Leadership bullshit

Leadership is about passion, vision, goals, learning and growth. It’s about people, communication and relationships, about taking care of others.

It’s about serving them.

Leadership is about showing others that it’s good to go out from your comfort zone and challenge yourself and others. Leadership is about being an example that others would like to follow, about being a visualization of what you are saying and sharing. Being a leader means that sometimes you have to stand against, sometimes you have to make a difficult decision and it happens even when you don’t have enough information. Leadership is about forgetting your ego, about being humble, about taking risk, sharing successes and taking responsibility for failures. That’s what leadership means for me, that’s how I’m defining it.

Everyone is a leader, but not everyone want to be

As John Maxwell says, “Everyone is a leader because everyone influences someone”. We can agree or disagree with this statement; nonetheless, after giving this saying a closer look, I firmly believe that each of us will admit that any of us have impact on someone. It doesn't matter whether it's one person, our closest family, group of friends or someone else -- there’s always someone.

We accept this type of leadership unquestionably, it's so natural for us that we often don't even treat this as leadership. This is the main reason underlying lack of development in this field. We didn’t name it, so we simply don't invest our time to become better in how we impact others.
Is this the only reason? I think that many of us just don’t like to take full responsibility. They don’t feel well in a situation in which they find themselves, it wasn’t their choice. The fact that someone is a leader does not mean that he or she wanted to become one.

Take one thing at a time

A while back I wrote that if you want to make improvements or fix something, you should start with the easiest thing, because it allows you to gain team's trust and increase confidence of team members. It will also prove them that it's OK to try and, in some cases, to fail.
Thanks to this you increase your and your team members’ chances to succeed with more complex and problematic issues in the future.

But there’s more things which can help you to achieve a success and increase quality of communication.

It's all about differences... or not?

definition of good team

It's not easy to create a good team. It's even hard to find one definition of a good team which would be accepted by everyone. I think the reason is simple - there are many solutions to each problem and the problem can be solved in a satisfying way by good teams working differently, teams consisting of people with various personalities.

The essence of leadership

For some people leader is someone who have a control over the team, who decides and sets the right directions.

For some people leader isn't so important role at all, well, just some guy with something he called soft skills, guy who want to do nothing, take no responsibility and get money for this.

For other leader is just another name for project manager or a titile for a developer who started to earn more money.

In many cases you aren't become a leader, because someone notice that you will be good as a leader or that you have traits of the great leader. In many cases is just another step on career ladder.

Do you have a time for thinking?

Some time ago one of friend of mine told me that he have a problem with people who doesn't want to take any responsibility. He told me that he continuously encourages them to share their opinions, make comments and even argue with him, but somehow he still fails.
We had a short, but constructive conversation this day. We formulate a few questions which would be helpful with finding a solution and we decide to get back to this topic in next week.

Unfortunately we had to reschedule it and we met again after two weeks.
I was prepared very well to the conversation and I eagerly waiting for what my friend will share with me.
It was pretty unexpected when I heard that he have had no time to thing about our questions.

I know that nowadays it's not so easy to find a free time which can be intended for thinking, but if we would think about solutions for our own problems is rather like an investment, not a waste of precious time.

It's worth to remember that is cheaper to prevent than react.

You cannot change people...

Some time ago I had conversation with one of leader in our company. We planned to talk about responsibility and the ways how encourage people to taking it.
My friend started, he told me that he tries as hard as he can, he always repeats to his team there is nothing to be afraid with taking responsibility, "that's a possibility to grow!"

"And after all not all of them want to take it. I really don't know how to change those people!" - he said.

"Is it even possible?" - I asked.

Activities without a vision leads nowhere

Recently I had great discussion with one of my friends about vision, goal, an idea or however you will call it. We talked why vision is so important, why we need to know how to verbalize it and why we need to share it.

Last "why" leads me to two questions that I asked:
"Do everyone in your team knows the vision that you want to share?"
"Well, it would be great, but... I don't think so."
"Do you know why it's like this?"
"You know, they've got their own visions, ideas and I let them to have it. Thanks to this they can feel free and I believe that helps to avoid micro-management."
"I understand, but let me ask you another question, because I think the problem may be somewhere else. How are you sharing your vision, how often are you doing it?"
"All the time! Through things I'm doing. I think that action is far more important than words."
"Yeah, that's true, but only if everyone knows where they are going."

Sometimes it's worth to lose

I heard once, that the best end of any situation, any action or discussion is when everyone are a winners. I know that it sounds great and for most of us such a positive endings are something that we are dreaming about.
But is it always right? Should we always be focused on winning? Should we always be a winner? Maybe opposite side don't have to be a winner as well? Not because we want to lose or we want to hurt our opponent, no, that's not the reason.
Maybe sometimes win-win situation isn't the best choice? Maybe sometimes it's better to lose, even when we are focused on benefits for both sides?

Start with something easy

Most of people don't like changes, or maybe in different way - they like, but only if changes won't have any impact on their current life and doesn't require additional effort. Unfortunatelly those kind of changes happens rarely, if at all.
It doesn't matter do we talked about improvements, development or solving a problems - if we want to do something, it will always require to move people from their safe zone. Even if we plan to fix an issue, most of people will tell you something like: "yeah, we should fix it, but maybe not now, maybe it's not so important and, to be honest, I get used to it and I can live with this." or: "we shouldn't do anything, because after ... problem will solve itself."

Well, problem won't solve itself, we need to do something to make it happen and if problem affect us somehow, solution also will. We cannot avoid it.
"Living with it" isn't a solution either. Sooner or later you need to handle the problem and if you won't, it will be someone from your team. This is not a solution, this is postponing. The later you start to handle the issue, the more difficult it will be to solve it.

So what to do if you are in situation that is worth to introduce changes/improvements/fixes and you need to convince people to follow you?

If your team already working in culture of continuous improvements then it's easy, you just need to show them reasonable arguments and they will at least try, they will put they effort to check whether the idea is good for them or not.

But what if you are far from it? What if they worked for many years without changes and they just used to this "complain and no action" state? Maybe they already talked about the problem many times and even agreed for solution, but it required lot of work and they just weren't motivated enough to finish it.
Situation like this have more negative impact, because problem still exists and additionaly team is demotivated, they felt they already made steps to solve the problem. It's not important they didn't have strength to endure to the end.

start with something small to succeed fast

When I'm start to work with new team or group of people I always do recognition, try to find the problems, bottlenecks and places for improvements. I also look at all people who would be affected because of potential change or who are affected right now because of existing problem.

When I have all those information, I'm trying to think about solutions for problems (only ideas, without details, just not-binding propositions). But not all of them at once, I'm starting with the easiest one. And the easiest doesn't mean unimportant.

After preparations I'm scheduling a meeting to talk with the team. At first time, we aren't focus on solving any issue, we just talk about them. I heard many times that is no more than waste of time, because on first meeting I don't have plan to get any conclusion, but in my opinion, this allows them to share their's problems with me, we are starting to build relationships and trust.
And this is the reason for this meeting - if I want to help them, they need to know I do care.

On next meeting I present them the list of issues and proposition for improvements. We are prioritizing them and after it's done I'm looking for the most important from the easiest. The one, which requires the lowest amount of effort and time to implement. Why?
If team have wrong experience with doing a changes, you need to prove them that is important and it will pay off. You cannot be another person who will promise everything and will leave them with nothing.
Even if they are eager to do changes, because you are the person who really know how to talk with people and know how to convince them, you still should start with something easy. The less experienced in well done changes team is, the bigger risk for failure. We want to minimize this risk, we need to give them experience, the fastest and shortest way is to start with easy problems.

The more things you will solve/improve, the most experienced team will become, the more effort and time they would dedicate to implement it. If they will see the results, they would be more open for further changes.
Each success will prove them that it's worth to invest their strenghts to achieve the goal, they will decide for longer term changes without fear and with motivation.
They will trust you, so it won't require as much effort from you as on the begining to convince them for next step.

Start with something small and you will achieve great things.

What defines a good meeting?

From today I've started to work with leader of second team in my project on introducing a few improvements in their work. Of course, it will require many changes, each change needs to be accepted by whole team, we need to show them, that is worth to try, that it make sense. We need to talk, discuss and even argue. And perferct place for such an activities are meetings.

But before we will start, I need to face with one great challenge - I need to convince them, there is value with doing meetings at all. They got many bad experiences with those kind of activities, they participated in boring meetings, in meetings, that was for them just a waste of time, they doesn't like interruptors, they want to work, work efficient and they're treating almost all meetings like a break from real work.

What can I say? It's great when people want to work and doesn't like those horrible moments when they need to do something else. But we need to make improvements to work in more efficient way, we need to remove impediements to do better all things, that we want to do as best as we can. If we want to, we need to schedule a meeting to discuss all ideas and propositions of potential solutions, we need to prepare a plan and each teammate should know and accept it.
That's why all team members should participate on the meeting.

If we want to convince people that meetings aren't just a waste of their time, each meeting needs to bring value for them, needs to show them how important it was to done it. Each meeting needs to be good. And what defines good meetings?

It needs to be interesting

Do everything what we learn should be useful for us?
I believe so. In present days, we got no time for spend it on useless activities. But do we always know what would be useful for us? Do we know it, when we first time hear about something? All those blogs that we are reading, all those books, is there always something useful? Sometimes answer isn't so obvious, sometimes is. Sometimes even happens that we learned something, but life changes and knowledge which was never used before probably never won't be used.
But do we think that was a waste of time? I can answer only for myself, but many times, when everything changed, I didn't regretted what I've learned, even when I knew that knowledge won't be useful for me anymore.

sometimes it's better to let go...

when your work is what you love...

Personally I'm someone who can't work for 100 percent, it's impossible for me. Why? Because I always giving even more, I just really like what I'm doing. I always looking for new, better solution, I must improve my skills, increase my knowledge etc. It's just stronger than me.

And, as I notice, in IT this is common approach. We, developers, managers, designers, love what we are doing, this is our passion, this is not only 8 hours work, this is something more. We love challenges, we love problems, bugs, because these are the things, which gives us opportunity to test ourselves, to verify our skills and learn something new.
This attitude continues until we're motivated. And here comes the problem...