Leadership is by Design

Your Team

It's important to be deliberate, intentional and unwavering with the clients you choose to surround yourself with. It's just as important with the members of your team. There is an accretive, collaborative array of benefits that come with the right philosophy.

One client of ours used to hire based entirely on experience and technical ability, but had a bit of a revolving door when it came to retaining talent. He was just checking boxes and throwing bodies at problems, resulting in a lot of collateral damage. His vetting mindset drifted to "hire a clown, expect a circus." Being of Scottish descent, we appealed to the concept of tartan - the plaid fabric with many different colored threads woven through it. The point was to look at the mosaic of the team, but also to get granular on each component. Talent, in-and-of-itself, is a currency that can fluctuate in value over time. We would suggest that your vetting process to attract great talent, and your ongoing culture to keep it, have a philosophical component to complement the technical. You need to keep an open mind here. As political columnist and author PJ O'Rourke said, "C students will open a restaurant and A students will write the review." 

Embracing Best Practices and Processes

From an enterprise perspective, ensure that all team members embrace best practices and process, meaning that nothing resides solely in the heads of your people. Remove any mystery. Define roles, responsibilities and expectations. Embrace the Rule of Three, which states that everything anyone does three or more times, and which has three or more steps, is documented. It creates an intellectual property that has intrinsic value and also liberates the team to elevate themselves. It's counterintuitive in that, when everything is documented, individuals can become obsolete - meaning if they depart, they can be replaced quickly. Faces can change on the team, but the clearly defined roles do not. However, the real outcome is that you are creating an environment that they won't want to leave, because they aren't plateauing as a person. You are liberating everyone to grow and maintain relevance and even indispensability, but in a good way. We have an entire section dedicated to team dynamics later on, but for now, we just want to emphasize our philosophy on leadership.

Leadership is about empowering and liberating a team to see what it brings out in everyone. You may have heard of the fascinating (and hopefully true) phenomena that an alpha wolf will lead from behind. When moving, the front of the pack is apparently made up of the youngest, in the middle are the oldest - they determine the pace - and then trailing behind are the strongest of the group. There is no need for bravado or an obvious show of strength. Even if this is only the stuff of legend, it's still something we should consider ourselves.

Create Loyalty

Surround yourself with good people, empower them to strive for excellence, and hold them accountable to building enterprise value, and you will create loyalty among some and reveal a lack of fit in others. Incentivize for quantitative performance and offer discretionary rewards for qualitative performance, too. No matter how much we talk about best practices and processes, people are essential.