Take the lead, don't wait for permission

Permission never comes

Leadership is about doing things. A good leader is out in front, leading. Sounds strange, I know. Leaders don’t wait for permission to make things better. Leaders just do it. Leaders don’t sit in the back telling others what to do and how to do it. People that do tell others what to do and how to do it are either clueless or loudmouth slackers. They are not leaders.

Being a good leader is about doing things yourself and setting an example. It doesn’t mean doing everything yourself, or even most things. Leading is about setting the parameters of success and defining a framework to achieve success. It’s not about dictating parameters and frameworks. Those things need to be socialized across a group to build consensus and understanding. A team needs to know, directionally, what the aim is. Aim doesn’t have to be perfect. A team needs to know how they are expected to work together. This changes as people get to know each other. People become more effective working together over long periods of time.

Effective leaders surround themselves with people who outshine them in certain areas. Leaders support and encourage others to keep outshining them. There is an element of humility to being an effective leader. Ego can’t get in the way of progress. I can’t fall into the trap of thinking I’m the best software architect in the neighborhood because people with experience different from mine, who are closer to the details of a project should be the people making recommendations. My job is to understand their recommendations, clear the path to implementation, and make decisions based on risks. None of that includes competing with software architects on their own turf.

Establishing yourself as a leader can be difficult. The kind of person who talks the talk and doesn’t walk the walk succeeds often enough that it steadily frustrates the competent, capable, responsible, reliable aspiring leader. People resent a loudmouth know-it-all masquerading as “leadership”. Who hasn’t seen someone like this lead a project into a dumpster fire? Or stir up chaos on a daily basis that everyone feels except them? How do you escape this person? Take the lead yourself. Take it from them. Don’t be shy about it. Be bold and get out in front. Identify what needs to be done, do it, and then tell people you did it. This works in a lot of situations. Professional work situations. Athletic training. Academic - high school through post-doc.

Getting out in front means planning. Leadership is about effective planning. Planning means setting achievable goals with fair, equitable outcomes. These goals should be palatable to a broad range of stakeholders. The goal is to outline a plan that gets buy-in from your team. Initially goals should be for the short term. In new teams, there is a “get to know each other” period where grand plans are difficult to agree on because the team isn’t speaking with the same vernacular. The words sound alike, and they’re used in similar ways, but the plan isn’t received the same by every member of the team.

In a project I was recently involved in, we had one person “assume leadership” in an unspoken way. The goal of the project was to determine the value proposition of a particular product, in the context of developing the product to meet the value proposition. There is a presentation aspect of the project where we would present our findings to executive stakeholders. The assumed leader had a particular product outcome in mind and was going to bend the process to fit his outcome. The assumption was that he was going to tell us what he wanted to see done, and we, the rest of us, are going to do it. Regarding the presentation, he wasn’t going to do that either.

I nope’d right out of that one. Nope. Not going to happen. Here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to work on the project together, as a team, and everyone’s thoughts, opinions, feedback, and input will be considered together. The product will reflect the value proposition based on the value proposition, not what someone wants to build on the company’s dime. I did the pre-work. I asked for data and opinions. I consolidated those data and opinions into an outline of our methodology and findings. I did all of this “in public”, over an email thread to all of the group participants. I sent the aggregated data and consolidated opinions to the group for feedback. At our next call, the assumed leader hadn’t read anything that came back to him on the email thread. He was only aware of what he sent. The rest of the team wanted to use our work as the foundation of the project.

Leading is facilitating. There were a number of discussions going on in the email thread based on data collected in the field. All of the team members contributed data and their thoughts on what it was telling us. Just having the discussion is a meaningful act in leadership. Creating a composite opinion is a meaningful act. It gives people an opportunity to grab on to an idea and discuss it. Poke it. Try to see where it falls short. Try to see where it is strong. Writing things down and sharing it is a meaningful act of leadership. Maintaining the group’s process and history through documentation is a meaningful act. Building off of existing ideas is difficult when there isn’t a written record of those ideas. Making small, incremental progress is a meaningful act of leadership.

I’ve kept details of the product out of this. I hope the meaning becomes clear from leaving that gap. The meaning of leadership itself is collaborating with others toward common goals. That collaboration has to happen. Leadership isn’t exclusively about goals. Humans are social creatures. We socialize with each other. We work together to achieve more than one of us individually. Individuals can’t come together when there is no communication and collaboration. Therefore, leadership isn’t about setting direction and making others do the work. Leadership is about getting the work done yourself.