Noble explained this week. It’s not about mentors, it’s about surrounding yourself with great people and taking the opportunities when you see them. Meanwhile, where is that copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People…

Vision and leadership

By Scott Savage

On January 4, 2010

In Business, Personal

Seth Godin is my favourite marketing guru, and he recently published a free e-book that has statements from 70+ great thinkers. For me, reading these statements was the perfect way to reflect on the past year and motivate myself for a big 2010.

There was one slide in particular that resonated for me. The ability to create a vision is a product management skill that I have really tried to build, but I never realised that by creating a vision you are demonstrating leadership. It is so easy to put vision in the “too hard” basket and let your daily grind expand to fill your day. A leader rises above this by setting a vision that resonates with those around you and motivates them to do the same.

In a down economy – particularly one that has taken most of us by surprise – things get very tactical. We are just trying to survive. What worked yesterday does not necessarily work today. What works today may not necessarily work tomorrow. Decisions become pragmatic.

But after a while this wears on people. They don’t know why their efforts matter. They cannot connect their actions to a larger story. Their work becomes a matter of just going through the motions, living from weekend to weekend, paycheck to paycheck.

This is where great leadership makes all the difference. Leadership is more than influence. It is
about reminding people of what it is we are trying to build – and why it matters. It is about painting a picture of a better future.It comes down to pointing the way and saying, “C’mon. We can do this!”

When times are tough, vision is the first casualty. Before conditions can improve, it is the first thing we must recover.

Company Culture at Netflix

By Scott Savage

On August 5, 2009

In Business, HR

How many companies clearly define their culture and HR policy in a public way? Jack Welch of GE famously held the view that the bottom 10% of the company should be fired every year, but in the days of labor shortages that would be frowned upon. That’s why it was refreshing for me to see this slideshow from Netflix. Have a read for yourself, although be warned it is quite long and detailed:

So what do I think? Firstly it is awesome that a company publishes this kind of presentation, everyone should be proud of who they work for and have no problems articulating that to the public. I don’t think there are many companies who are so upfront, open and honest about who they are (in many cases even being aware would be a great start).

In particular I liked:

“adequate performance gets a generous severence package” – provocative but also highly motivating to myself at least. There is nothing better than being in a team where you know everyone cares as much as you do, and nothing worse than putting your heart into something that sits in someone’s “to do” list.
Brilliant Jerks – the cost to teamwork is too high. I have had managers who make excuses for a brilliant jerk because they hate the thought of rehiring for a person that is currently letting them put their feet up.
Rare Responsible Person – Doesn’t wait to be told what to do, Never feels “that’s not my job”. Everyone should pitch in, no-one should feel territorial. If I am struggling I will put my hand up and ask for advice, and I expect others to do the same and welcome my input.
Value simplicity – No-one can manage lots of small products successfully. Focus on what works, and keep making it work even better.
High Performance People make few errors – Hire well, trust your people to do their job. Don’t cotton wool bad people and have checks and balances to make sure they don’t do damage. That adds huge amounts of waste and overhead.
Control through context– Managers should communicate a clear strategy and whatever happens within that strategy is up to the employee.

What did you get out of it? Does your company even have a policy or statement on culture?

Top 10 traits of bad leaders

By Scott Savage

On June 18, 2009

In Business, HR

Harvard Business Publishing summarised the 360-degree feedback data on over 11,000 leaders from a study completed by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman. Here are the 10 most common leadership shortcomings, how many apply to you or your leader?

Lack energy and enthusiasm
Accept their own mediocre performance
Lack clear vision and direction
Have poor judgement
Don’t collaborate
Don’t follow the standards they set for others
Resist new ideas
Don’t learn from mistakes
Lack interpersonal skills
Fail to develop others

It is interesting to note that the most successful and least successful differed most significantly in their energy and enthusiasm. Can a good leader therefore be trained or are they born? I see some similarities to the concept of “culture comes from the top”. If the CEO demonstrates energy and enthusiasm this has a huge impact on their report’s motivation to follow, and this energy in turn cascades down the chain. Finally poor management is one of the top 10 reasons employees quit their job, so the consequences of bad leaders are serious.

The Top-Down effect

By Scott Savage

On July 19, 2008

In Business

A company culture is something that is very difficult to describe, let alone create. One of the blogs I read, systematicHR, posted up an interesting response post which covers the top-down flow effect that a CEO has on company culture. I think the closing lines sum it up very nicely:

The CEO absolutely defines culture whether they intend to or not. HR then further defines what that strategy will look like.

So what are some ways that a CEO can do this? Well I like realestate.com.au‘s approach of having a CEO blog and bi-annual company conferences where the CEO presents the company achievements, strategy and goals. Just engaging in this open communication helps create an open culture, but the real key is in the actual organisational strategy. As the post says, this strategy will directly dictate culture and will change depending on the nature of the business.

Having worked in a sales organisation almost 5 years I would say there is a very fine line between a competitive and a demoralising organisational strategy (and therefore company culture). The nature of sales people and cycles makes this line a fluctuating target. The two biggest things I believe are:

Consistency – client spread, discipline, sense of fairness
Communication – Competitive but still collaborative (teams help)

In the end I guess the key is to clearly communicate and inspire passion for what you do. People will pick this up whether it is active or passive and positive or negative. The moral of the story is be aware of your influence.