Aneesh Sathe

Category: Leadership

  • Strategy sits on a pyramid of hearts

    There is a fetishism around management artifacts, handbooks, spreadsheets, memos and more. People who like the idea of being a leader but lack experience look at these artifacts and think that whatever goes into the artifacts is how the world will function. This micromanagement flavour of command and control forgets that there are people involved. Leaders must remember that the people who you are leading are just like you and, crucially, that they are closer to the problem. Strategies crumble when they leave out the team’s intelligence, insight, and input. Therefore, building a culture of mutual trust and an intuitive mode of operation is crucial for success. Winning hearts is not trivial.

    The inner game: Respect your team as you respect yourself

    Respecting your team’s intelligence is a starting point.[efn_note]It might sound strange that this has to be said, but I’ve seen it happen too many times.[/efn_note] When leading, I acknowledge that everyone is important for the team’s success, each person has their own role as I have mine. As a team member, I would like to understand the why of the task. Seeing the bigger picture helps everyone understand the critical nature of their work. To have a team that is brimming “with ambition, initiative and originality” [efn_note]“It is my great and constant hope that the Marine Corps will produce some outstanding man for the country. Such men are somewhere, and they may as well be in our classes as anywhere else. I do not want such a person to be hammered down by narrowness and dogmas: to have his mind cramped by compulsory details. It is my constant ambition to see the Marine officers filled with ambition, initiative, and originality; and they can get these attributes only by liberality of thought – broad thought – thought that differs from precedent and the compulsory imprint of others.”

    Letter from BGen J. C. Breckinridge to Colonel J. C. Smith, dated 21 November 1934, J. C. Smith Papers, Marine Corps Historical Center.”
    via “Maneuver Warfare Handbook” by Lind, William S[/efn_note] is a blessing that requires much penance. The first step is respect for everyone on the team.

    Respecting your team’s insight is to accept everyone as a specialist. You build your team based on the myriad skills required for the project’s success. As a person spends more time doing the tasks they build an innate understanding of the problem. While you, as the leader, may be able to see “everything” what you are really seeing is the big picture. All the execution happens at the level of little things. How to do the little things well is insight, and you are no expert.

    Respecting your team’s input is simply the final step of respecting their intelligence and insight. If you don’t allow your plans to be challenged and tuned based on what the team sees then you are driving blind. This is not to say that every input is to be accepted or that every input is right. Everyone is seeing a part of the puzzle, and what is right in the specific might damage in the broad. But it’s the leader’s job to discern and to communicate why.

    Insight and input seem like the same thing but they aren’t. If the leader creates the wrong environment, insight is simply not given. Which leads us to the other part, building a healthy culture.

    The outer game: Mutual trust and team intuition

    There is never enough time, or really reason, to set aside time to “team build” and develop mutual trust. Teams are built on the job, they are built by working together. “Trust cannot be wished for or assumed, it must be earned.” Working together helps us understand each other and the leader grows to trust the team’s actions and the team grown to trust that their actions will be supported.[efn_note]Both leadership and monitoring are valueless without trust. The “contracts” … of intent and mission express that trust … that his subordinates will understand and carry out his desires and trust by his subordinates that they will be supported when exercising their initiative.” Maneuver Warfare Handbook by Bill Lind[/efn_note] If there is a failure, there was a failure of internal process or not correctly anticipating the environment, either way the responsibility is on your shoulders, the team did the best they could.

    Team intuition is built through good training, building an understanding of each other’s capabilities and repetition.[efn_note]“You cannot, he admonishes, give in to the urge to check and control everybody. In the heat of battle, there isn’t time. You have to trust your soldiers and subordinate leaders to do the right thing under the stress of combat. But, and this is the key point, this trust cannot be wished for or assumed. It must be earned through training and working together, as the German Army did between the two world wars when it was reduced to a small core of career professionals (an “unintended consequence” of the surrender terms imposed by the Allies at Versailles.)” Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business by Chet Richards [/efn_note] Task relevant maturity is a useful rubric to know how much training is needed. If an engineer has never made a customer call before, then they need a detailed explanation. I have done mock versions of important calls with people of all seniorities if it was their first time. Over-training has diminishing returns and it’s best to just go and do the thing.

    Clear communication of the goals helps people do the right thing by default. Understanding what has to be achieved and know what is in the realm of possible actions enables the team to act effortlessly. The effortlessness comes after years of working together and after difficult trials. Once it’s there, however, that team is unstoppable. [efn_note]“Zen and other oriental philosophies talk at great length about intuitive knowledge, but they also stress that it comes through years of experience and self-discipline. In medieval Japan, samurai warriors practiced with the long sword until it became as an extension of their arm. When the fight starts, you don’t have time to stop and think about the fundamentals. In fact, one of the goals of Japanese samurai strategy was to cause this very “stopping” of the mind in their opponents.” Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business Chet Richards”[/efn_note]

    A lot of my understanding of how to build a good team is based on experience and from reading military strategy. In military strategy there is a focus on “winning” and “opponents”, they are terms I shy away from. In a business environment, especially in a startup, there is much that isn’t in your hands. You simply must do the best with whatever you have. Win the hearts of your team and they will do the best and give more than you imagined.

  • Leadership is solitude, leadership teams are introspection

    Summary

    Leaders are by the nature of their job, alone. Good leaders are thinkers, they explore and map their territory and lay out a course. That is they lead with vision. To develop a clear and confident vision leaders need to be able to concentrate on what’s important to take decisions with courage and conviction. Leaders don’t have the expertise to tackle every problem. Leadership teams have a wider expertise and should be structured such that there is openness and space to explore from a place of vulnerability. Good leadership teams are also good friends who are able to fearlessly point out mistakes and pitfalls. Leaders should go out of their way to create and maintain that culture of intellectual honesty in their leadership teams enabling the same kind of introspection as one would with close friends.

    Good leaders are courageous thinkers

    Leadership is a frame of mind. You don’t need to have a title to be a leader, but if you do have a title you better have the right frame of mind.

    As a leader, you need to be able to think for yourself. Take in, organise, and make sense of data coming to you and then take a call. You also need to have a strong moral sense. This takes courage. It is trivial to let things proceed as they are or to con your superiors into generating a list of tasks for you to do. But to point and say that we need to do this and not that, takes courage and mental faculties to argue for your point in the face of opposition.

    In books on leadership, one often reads saying “no” and creating time for yourself in your schedule, the main purpose of this is to give yourself time to think, to marinate in the data and ferment out decisions. Leaders (in my startup experience) are pelted with requests and activities that would easily fill up 48 hours every day if they let them. For people like me, who come from research, the importance of creating time to think and plot ahead is implicit and we naturally make that space.

    Good leaders make that space, put in thought and make the tough calls.

    Good leadership teams are capable, great leadership teams are capable friends

    There is a central problem here. No leader can be an expert in everything. Even if data is staring you in the face, you may not (and often don’t) have the experience to correctly surmise what the next step should be. This is what the leadership team (or just your team) is for.

    There is an excellent article by William Deresiewicz on Solitude and Leadership (here), where he talks about how being a leader is essentially an activity done in solitude. However there is also an important point he makes about the need for friendship as a means of self-discovery and solitude:

    “So solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better. But there’s one more thing I’m going to include as a form of solitude, and it will seem counterintuitive: friendship. Of course friendship is the opposite of solitude; it means being with other people. But I’m talking about one kind of friendship in particular, the deep friendship of intimate conversation. Long, uninterrupted talk with one other person.[…] what Emerson meant when he said that “the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude.”

    Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities.”

    Leaders should go out of their way to be friends with their leadership teams. In my experience of running projects, large and small, without a tight-knit leadership team the projects are hopeless and fail miserably. The main reason for this is not the capabilities of the individuals but their ability to openly discuss and question assumptions. To an external observer this make look like the leader is generating a coterie or a clique around them, but that’s exactly what one needs. A good leader is nothing without a leadership team that is textbook definition of coterie: “an intimate and often exclusive group of persons with a unifying common interest or purpose“.

    A good leadership team enables the leader to take tough decisions and make what seem like courageous calls from the safety of having thought things through.