Self Management

  • Leave the past behind

    One consistent theme I’ve observed in the most effective leaders I’ve worked with is the ability to leave behind past events once no longer relevant. They use the past to learn, but they don’t spend significant time or energy focusing on or talking about past people, events, old processes, etc. The go-forward plan of action and belief in the future is often much more relevant and important to the team and so prioritizing their time and focus here is more effective.

    Conversely, some of the more junior or less effective leaders I’ve worked with often spend a considerable amount of time discussing prior events, team members, or old and now outdated ways of doing things. They get a bit stuck in the past and struggle to move on.

    Let’s say you have an executive who oversees a function (e.g., marketing) and their success requires a close working relationship with a leader in another function (e.g., production). The marketing leader depends on sufficient advance warning on new products coming off the line to prepare the appropriate brand content to support a launch. Well, say the production supervisor is notorious for dropping the ball on communicating with marketing and often leaves them in a panic, and then that production supervisor is terminated. Fast forward six months: an effective marketing executive will have moved on and re-established a better working relationship and process with the new production supervisor. An ineffective marketing executive will continue to discuss the problems caused by the old production supervisor, distrust the function, and struggle to establish a better working relationship with the new production supervisor.

    Typing this out, it seems straightforward. And yet, I’ve seen examples of folks getting stuck many times over the years. Better to focus ahead.

  • Being held to a higher standard

    The other day, I was in the final stretch of a run and coming North up the street near my home. Coming South towards me were three ~12-year-olds riding scooters, spread horizontally across the sidewalk. As I was coming towards them, I was expecting one would make way for me to pass. But they didn’t and because there were cars parked along the street on one side and a building on the other, I had to awkwardly squeeze myself between a car and the sidewalk to avoid hitting one of them. And I kind of got the sense these kids were aware of the situation and purposefully not moving out of the way because they thought it was funny. Naturally, my first thought was “what a bunch of little pricks” and I briefly fantasized about having just barreled through them. Fortunately, it was only a fleeting immature and petty thought. I was then thinking if I had acted on that impulse, how pathetic a grown man would look in that situation. Because even if those kids were being little shits, adults are held to a higher standard, and rightfully so.

    It reminded me of a situation at Avanti that happened many years ago, when we first started using Microsoft Teams. There was an employee who routinely posted snarky, sarcastic, and ‘know-it-all’ responses in public channels. Mostly in response to other people asking for help or clarification on product related topics. He was older and had significant subject matter expertise and was working in an individual contributor role. It would have been apparent to anyone reading that he was being a jerk. His Manager, who was a newly minted and first-time manager, started posting public and snarky retorts in reply. And even though the Manager was clearly in the right, by mirroring the employee’s poor behaviour, it reflected even more poorly on him than his employee. It reflected poorly because we expect more from our leaders. We hold them to a higher bar. And that feels appropriate; a leader should be held to higher standards.

  • Can taking pride in your work be a problem?

    I generally believe taking pride in your work is a hugely important characteristic commonly found in high-performing professionals. When you take pride in your work, you care. You are more likely to go above and beyond. You are likely to re-read before hitting send. Taking pride in what you do also correlates positively with effort; you’re going to put more in because it matters to you.

    For these reasons, I like hiring people and working with people who take pride in their work. There are two watch-outs, though. First, when someone takes immense pride in their work, it can occasionally lead them to strive for perfection. Perfection is impossible to achieve. There’s a gap between excellence and perfection, and in almost all scenarios ‘excellent’ is a sufficient bar to strive for. Usually, I start to wonder if someone is falling into the perfection trap if they always deliver extremely high-quality work but consistently struggle to keep up with the pace of deliverables, if they deliver work after a reasonable, mutually agreed-upon deadline has passed, or if they can only hit the deadline by working an unreasonable amount. Second, is when I notice someone struggle to get started on a new project or work deliverable. The desire to deliver a work product close to perfection can lead to inaction by creating this intimidating invisible barrier to start.

    Fortunately, I’d much rather work with someone who struggles with these challenges than someone who doesn’t give a shit. With coaching, it’s possible to educate someone on the declining marginal benefit of taking something close to ‘perfection’, and make them feel really, really good about delivering something that’s (just) excellent. There’s still a lot of pride to be had and finding that sweet spot between quality and effort is an important learned skill.

    Part of building good professional judgement over time is knowing which projects and work products require more or less time and effort and whether the investment is likely to impact the outcome. For far too long, my desire to take pride in my work resulted in me investing too much effort into deliverables where the quality didn’t necessarily impact the outcome much. Spending an hour honing the perfect email proposal to an executive at a client, who you can reasonably predict might skim the email and say “let’s hop on the phone” may not be the best investment. I try to remind myself of the intended outcome of what I’m working on to help calibrate what level of effort should go into it, despite a general desire to produce something I can be proud of.