Tag Archives: teams

Title-less leaders

Leave a reply

When people follow others because they want to, not because of their title, it’s because the person they are following is a good leader. When the person they follow leads without the title, it is because they are good team members, and also good leaders.

When a problem arises, these title-less leaders seek solutions. They don’t try to do it on their own. They will solicit the help of their peers, and they might also ask the person leading them… but only if it requires that help, and only if that leader is helpful.

It is a mistake to believe that the title-less leader only ‘escalates’ a problem if it can’t be solved without help. If the titled leader is a valued team member, then the title-less leader will come to them just as they would go to another colleague. But if the titles leader is not effective then the title-less leader might leave them out.

Title-less leaders get a lot done. And what they lack in title they deserve to earn in respect and accolades. Even though outwardly the title-less leader may not want the accolades, they deserve it, and it should be given.

The people who take on leadership roles without needing the title are the ones that make an organization great. And when they get promoted, their teams will follow them. But long before they get the title, their leadership should be recognized and explicitly appreciated.

‘Making it work’ mindset

This was in James Clear’s weekly 3-2-1 email newsletter:

“One type of person approaches a situation with the mindset of, “How can I make this work?” 
Another type seems to approach each circumstance with the mindset of, “What are all the reasons this wouldn’t work?” 
Both people will be forced to deal with reality, but the first person will only have to solve problems that actually occur while the second person will often avoid taking action entirely because of the potential problems they have dreamt up before starting. 
There will always be reasons to not do something. Be a problem solver, not a problem adder.” – James Clear

It’s not just enough to have the right mindset when you have to work with someone who has the wrong mindset. You lift an idea up, and it gets knocked down. You make a suggestion and three counter examples are brought up. I believe there are times and places that this counter argument can be healthy and even promote better solutions, but when you are still looking for solutions and you have someone knocking the ideas down over and over, well then the problem or problems become unsurmountable. It’s not just your own mindset that matters, it’s the whole team’s.

I remember working on a team where this one person seemed to undermine almost everything I suggested. Even when I went to her in advance to see what the roadblocks were, she’d still undermine my meeting with new problems after I thought we’d exhausted reasons it wouldn’t work. What I didn’t understand was that this wasn’t just about being stubborn and not wanting to change, it seemed more just a mindset of “This isn’t working, and that won’t work either.”

I left that job before ever solving the mystery of how to work with this person effectively, but that experience taught me that it’s not just important to have a solution-focused mindset, it’s important that the people you work with do as well… or that you plan meetings such that ideas are allowed to be developed before there are opportunities to knock them down. Because it’s easier to knock ideas down than it is to build them up.

If it’s important

I love this quote, “If it’s important, you’ll find  a way.  If not,  you’ll find an excuse.”

It’s similar to this Derek Sivers quote I recently shared,

“I have a concept that says that your actions reveal your values better than your words. So no matter what you say you want to do, your actions show what your values really are.”

Eight years ago I created an image for a presentation I was doing:

Here is the blog post on my Pair-a-Dimes blog about the slide and the presentation. The concept is simple: If something is important to you, you will find your way and if it’s not important enough, you’ll find reasons not to change. The greater the challenge to change, the more important it needs to be to find your way rather than finding an excuse.

A couple days later, I added two more images and shared them in a post: Leading Change – 3 Images

I think I used these three images in every presentation I did for the next few years. I wasn’t thinking about forced changes like the pandemic created, I was thinking about changes we want to create. I was thinking about the potential we envision, and how we fight the systems and habits that make excuses easier than change.

It’s easy to be a cheerleader for change. It’s much harder to spend the time removing barriers and working with the resistors of change to make it as important to them as it is to the rest of your team.

It can’t just be important to you.

Average tells us nothing.

Part 1

It might be an exaggeration to say that it tells us nothing, but averages don’t usually give us enough information to be useful.

Individual student level: In Math class, kid gets an ‘A’ on his test on positive and negative integers. Then he gets a ‘C’ on fractions. Score averages to a ‘B’… but when the kid moves on to algebra, and most of the algebra includes solving problems with fractions, it’s unlikely the kid will do better than a ‘C’. The important information is the ‘C’ in fractions, not the ‘B’ average.

On a team level: When some team members have done amazing things and other tram members have done nothing new, measuring the average means absolutely nothing. You can’t look at averages when some team members will move and some won’t. The reality is that everybody has to be moving in the right direction, and when some are standing still, it doesn’t matter where the average is, it doesn’t matter if the average is moving slightly up.

The fact is that we are failing or we have failed if we don’t figure out where we are weakest and improve where we need it most. Athletes get this. They know that the weakest part of their performance is the area where there is the most room for improvement… this is a mindset we need on our teams to move forward.

Part 2: The Parachute Packing analogy and school grades.