On Perfection

Last week's article ‘On being right’ drew quite a few responses from readers about how wise it is not to go in hard, and also how challenging it can be to do that in practice. Several people highlighted the parallels with wanting perfect outcomes. 

There’s a pragmatic balancing act when it comes to solving problems. We can easily get bogged down in way too much detail, seeking the perfect outcome. Perfection very often stops us from moving at a sensible pace and sometimes bogs us down completely. 

Getting something done at an acceptably good standard, getting it out and moving on is usually a lot better than fussing over tiny details that will not contribute much in the way of results, but will increase the amount of work to be done. There are few exceptions to this. Notable ones are high-consequence decisions that are difficult or impossible to reverse, or high risk situations where controls need to be very carefully implemented - Those scenarios are pretty rare.

Good enough and done will almost always beat perfect, but still polishing. Get after it.

On being right

‘What we are doing carries substantial risks. I’ve got the data to prove it. I’ve been trying to get the decision makers to see it, but the conversations are going nowhere.’

This was the essence of 3 recent coaching conversations with leaders who have significant influence, but they are not the decision makers. All three had been working hard to prove their point and galvanise a decision or action. It’s not going well for any of them. 

Going in hard seldom works - even if you are right and can prove it. It’s inherently adversarial and tends to get various parties digging in on their perspective. When we try to influence like that, we can argue until well after the cows come home. 

Going in hard forgets:

• There may be other factors I can’t see from my position.

• Other parties may have investment (time, money, resources, ideas) in the way things are. If they feel personally attacked, they are likely to dig in.

• Even if I have the problem right, I may not have the solution right.

• Even if I have both the problem and the solution right, I’ll need others to fix it. I need agreement or at least alignment.

• If the perfect solution gets no buy-in, it’s no solution at all. A partial solution with solid buy-in will beat it hands down. 

• There may be an even bigger problem that is the cause of what I can see.

• What else might be missing?

Instead of going in hard, get curious about what constraints might be present for others. Are there ways to work with them to remove those obstacles? Explore for understanding, not for ‘right’. You’ll likely expand your influence.

Faster than before

Once a team gets clear about what's important, both culturally and transactionally, they can start to build speed. Clarity brings the possibility of mantras… pieces of language that are packed with shared meaning.  

For example Atlassian, a global company founded and headquartered in Australia, has several mantras. One of them is “Be the change you seek”. For them, it means:

• Take initiative rather than seeking/waiting for permission. 

• If there’s a problem, find a way to get involved in the fix.

• If there’s a gap in the market, fill it.

• If the product is not up to standard, change it. 

Smart leaders build mantras with the people around them. Then they find clear examples to reinforce their meaning. Mantras and clarity go hand in hand. Once you have them, you can remind people of what is important and set direction with a few words dense with shared meaning. It takes effort to get to that place, but on the other side of it is speed.

Do you have any mantras? If not, what might they be?

Dig Deeper

The Dig Deeper Podcast is a great resource for leaders who want to create lasting impact. Digby Scott hosts a great conversation, and it was a pleasure to be a guest on the show. You can listen to the episode here.

If you enjoy this conversation, keep an eye out for a joint event Digby and I will be running in Perth next month. We'll be inviting leaders to a session on proactive and impactful leadership in a rapidly changing environment. Event details coming soon - if you'd like to be directly updated, send me an email, and I’ll put you on the list.

Refine “Good” and “Done”

If you want to go further and faster with a team, cohesion is critical. Cohesion is driven by clarity. 

A few days ago I was working with an excellent leadership team. They  invest heavily in finding clarity. Even so, there's uncertainty.  One leader said, “We don't have iron clad agreement on what ‘Done’ is or what ‘Good’ is. Great places to start if you want clarity.

When leaders and teams explore this, they refine clarity with each iteration of work. While the answers may seem simple, perhaps even obvious, getting clear creates alignment. Every  team member can orient their effort to team standards. Not just for the task in hand, but for how this particular team does its work.  A void here gets filled by silos. Sub teams focus on getting their work right, rather than looking at the whole picture. If the silos seem strong, but the whole seems weak, ‘Done’ and ‘Good’ is a great place to start.

Get clear - then repeat often. Not using exactly the same words and examples, but shining light on finer and finer detail. Then empower others in your team to do the same. Once a clear baseline is set,  a team can move very rapidly because they know exactly what they are attempting to achieve. There’ll be more and more reinforcement of a job well done both inherently from the task, and from satisfied team leaders. With consistency, it self perpetuates.

How clearly can you answer those questions?  What does good look like? And what does done look like?

Making the Leap

There’s a paradox happening among the Not for Profit organisations I work with. On the one hand, they are dealing with the slimmest operational margins ever. On the other, many are experiencing radical growth. Dealing with the duality of that is challenging.

Some of my clients have grown by more than 3X over a 12 - 24 month period. It’s taken them from less than 50 employees to over 150, which represents a radical transformation and an epic challenge for leaders.

When a whole organisation is less than 50 people, culture, purpose, values and standards are easy to lead. Everyone knows enough about each other and the various parts of the business to feel connected to the core purpose. Culture happens in conversations where significant portions of the staff are present. A meeting between 5 people is 10% of all staff. If 20 people get together it's almost half.

At 150, everything changes. Organisations become more reliant on systems to make it work. People know less about the whole. They know less of their colleagues well. And that meeting of 5 is now around 3% of your staff. Leaders who ‘lead by walking around’ no longer have time to meet and greet everyone. Recruitment is more diversified. People get more focussed on the work they are tasked with and have less visibility of the whole.

If leaders don’t make an intentional shift in how they lead, strong culture erodes due to less connection back to purpose. It’s been a great pleasure to work with organisations making the leap. There are some easy shifts leaders can make to continue building a strong and purposeful organisation. It’s definitely challenging with rapid growth, but it can be done.

Going Potty

A leader was telling me about challenges with their team not producing work to a high enough standard. Everyone's a bit frustrated. This seems to be a trend - expecting great results on the first effort.

There’s a leadership legend passed around about a pottery class where students were given the choice of submitting one perfect piece for assessment, or producing as many pots as they could and submit them all for assessment. The best quality pots came from the quantity group, not the quality group. Turns out this never happened in pots, but it did in a photography class. It was written about in a book called Art and Fear, where there were already too many photography examples, so they changed it to pots. The pottery story has since spread like wildfire, and keeps popping up refreshed. Why? Because the principle makes sense.

For many (maybe most) things, we need reps to get good. This is challenging, especially when there are significant consequences that go with getting something wrong - Pilots, Lawyers, Accountants, Soldiers and Surgeons spring to mind. Note - all these professions create opportunities for practice alongside someone who is already accomplished.

How and where could you/your team benefit from reps? How could you set that up for maximum experience/exposure with minimum risk?

Don’t expect awesome if there’s been no practice.

Ferocious Heart

Some of the high performance environments I have been exposed to burn people at the altar of success. It’s always felt unnecessarily harsh to me - that performance often costs humanity, humility and health. People pushing for a result at the cost and exclusion of all else. Some heavy hitters claim it’s the only way. Musk has achieved more than many and asserts that, “The fundamental weakness of Western Civilization is empathy”. As if care prevents success and progress.

So it’s been great reading Gilbert Enoka’s book “Become Unstoppable”. Gilbert was the mindset coach for the New Zealand All Blacks during their most dominant era. High performance. Highly competitive with people head-to-head on a weekly basis for selection. Ferocious on the field. Unyielding standards. Enoka clearly lays out a recipe for success which has at its heart Care, Belonging and Vulnerability. Not words that immediately spring to mind in elite sport. But essential to building the culture the All Blacks are famous for, on and off the field.

The book is rich with insights that can be applied to many endeavours. And if you happen to be a rugby or sport fan it’s an intimate look into the detail behind one of the most successful teams of all time. Well worth a read.

Not a Knot - passing skills to another person

I was teaching someone relatively new to abseiling. Gina (not her real name) was quickly building skills and was hugely enthusiastic. I’d delegated the rigging of the ropes on a cliff she’d never worked on before. As I walked back along her ropes, I spotted a knot that was not. It was sloppily tied and not fit for the purpose she’d used it for. Abseiling is very safe if all the gear is properly used, but get it wrong and the consequences can be spectacularly fatal. 

A group was about to join us for the day, so I quickly called Gina over, discussed the problem and demonstrated a better knot to tie. After the group left we did a couple of practice rigs to expand her knowledge about rigging. It would have been easy for it to be awkward, or to feel like micro management, but we were following an explicit skill transfer process:

We had discussed and used the process for other skills and were moving from We Do Together, to You Do, I Watch. The process encourages demonstration, clarification, and thinking. It’s a great way to hand your skill set to another person. If they know what you expect from them at each stage and what they can expect from you, it takes much of the potential stress and clunkiness out of learning. 

A couple of weeks later, Gina rigged all the ropes, and inspected them herself while I laid out equipment for the group that was arriving. We both knew that she had developed enough skill and judgement to set the ropes. She also knew that I would answer questions and/or assist if she found herself not sure what to do. We’d taken the time to build mutual trust in each other in relation to that activity. Next week, we’d start the process again on a more complex skill set.

Can I trust them?

“Can I trust them?” is one of the most asked questions when I am coaching leaders about delegation. When we delegate stuff, often it remains our responsibility - If it doesn’t work out we may be the person who will be held responsible.

In many environments there is a regulatory responsibility too - if something you delegate goes wrong, your ‘licence to operate’ may be on the line. Potentially you’ll face regulatory penalties of some kind. This is true whether you are a board delegating to a CEO, or a frontline nurse manager, delegating to a team of nurses. It applies in many settings and at many levels.

So how can you trust someone to do what you have delegated properly - trust them enough to not be constantly looking over their shoulder to make sure it's OK? Especially if what they are doing is complex and/or complicated.

It takes time. How much time will depend on the person's prior experience, their confidence and their skill. It’s useful to have a system for handing skill sets on (We’ll talk about that next time). It’s also useful to consider what you will need to see from them to be satisfied that they know what they are doing.

Be transparent about how long you will be watching and what you are watching for. Explain the risks/consequences if it goes wrong and the incentives for getting it right. By doing so you are creating an environment where trust can develop and delegation will be successful.

Really Quick?

We spend a lot of time smashing through to-do’s. Pumping it out. Getting stuff done. But is it as quick as it seems? Some situations I’ve encountered recently:

• A major rewrite of critical messaging, because a subject matter expert speculated on something, rather than verifying with data. Quick answer, but the result is days of work, with many people involved to get an accurate picture. 

• An Executive team spent a day reflecting and discussing the evolution of their business. They highlighted 3 significant pressure points in the 12 -18 month future. They are now planning for those periods. In the past, they have been ‘surprised’ by similar pressure points that haven’t gone well due to lack of planning. That day seemed slow and could be viewed as unproductive, but they are now well set up for what’s coming.

There are many situations where stepping back and taking more time results in a slower moment, but a faster future.

Where could you step back and gain a future advantage this week?

When the circumstances suck

If you’ve been on the planet for long enough, you’ve encountered adversity. It’s part of life. Sometimes the circumstances you face are grinding and unpalatable. I’ve been working with a few people and organisations facing this sort of adversity over the last few years, and have been facing my own challenges in parallel. Sometimes the deck is definitely stacked against you - so what do you do?

There’s a useful paradox - Two seemingly opposed mindsets held in parallel. On the one hand, accept the reality that you are facing. On the other, fight like hell to change it. So simple to say. Simple to understand. Bloody hard in practice. Personally, the acceptance part is very challenging. It feels like giving up. It feels like concession. It doesn’t feel fair. 

In reality, getting to acceptance takes some time. And the time varies depending on the people and the circumstance. Often it’s not linear. Some days acceptance comes more easily than others.

So what does acceptance achieve? It lets us see the circumstances for what they truly are. It allows us to make calmer, more reasoned decisions. And, it helps us focus the fight on the parts that we can control or influence. It doesn’t always feel palatable, but it's more effective than beating yourself against an unmovable wall. The faster you can find acceptance the better.

What do you need to accept, without giving up the fight?

Proper Connection

“If you stack in a single stainless steel nut, the resistance is enough to potentially start a fire.” I was discussing a 12v electrical connection with a knowledgeable friend. When we unpacked it, what he said made sense, but it really isn’t obvious unless you know. It would be a simple and understandable mistake to make. 

It reminded me of two recent situations involving human connection and similar heat. 

“He doesn’t seem to listen, or respect our experience” - Executive Leaders talking about a peer. The ‘evidence’ was he sat looking down with his arms folded. On discussion, it turns out that in his culture of origin ‘looking down, arms folded’ is how you listen with respect. Poor quality connection, unnecessary heat. Burning time, energy and resources in an environment where everyone is already busy.

“Sales, Warehousing and Delivery just will not cooperate” - Classic silos. They all needed each other but were getting in each other's way. Delivery felt sales were overpromising. Warehousing reckons no one allows enough lead time. Again, poor connection with the various people not understanding the strengths and limitations of the other people in the organisation.

It crops up all over the place and it’s costly by any metric you care to examine. If things could be working better, great questions to ask are “what is the quality of the connections and how could they be improved?”

Back and Beyond

This week is a short fictional piece reflecting on a pattern that seems as old as time. What do you long for in the past and dream of in the future? How can you make more of that part of your today?

Back and Beyond (by Mike House, who is considerably older than a digital native)

They called us digital natives. Born into a connected world. Now  old, I gaze on youth around me, and lament. In my day we wrote our own messages. Connected instantly with the world. Did our own research. These kids barely think! Pushed, prodded and prompted by the latest machine. No original ideas. Surely we regress.

Worried, I  join the ancestral line dwelling on better days and better ways. Wish we could go back. Back before touch screens, before mobile, before internet and email. Back before flight, before steam. Back to the days before the wheel, before fire. It was surely better then. Yearning for a past that never truly was, do we sacrifice the future? One foot back, one beyond, never really here. But beyond fire and wheel and all our ingenuity, each lamented generation has found a way to bring something new, seeking ease, solutions and comfort for those they care about.

Maybe this unthinking generation will find yet another evolution.  Maybe this time the doom tellers will be right. I guess they must be some time.

What is High Performance?

I'm reading a great book called “The Fourth Pillar - Modern Stoicism and the Philosophy of High Performance” by Harry Moffitt. Harry is a former special forces soldier and corporate psychologist. He’s worked with all manner of high performance individuals and cultures. He poses a fascinating question - What is high performance?

There are some obvious examples like Serena Williams or Michael Jordan (and their equivalents outside sport). But it gets murky when you consider people who excel in one area of life but are far from exemplary elsewhere (OJ Simpson, Keith Richards were examples he gave). And what of examples that are normally not even considered like the parent who never misses a game or performance involving their kids, or the addict who finds a way out, or the low profile person that delivers the detail on someone else's high profile vision. How about the farmer who slowly restores the salt affected land on his farm, or the Aboriginal Elder holding culture in a particular place, maybe the kid who scored below average but shifted their own personal best by a monumental amount, or the couple who maintain the passion in their relationship.

I agree with his premise - I reckon the things we note as high performance are too narrow. It’s made me think about the people I know and observe in a different light. Some of the examples above are Moffitt’s, the rest are mine. They are all real people.

What does high performance look like to you? What does recognising it do for the ‘performer’ and the observer?

Extreme Rehearsal

Once upon a time I used to run tours into caves. We’d abseil groups into caves via tight vertical holes in the limestone. I don’t believe in monsters, but if I did, those holes are where they would live. We’d explore underground before climbing back out.

The activity was low risk if well managed, but also very unforgiving of mistakes or accidents. We would rehearse rescue scenarios in extreme. The logic was if we could train for almost inconceivable rescue scenarios, then anything we actually encountered would be comparatively easy. It also meant people understood their equipment really well, and could adapt its use under pressure.

We never had to deploy those skills for real, but the practice was worthwhile all the same, even if it just made us very conscious of the challenging environment we were in.

I recently watched an Australian Story’s account of a dramatic rescue on the Franklin river in Tassie. It highlights some of the challenges rescue teams can face, and just how extreme the situation can become.

The rehearsals we did were the practical outworking of forecasting - taking the scenarios we could envisage and then working out how we would actually respond. It’s not as easy to do in a less tangible environment, however the practice is still good.

Whether it's a desktop exercise, a brainstorming session, or a physical rehearsal of some kind - like the annual fire drill, it’s well worth doing. How could you consider and practice for the extremes you might encounter in business or life?

Two forecasting fails

Fail One

Only envisaging one potential outcome. As a realist with an optimistic bias, I catch myself with this one more often than I would like. I only picture the successful outcome. The positivity sometimes serves me well, but it also makes for a bigger/slower adjustment if things don't go as anticipated. ‘Foreseeing’ only a good outcome can be like “she’ll be right” - it works well if it goes well. A better version is to forecast 3 versions. Ideal, Worst Case, Something in between. Considering each version gives a more robust ‘Plan A’ that will handle a broader range of possibilities.

Fail Two

Over-thinking it. Some people go down a rabbit hole of trying to envisage every possible outcome. The endless “what if” leads to second guessing your chosen path of action. There's lots of research highlighting the many negative aspects of too many options - over forecasting has the same effect. Forecasting is about considering what might be possible or at risk. It’s not about trying to accurately catalogue all eventualities.

Bonus Fail

Freaking ourselves out. Some leaders ask me what the most dire forecast is that we should consider. I reckon it depends on what you can handle as an individual or a team. If you can discuss a really dire, worst case scenario, and treat it as just a thought experiment, that’s useful. But if going there will cause sleepless nights and endless tilting at windmills (origins) (epic sounds), don’t go. That’s exactly the opposite of what the exercise intends. Go as far down the rabbit hole as is useful, but don’t get stuck down there with an overdue rabbit.

Fear of Forecasting?

Breakfast. A leader I admire. Deep conversation about the state of the world. Great way to start the day. The best leaders I know are unafraid to forecast. They are not trying to predict the future, instead thinking about various possibilities and how they might respond in the face of them. Last week, one such conversation turned to how Western Australia has been relatively immune to several large global crises.

GFC - Mining economy shielded us

COVID - distance and sparse population shielded us

Energy Crisis - Abundant natural resources shielded us

Each of these, and other crises have had an impact here, but not like elsewhere. Sometimes we seem to think we are a bit bombproof. The conversation over breakfast explored a number of current global and local factors that could impact us in bigger ways.

Solid leaders play out many eventualities. Not as a glass half empty. Not as fear mongering. As a way of being prepared for more than one possibility.

Forecasts are rarely 100% (just watch the weather) but that’s not the point. Pre-thinking about many possibilities makes it more likely you’ll handle the ones that arise.

How did it go?

We sat around a small intimate campfire deep in the desert. The end of another long day of challenging driving and epic scenery. We shared food and talked while a billion stars broke out in the growing darkness - the air so clear it felt the stars were pressing down on us as the last of the sunset faded to inky blue black. 

As we had done every day on this extended journey, we asked each other “How did today go compared to your expectations?” and then we listened to each other. Some longed for more time out of the car and exploring on foot. Others were keen to pause for longer when there was a view. Each day we refined and modified what we were doing to bring our reality closer to what people had pictured before we left. 

Those expectations we have of each other, of the experience and environment seem so obvious and tangible to us - so much so that it seems reasonable to expect that everyone around us shares them. Because they are ‘obvious’ it’s easy to charge forward and then wonder why there’s a mismatch or simmering tension. 

I’ve do the same thing with teams working purposefully on something together. “How did today go compared to your expectations? How could we do better?”. It doesn’t take long. People feel seen, heard, engaged. Shared understanding and increased effectiveness blooms. That means more progress, better decisions, less frustration and do overs. 

Because our expectations seem obvious we sometimes forget to make them visible until things are not working well. Sometimes that's far too late.

When and where would a shared conversation about expectations be useful to you?

It Should Be Obvious!

We discussed what needed to be done and then left the meeting. Our fruitful conversation had reached a detailed and shared understanding of what needed to happen next. We agreed to meet in a week and discuss progress, then parted ways to get to work. A week later, we had both been working from a very different understanding of what we ‘agreed’. How had that happened? Frustratingly, we both had some ‘do over’ to sort it out, and a need to revisit our conversion from a week ago.

As we got into it, we both had some expectations of each other and the work we were doing which had not been well articulated. They seemed obvious! So we’d agreed fervently with each other, without really understanding what we were agreeing to.

When we revisited the conversation, we explored the apparently ‘obvious’ parts in much more detail and reached a better understanding to work from. That was positive, but we could have saved ourselves some time and frustration by exploring our expectations and assumptions in more detail to begin with. The challenge is, that often feels too slow.

Lots of the work I do with leaders is helping them articulate things that ‘should be obvious’ and/or sorting the challenges when progress doesn’t match unspoken expectations.

In a world drowning in information, one of the greatest things a leader can give their team is clarity and the environment to seek it.