Leading the Unleadable

by Alan Willett

  There are a number of readers thinking right at this moment, “This is not true about me.” I know this because I have heard this from every level of leader up to the CEO. The argument I hear is along the lines of “I am not like the others.” The clincher for the argument is something like “and just the other week, Sally in development told me the absolute truth about something I needed to hear.”

  And it was true in that one instance that Sally did tell you the thing you needed to know. However, what you are missing are the other ten things she didn’t come to you with because you were too busy, or because she was afraid of the repercussions it would have on her teammates. It also doesn’t include all the other people who have never told you things that you or your subordinates really should know.

  There are many reasons why leaders are blocked from the whole story even when they have fully developed their radar. I have often found situations where the team members absolutely knew that the trouble was significant yet failed to raise it to anyone in leadership. I always ask why they didn’t. It is critical for managers to understand the most common barriers to truth telling.

  The Top Fifteen Barriers to Truth Telling

  1. Fear of disappointing. People don’t like disappointing anyone. To tell the leader bad news would be against how they think and behave at home. They just won’t do it.

  2. Self-doubt. People have told me that they haven’t said anything because “I might be wrong about this. It might not be that bad.”

  3. Fear of personal or career repercussions. “If I raised this issue, the bad news would stick to me for a long time.”

  4. Fear of losing future business with clients. “If we delayed the release to fix the real issues, we could lose the customer.”

  5. Fear of conflict. “They might argue with me!”

  6. Denial. “It really isn’t that bad.”

  7. No one else thinks it is a problem. “When no one else has even noticed the problem, it must not really be a problem.”

  8. Low self-esteem. “I don’t believe I am worthy to bring the issue forth. They are too important for me to talk to them about my views.”

  9. Fear of the issue sticking to the issue-raiser. “If I raise the issue, I am afraid I will get stuck with fixing it—and failing.”

  10. Low skill in communicating issues. “I just didn’t know how to raise the issue. I was stuck on getting the message right.”

  11. Confusion. “I didn’t know who I should tell.”

  12. Incorrect trust in management. “I thought it was obvious. Management was surely taking care of it.”

  13. Fear of nothing happening. “I have raised issues in the past and nothing happened. I gave up hope.”

  14. Not my problem. “They gave us a stupid irrational deadline. It isn’t my problem that this project is doomed.”

  15. Protecting others. “My teammates could get fired over this. I am not taking that on.”

  Three Methods to Drastically Reduce Your Blind Spots

  It is not possible to eliminate the blind spots in your radar completely. The best you can do is to continuously work to reduce your blind spots. No matter how hard you work to do this, there will be some surprise that comes up from an area that was never expected.

  The good news is there are three significant ways to reduce blind spots.

  METHOD #1

  Draw from the experiences of others.

  You will have a much greater ability to make sense of complex situations when you have a large set of experiences you can draw from. Those who are truly seeking mastery of leadership will grow this experience base by leading many projects, by reading books, and by talking with other leaders about how they handled situations.

  You can increase your collection of experiences exponentially by talking with lots of other leaders about the difficult situations they have encountered. The following are the four keys to making these discussions as valuable as possible for everyone involved.

  1. Set the stage for confidential and intimate sharing. If you truly want to understand how others have dealt with situations, be ready to share one of your own. Also make it clear that anything discussed is confidential. Be clear that your mission is to learn how to better deal with troublesome situations in positive ways.

  2. Ask for details. Ask when they first noticed there was trouble. Did the leader act right away or delay? Were there earlier clues that they saw? Were there potential clues they missed? How did they deal with the trouble once they decided they needed to act? How did it work?

  3. Question, but avoid judging. You will hear things that may be against your own personal ways of handling situations. If you find yourself feeling judgmental, it will cloud your listening. It is also likely to be noticed even if it manifests just subtly in your tone of voice or body language. If you notice that you’re feeling judgmental and can set it aside happily, do so.

  If the judgmental feeling remains, this may be a good place to explore further with the person. I suggest being open to bringing up your feeling in a way that promotes shared learning. You may say something like this: “I am finding myself troubled about the approach you are discussing. I am not sure exactly why, but it is getting in the way of my learning. Could you tell me more about why you chose that approach and any feelings you have about it?”

  I have found that the discussions resulting from this opening of feelings are the most productive of all.

  4. Think about what you learned later and apply your own judgment. Many people use the same methods over and over again and have them not work over and over again. Yet, they believe they are working. So when you speak to others about their experiences, balance their words by observing the actual results and evidence.

  The experiences you collect will help you notice more situations earlier in the process.

  METHOD #2

  Periodically have an external expert conduct an assessment.

  You should periodically call for an external assessment. Properly conducted assessments will provide you with a thorough understanding of complex situations.

  Assessments should have a key purpose beyond simply finding out what is going well and not going well. Assessments are much improved when they are focused on an important goal. Those goals could be any of the following types.

  1. Determine the soundness of the project plan. Is the plan technically feasible? Has the team considered alternative approaches and picked the fastest approach to deliver the most value to the customer? Has the team made a commitment it will keep or beat?

  2. Evaluate the customer engagement process for developing valuable proposals. Understand how the customers feel about the process, including long-time customers and prospects that said “no.” Work with the team to understand its view of the weaknesses and the strengths of the process.

  3. Evaluate the organizational strategy and how well the implementation plan is working. Find out how well people understand the strategy without looking at any document. Find out what actions are being done that support the strategy. Find out if actions are being taken that contradict the strategy.

  Good assessments will produce reports that have clear and useful guidance for leadership to act upon.

  The best assessments will do more than that. The best assessments will result in teams and individuals taking a good hard look at themselves and result in significant improvements created by all those involved. Great assessments fuel the culture of continuous improvement.

  METHOD #3

  Periodically have an external expert help you collect 360 degree feedback.

  Method 2 is an assessment to hold up a reflective, magnifying mirror to the organization. You will learn much from that activity. This method is holding a similar mirror up to yourself with the help of your organization and peers. This is powerful because it will help you learn what the key obstacles are in your quest for exceptional leadership.

  This method is very powerful, but some organizations are effectively destroying that very power. The
se organizations are making 360 degree feedback an institutionalized yearly event on the organizational calendar for everyone. They make it a standard survey. In those organizations, 360 degree feedback is becoming as welcome and useful as “performance reviews.” In other words, just another box to fill in at year end.

  Even if that is happening in your organization, you can still collect your own 360 degree feedback and restore its power for you. Here are the steps you need to take to get full power from this method.

  1. Get an objective expert to help design and conduct the survey. This is optional, but the expert will help make each of the following steps more powerful. The remaining steps are written with the assumption that an external expert is guiding the process. However, if you cannot get an external expert, you can substitute yourself in the equation.

  2. Design the survey. Like the assessment method listed previously, it is very useful to have some specific ideas on the information you would like to collect. Consider a number of categories that would be useful regarding your expertise and your leadership effectiveness. Design questions that you would love to know the answers to. Discuss these with the external expert.

  3. Select a group of people who will provide you with the feedback you need. The key is to get a balance of peers, leaders above you, and people who follow you. It is also important to think about people you know are fans of your work and those who may be detractors. It is important to have a mix of both. You may be surprised by supporters having issues you were unaware of and also by the respect that people with whom you have had issues with may have for you.

  4. Have the external expert conduct the written survey. This can be open-ended questions or a rating system for each question. Either will provide insightful information. The external expert collects and collates this information to be presented back to the leader. Anonymous surveys will provide the most honest information.

  5. Have the external expert conduct the in-person survey. The external expert can conduct interviews either in one-on-one sessions or in small groups. When the written survey is done first, this enables an in-depth investigation into the areas that you would like more explanation of. So, even if the written survey was anonymous, if there are mysterious results, the follow-up interviews will uncover the more detailed information needed for driving improvement.

  6. Work with the expert to make action items to improve in key areas. This is the step that many leaders find most useful to work with the external expert on. There is so much information that it can be an overwhelming list. That alone is not a problem; the real problem is that some of the information can be painful to listen to. Many people are aware of their weak points, but hearing about it from others can cloud a leader’s judgment in sorting through the results. The expert will help you sort out the most important areas that will be the keystones for your improvement plan.

  7. Plan for improvement. Chapter 6, “Follow Through: A Bridge to Enduring Improvement,” provides detailed guidance on how to do this. The key is to have clearly in mind what things you want to be better at and to let people know that you are working on it! The other key for this step is to plan a follow-up survey.

  8. Conduct a follow-up survey a few months after the first survey. Knowing this survey is coming will help keep you focused. It will also help those who gave you the feedback focus on whether or not you are improving. Their feedback will be valuable. The majority of people who have employed this method have exceeded their own expectations regarding how much improvement they achieved.

  Spotting trouble is good. Spotting trouble early is better. Develop these methods and more of your own and maybe the unleadable will never get a chance to become that way.

  REFLECTION POINTS

  1. When leading, what are situations that put you on alert that something could go wrong either with your project or around your project? What previous experiences led you to develop that awareness?

  2. Where are your blind spots when leading?

  3. What actions have you taken to reduce blind spots?

  4. Have you ever taken any actions that have created blind spots?

  Take Action: Transforming the Troublesome

  Once you spot trouble, how will you deal with it?

  The trouble can be a conflict brewing, a conflict in progress, a quality issue, a schedule issue, or any issue that puts the group and mission at risk.

  There is a choice to be made by the leader. If action is not taken, it is possible that things just might get better. However, it is more likely that if action is not taken things will get worse, and often in unpredictable ways. It can get worse in big ways, such as larger conflicts or schedule delays. Often, these situations get worse, instead, in small ways, such as a lethargy overtaking the team as team members become apathetic about the mission. If the leader does not care, why should the other people in the organization?

  If improper action is taken, it can make things worse faster. For example, consider a leader who suddenly delivers a lengthy monologue at full volume to a troublesome person in a public situation. This leader had waited for things to get better and had let her own anger build until it escaped. This incident led to significant attrition of the team over the next weeks and to those within and outside of that leader’s organization to actively avoid her.

  It is best to take proper action. To take proper action, proper preparation is required.

  This chapter provides the general framework and mindset for working with people who, to put it mildly, are out of compliance with your expectations. The framework is an orderly set of action steps with compassion at its heart.

  These steps will help you focus on the person at the center of the trouble and learn how to take action that leads to a positive difference. This framework is effective regardless of the type of situation that arises. You should, however, always use your experience and judgment to adjust to the exact situation with which you are dealing.

  The Case of the Team Slacker

  When reading the steps for preparation, action, and follow through, consider the following situation that team leader Alison faced.

  Alison works for a company located in the northeastern United States that has grown to more than 100,000 employees and has a long history of innovation. Alison aspires to grow her role in the company.

  The project Alison was leading was what was known in our organization as a “bright lights project,” as it had intense importance to all the executives, including the CEO. The company was counting on it, but there was trouble brewing. The project was getting significantly behind, and the team was blaming Carl.

  Carl was showing up late but not very late. He was at all the meetings that he was needed at but didn’t seem engaged. These were trouble indicators enough but, in addition, his work was behind schedule and, even worse, it was sloppy.

  The pressure and Carl’s lack of energy were starting to affect the team. Some members were getting angry. Others were starting to show up late too. The high team energy from project kickoff was fast dissipating.

  Alison should have spotted the trouble earlier and acted earlier, but in this situation, she didn’t. She realized she needed to act now.

  Prepare for Proper Action

  As a leader, you have seen situations where it was clear that if issues weren’t already apparent, they soon would be apparent to everyone and that they should be addressed quickly. Your ability to handle such situations is greatly amplified if you can first clearly hear your own inner voice. Understand why the situation at hand is important to you and to the group and why it is important that it be resolved.

  Mastering this ability to hear and understand your emotions and what is behind them will help you immensely in taking proper action. Four steps are needed to prepare for proper action.

  STEP 1

  Understand What Emotions You Are Feeling and Why

  What emotions are you feeling and why? It is really important to listen to your inner wisdom. If you are frustrated or angry with
someone, it is important to stop and ask yourself why. Is the behavior simply annoying or will the behavior negatively impact the organization? Your answers are likely an important part of the discussion you need to have.

  Having to deal with situations like the one in the case study is often very upsetting to a leader. There are many reasons why:

  • Leaders already have too much to do. Thus, it is upsetting when some unexpected trouble occurs, but more than unexpected, the trouble often feels like it is a pointless, irritating distraction.

  • Sometimes it seems that the greater the pressure the project and the leader are under, the greater the level of difficulty of the situations that arise. Often, it is just that the impact of ordinary trouble escalates if the project is already under pressure.

  • Troublesome situations almost always stir up strong emotions. The fog the drama creates makes it more difficult to see the real problems. This is true for the people around the situation and for the leader.

  • Confronting people with performance issues is difficult. Talking to people about what they are doing wrong evokes the feeling of being in conflict. Leaders, too, are susceptible to the fight or flight syndrome.

  Any of these root causes by themselves can cause upset. When other problems join in, as tends to happen, it can be magnified into a worst-case scenario, adding to the stress level. The typical reactions to these difficult situations are the classics of denial, bargaining, anger, and depression.

  For example, Alison had a combination of emotions. She was angry that the project and her own future could be jeopardized if the project failed to deliver on its promises. Further, she felt betrayed by Carl. There was also a feeling of shame that she was letting the overall team down that was counting on her leadership.