Tom Catalini's blog
Leadership is not about you, it’s about them. And it’s not about them being led by you. It’s about them being great.
A leader sees greatness in other people. You can’t be much of a leader if all you see is yourself.
-Maya Angelou
Leadership is about possibilities. It’s about a better future, built together by using everyone’s best effort.
A great leader will bring to the table a compelling vision of the future that serves a greater good and inspire others to help make it a reality.
Leadership is not linear. It’s not what they teach you in school. Case studies are artificially neat and clean.
Rather, good leaders have honed situational awareness skills that constantly absorb, process, and adjust to changing dynamics and variables. They recognize the complex system of politics, individual motivations, group dynamics, external forces, and technical matters as well as their ability to react to and influence those variables as situations develop.
We bring clarity to things by setting goals, understanding and communicating objectives, and laying out a logical path forward – project plans with milestones, dates, and resources assigned. That’s all crucial, but insufficient. Leadership is needed to move the initiative forward into and through an environment that’s constantly changing (sometimes in big ways, and always in small ways). Those leaders who have a “feel” for this, who have the intuition to “read” and adjust to situations – those are the ones who get you through successfully.
Plans are good, but not good enough. Leadership must remain focused, but the path forward is always somehow divergent in unanticipated ways. That’s what makes leadership difficult. But also what makes it interesting, challenging, and fun.
Tune your situational awareness. It’s the best, most important skill you can develop as a leader.
A lot is within your direct control. Nobody’s going to question your decisions here. This is your area.
This matters a great deal, whether your sphere of control is limited to just one task, just a few functions, just your job, just your team, or just your department. Or any subset, cross-section, or combination. The point is – it’s yours and you can do a lot with it. More than you might think.
Sometimes it’s worth considering this. And then doing something about it. Take your focus off of other people, other decisions, other circumstances. Look at what you can do (what only you can do) to have an impact.
You may discover that even changing the things in your direct control can be hard – it can take some guts and some effort. But it will make a difference, and it will be worth it.
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There’s not a lot of room for complaining about what technology can’t do these days. So, the real issues are harder and harder to ignore.
There’s not a lot of room for complaining about the lack of data these days. So, the decisions are harder and harder to ignore.
There’s not a lot of room for complaining about a lot of things. There are more options than ever. Many solution components are inexpensive or free. Talented people are ready to engage. Business circumstances demand action. So, the lack of leadership is harder and harder to ignore.
A willingness to make decisions, to take responsibility, to commit to a path. A chance to be wrong (which is also a chance to be right) and the guts to take it. That’s what’s going to make the difference.
This is a gift. When people are telling you why something can’t be achieved, they’re sharing part of their worldview. It may be a widely held belief, or it may be a personal protection mechanism. But it’s how they (singular or plural) have rationalized inaction.
Now, what they’re saying likely has merit. Obstacles are all around us. Anyone who tries to move the ball forward on a regular basis sees that. But the obstacle is also likely not fully recognized in the story of rationalization. It’s simply been agreed, implicitly if not explicitly, that this is the point where progress stops.
And everybody waits.
For someone else to move that obstacle.
The trouble with that, of course, is that if everyone is waiting for “someone else” then there is no one else.
It’s better to take the gift of why it can’t be done and unwrap it. Look at the obstacle that everyone agrees on but that nobody has examined for a good long while. See what it is, why it’s there, and how it can be changed. And it’s likely not the obstacle that needs to be changed, but the perception of it. Looking at it anew, re-examining it in the current context (because it’s been there so long), and talking about it will likely lessen it’s power over everyone.
Dispel the mystique. Figure out how to work around, ignore, redefine, or do something about the obstacle now that it doesn’t seem quite so onerous. After all, the obstacle wasn’t really such an obstacle to begin with. It was an excuse.
Photo credit: sagebrush photography
Successful IT Leaders will need to focus on 8 things for success in 2013:
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Old habits die hard, and most of the time nobody knows why. Nobody knows why we have the habit or why we can’t change it. We just have it, and we don’t even think about changing it.
People fear change. That’s often true. Change brings about uncertainty. It leads us into unprecedented territory. The illusion of predictability is challenged and we can’t easily envision what happens next.
Two things make this very hard to overcome: loss aversion and conditioned response.
We have a tendency to overvalue what we have. People dislike losing more than they like winning (by about twice as much, in fact, according to several studies that have measured this aspect of human behavior).
So, change is risky. We could lose something that we already have, and that’s going to be painful. Indeed, by making the change we are guaranteeing that we lose something – the thing itself that we are changing. The discomfort starts there.
Perhaps even more powerful, is the conditioned response. Some time ago, perhaps, somebody else tried to change that same thing. And they got burned. Everybody heard about it, and though none of them felt the brunt of it directly, it’s been carried forward in the local folklore. So much so that the culture is averse to even the idea of changing that thing again, even if the underlying reason is now invalid. Indeed, the reason may not even be known any longer.
Moving to change things, then, requires careful consideration. Challenging long-held beliefs, whether they are true or not, is not a trivial endeavor. Small steps create the best path forward.
Finding small, but visible ways to demonstrate an expansion of the “safety zone” for doing things can go a long way. Scaling down your big idea to an incremental step, perhaps one that only touches upon a single element of the big change, can help. If you can show others that the baby step is safe – that bad things didn’t happen as a result – they’ll be open to exploring further. Even if the baby step itself didn’t create in a big positive result. Remember, we’re trying to demonstrate a lack of loss more than a gain right now.
What you want to gain is buy-in to make more baby steps. Make the next step, gain more buy-in. Soon, you’ll have made progress – you’ll have demonstrated the low risk of your idea, and hopefully showed some gains too. It’s a slow road, but worthwhile in the end. As buy-in builds, so does ownership. And once the group owns the idea, it has a good chance at becoming the new status quo. And once it is, we know that it will stick, just like the old one did.
Photo credit: marc faladeau
Analyze everything, but then rely on your intuition.
Be demanding, but respectful.
Create an expectation of excellence, but be forgiving when mistakes get made.
Decentralize creativity and innovation.
Expect results and you will get them.
Forget the past, it was based on old technology and old thinking.
Generate good will through great service.
Handle situations professionally, particularly the difficult ones.
Invent the future instead of waiting for it to arrive.
Just do it. Really. Action beats analysis most of the time.
Knowledge is power, but experience breeds wisdom.
Learn as much as you can with every project you undertake.
Manage expectations. And then manage them some more. It’s very hard to over-commuicate in this area.
Nimbleness is one of the best traits to develop in yourself and in your team.
Organize for the right battle.
Prepare for as many eventualities as you can, and then be prepared to be surprised by the ones you didn’t expect.
Quit whining. Everybody else’s job is hard too (if they’re doing it right).
Restore from backup every once in a while, just to be sure it’s working.
Start things off on the right foot. A little extra work up front goes a long way.
Try different approaches. Whether they work or not, you’ll learn something.
Understand other people’s perspectives as best you can.
Verify things, they change more often and more quickly than you might think.
When your family needs you, go home.
X-factors are hard to pinpoint, but essential to success (that “je ne sais quoi”). It’s not all about analytics and linear thinking.
Yes, and… is the best phrase in brainstorming. Use it frequently.
Zero in on the best stuff in your organization and try to replicate it.
Photo credit: kvanhorn
The success of your initiative depends on people. Your team, department, and organization is a group of individuals, each with their own hopes, dreams, fears, flaws, and ambitions.
Too often we are tempted to proceduralize everything. We remove the thought process from the people and embed it in the standard procedure. There are forms to fill out, rules to follow, and many groups of compartmentalized, highly structured, repeatable tasks. We think of processing knowledge work like factory work done by machines.
But it may be far more effective to organize the work for people rather than process (or at least to slide the scale much further in this direction). Particularly if you are looking for creativity or ingenuity. And definitely if you are looking for people to take ownership of their work, to be actively engaged and enthusiastic about it, and to question why and how things are done so that things can be constantly improved.
Photo credit: L. Marie
In the short run, focusing on control is tempting. Directly overseeing everything you can is the best way to get your agenda followed. No need to slow things down with dialog – everyone will see the results soon enough, and then they’ll understand. They’ll see your wisdom, respect it, and eagerly await the next directive.
Or maybe they won’t see things so clearly. Or maybe they won’t understand them as you do. Or maybe they’ll have ideas they’d like to incorporate into future plans and feel a little snubbed when there’s nobody to listen to them.
Gaining influence is hard, particularly in the short term. It’s a slower road that requires lots of communication and patience. It’s reach is limited in the early days, and may really only be effective with the things you directly control. But over time, influence can spread. And it can go well beyond direct control, both in terms of its span and its depth.
Influence is not the easy path. But it’s often the more effective and longer lasting.
Photo credit: Public Domain Photos
