Leading the Unleadable

by Alan Willett

  Unfortunately, the project team had a small schism occur early in the project between two of the strongest technical people on the project. One person preferred a rapid prototyping method he called swashbuckling speed. The other lead technical person was looking to follow a rigorous engineering process. Which was correct? It was never resolved, and the small schism grew into a giant emotional chasm as the project progressed.

  The first major technical review failed horribly. The team missed on their promises of what content would be delivered. Further, it didn’t work. The anger and finger pointing among the team members was evident in the room with senior managers attending.

  They did not disband the team. They used the following steps to bring the team together and as a way for the leader and the team to gather the good from the shrapnel of their failure.

  Gather the People

  The key for a successful learning event is to set a meeting on the calendar with ample time to work through the key lessons learned. This should incorporate the original idea for the project, the key assumptions the process was based on, the planning process, and the skills and talents of the people working on it. People should properly prepare and be ready to celebrate the learning to take place.

  Team members were reminded in writing and at all-hands meetings preparing for the post-mortem about how it would work and what the goal was. There was not any punishment, but there was a high bar set to figure out how to fix it. The team gathered. People were worried, but also optimistic based on the tone the leadership set.

  Take a Moment to Recognize and Whine About the Failure

  I know Edison said that each lightbulb that didn’t work was progress. However, out of those 10,000 “successful” failures, I expect there were at least one or two bulbs flung against the wall in frustration. Whining breaks are an important element of failure!

  Start the meeting with time to recognize any of the pain associated with the failure of the project. Make it quick, though—there is real work to do.

  The facilitator set the stage for team members to speak personally and specifically about what the failure meant to them. It was not to be a blame session disguised as a whine. It had to be focused on personal experience alone.

  The swashbuckling proponent shared how embarrassing the failure was to him and how he felt he had been a contributor to the failure. The rigorous engineering zealot shared a similar story. Many team members contributed to this segment. In a debrief later, attendees commented that this was the key section to the successful recovery. It was not sufficient, but it started the path to success.

  Triage the Failure to Find the Great, the Useful, and the Horrible

  Hopefully, after the whine break, everyone can put emotions aside. This step is a scientist’s view of the failure. I have not yet seen a project where all elements of it were a failure. Triage the elements and find which parts are great, which parts are perhaps useful, and which parts belong on the refuse pile of historical interest only.

  The team was able to triage fairly quickly. The group used data to understand which of the technical components were ready for production, which components needed work, and which ones to throw away.

  Increase the Value of Your Process

  The next step is to reflect on the process used for the creation of the project thus far. See where any holes in the process have contributed to the failure. Seek ways in which you can increase the value of the process, even if that increase in value is finding your way to failure faster!

  The team members came to the recognition that some of the components required the swashbuckling prototype approach and others needed the engineering approach, and always there was a point were they needed to come together.

  The schism was disappearing.

  Do Not Make Your Development Process Risk Free

  Avoid the critical mistake of trying to make the process risk free. Many processes become large, unwieldy, and so completely safe that the bold has been completely squeezed out. They were so safe they were doomed to fail.

  Think of 100+ Ideas You Can Build on the Rubble of Failure

  The keystone habit of this action of exceptional leadership must be the ability to generate lots of new ideas based on what you just learned.

  The team members walked into the postmortem workshop depressed about the failure and worried about the future.

  They left the workshop with over 100 ideas of how to move the project forward and plans for 30 of them to be put into immediate practice. The schism was on the way to disappearing. They were ready for the challenge.

  Conducting a postmortem of failures in this way rewards your expectations of excellence. By involving others, you ensure that each person is learning his or her own lessons as well as the lessons from others. If failure is not dealt with in the proper way, it often leads to many of the worst traits from the taxonomy of trouble. Punishing the failure will lead to an abundance of cynicism. Ignoring the failure will make it seem that success and excellence are not important.

  Doing a proper postmortem propels your organization forward with style!

  REFLECTION POINTS

  Consider the list of interactions that strongly affect an organizational culture. They are repeated here for your easy reference.

  • The formal expectations of excellence

  • How projects are started

  • Project review meetings

  • Weekly (or even daily) status meetings

  • How meetings are run

  • How bad news is received

  • The questions asked by leadership in the hallways

  • Formal reward and recognition

  • The training budget

  • How easy or hard it is to get the resources you need to do the job

  • Project postmortems

  • Yearly performance reviews

  I encourage you to talk with a peer and discuss the following questions and your answers to them.

  1. Which of these factors are the most important influencers in your organization?

  2. How do you know? What evidence do you have?

  3. What are the interactions happening in those important areas? Are they supporting the expectations of excellence or having the opposite effect?

  4. Considering the most important influence points, what actions can you take to help further create the culture of excellence you desire?

  Exceptional Starts Lead to Exceptional Results

  When I was learning the deep strategy game of Go, my mentor told me, “From a good opening, you can lose. However, from a bad opening, you cannot win.”

  At the time, I thought her little gem of wisdom was just too negative. We can have a great opening and still lose. Okay, that is true. I don’t like it, but it is true. I struggled, however, with the thought that “from a bad opening, you cannot win.”

  On examination of many situations, I found that she was, overall, right. Yes, against a poor player, I could often overcome even a very bad mistake at the start. Playing with good players, it was extremely rare that I could win when I made even minor missteps in the opening. I never recovered from a large mistake.

  This is also true when considering how projects or other initiatives start.

  Starting a project poorly leads to having to do significant rework later and being constantly behind expectations of schedule and quality. In addition to resulting in constant stress for the project team, projects that start poorly very seldom fully “win” by delivering all expectations on time or early and delighting both team members and customers.

  What happens when you start a day waking up behind the planned schedule? Often it results in rushing out to work behind expectations, leaving you almost certainly tired, stressed, and worried about what was forgotten. You hope the day will end better than it started, but it is rare that those days rate high in joy and productivity.

  The same is true for a longer period of time, such as a sales quarter. If you start with significant mistakes, such a
s a horrible transition between customer relationship management tools with incorrect data and angry salespeople, or a problem that’s carried over from the previous sales period, it’s tough to recover even in three months.

  So, my Go mentor encouraged me to take my time at the start of the game to think things through properly. She noted that the best Go players would often spend about two hours on the first 50 moves of the game and spend the remaining two hours on the remaining 200–300 moves of the game.

  If you want exceptional results, start toward your goals in the manner you expect to reach them—exceptionally!

  The Exceptional Start Challenge—the Problems of Starting Poorly

  When a project starts poorly, what problems usually follow?

  Think of a few answers and then compare them to the ones I hear regularly in my leadership seminars.

  • The project immediately gets behind schedule. This is often true because the team was given a schedule, but even when the team members come up with their own dates, if the project starts poorly they are already behind.

  • Stress levels ramp up quickly. This often causes conflicts that take time away from progress.

  • Teams are forced to take shortcuts to make some visible progress. This causes the team to have to do significant rework later to fix the problems they created. Often, the later rework costs more than the original start of the project.

  • Frequent status updates and requests for recovery plans begin to take up significant time for the leadership of the project and often many other team members, especially the experts. This all takes time out of actually making progress.

  • The project and the leadership are almost certain to face credibility issues with others in the organization as well as with the executive team. There will be questions, both about why the team is behind and why the team has a bad attitude.

  • On a personal level of leadership and team members, there can be a loss of will. People will start to lose faith that their mission can be accomplished. People will stop asking for what is really needed; they will just show up and do the work. They won’t put in the extra thinking required to do it well.

  • If there are opportunities elsewhere in the organization or in the general area’s labor market, projects that start poorly and don’t recover fast enough will face the extra problem of attrition of top talent.

  • Projects that start poorly take longer than projects that start exceptionally well. Projects that start well will quickly bypass projects that started earlier, but poorly.

  So how do projects start right?

  The Exceptional Start Challenge—How to Start Exceptionally

  Start by thinking about what you should do. Here, again, are the most effective answers from my seminars.

  1. Have a clear purpose for the project with clear priorities. Why is this project important to the organization? How urgent is it? Are there limits to effort and cost expense that would make it worthless? It is important to have at least an initial high-level answer to these questions and most likely others as well. Even if the project is an exploration of a possible new marketplace, the project must have a clear purpose defined for the beginning as well as an end result of success in mind.

  2. Understand how important this new project is in respect to the current portfolio of projects. Is this a tactical urgent response to a current problem? Or is this project intended to be a strategic development to bring new value to an existing or new marketplace? Is this more or less important than current projects?

  3. Choose a project leader whose set skill is commensurate with the project’s overall importance to the portfolio of projects. If this new project is strategically critical and challenging, it is wise to put someone in charge who is ready for the challenge.

  4. Expect leaders to negotiate before the start. The project sponsor who is funding the project should expect the project leader assigned to his project to negotiate. Their mutual expectations must be explored in a way that they are made very clear, such that the differences that appear will be in sharp contrast. I expect the leader responsible for any project to ensure that the project is starting from a foundation for greatness. If there is no negotiation, this is a clear indicator that no thought has been put into that very foundation.

  5. Start with a small team. Too often, projects start with teams that are way too small, and sometimes with teams that are way too big. Typically, starting a project exceptionally means establishing a strong foundation to add other people to later. Starting with a small team with the attitude to start the project correctly will make the project go faster and faster as the right team members are added.

  6. Start with the right leadership sweet spot for the type of project. Test pilots who love trying out new prototype airplanes are not the perfect candidates for making regular flights between Rochester and New York City. If your project is exploring brand new technology and marketplaces, you want a leader who is fearless about being wrong and learning quickly from taking those risks. If it is a project to build on a current technology for new features or services for a well-established customer base, you are not expecting multiple experiments that could be wrong. You want a leader who will ensure that the current technologies continue to work well for your customer base. Look for the right type of leader for the project context.

  7. Start with a good social mix. Many people taking part in these exercises have noted when executives assigned people who were known to never get along to start a project. You can start with a volatile mix, but if you are going to start that way, you’d best have a very strong leader who knows how to make the inevitable conflicts consistently constructive. Again, you can start with a volatile mix, but personally I would save adding those ingredients until a bit later in the project.

  8. Time the start to enable momentum to build quickly. Many of the items on this list are based on the experience of starting up projects poorly. Many times, projects start poorly for the simple reason that no one looked ahead to see obvious conflicts that should have been anticipated. A common example is starting a project two weeks before a long holiday season and having everyone come back after the holidays to find they have to do almost all the start-up work over again. When you are deciding on a specific start date to gather the people, make sure there is ample time and low conflicts for the leadership and the team to start exceptionally.

  Do you agree with this list? What items would you change, add, or delete?

  Most important, for your organization, how many of your initiatives start with the criteria you believe are needed to start a project to be great?

  I have asked this question in multiple workshops, and in every single workshop a mystery has been exposed. The attendees had always created a list very similar to the one I presented here. Yet, their answers were that the vast majority of the projects in their organizations started poorly.

  This was hard for me to believe, so I asked the attendees to create a matrix of the criteria they defined and score multiple projects against the criteria. The detailed results showed the truth of their statements. There were occasional projects that scored well on six of the eight criteria listed here; however, the vast majority scored poorly on most of the exceptional start criteria.

  There appeared to be a mysterious barrier between the leaders and what they know and what is actually done to start initiatives well.

  The Exceptional Start Mystery Explained

  We know that we should start projects well. Yet most sponsors of projects fail to do so. Most leaders who are given a project to lead accept the bad start, often without question. Even if they do question it, most eventually just agree to “do their best.” We know that if a project starts this way, it will have bad results later. Yet most organizations do this.

  Why?

  The explanations I have heard from many leaders are very similar.

  Explanation #1: We Had the False Understanding That Starting Projects Earlier Would Mean They Finish Earlier

 
Many people have explained that they believed that starting things earlier meant they would be done earlier. There is truth in that if you start earlier correctly, and then run the project well, the initiative will be more likely to have earlier success.

  This belief is dangerous, however, if you believe that it means starting projects as fast as possible, no matter how poorly, means finishing earlier. It does not. Starting early incorrectly will not have the desired effect. As noted previously, it leads to rework, conflict, multiple project delays, and many reasons for the project actually finishing later than if the team waited and started the project correctly.

  Explanation #2: The Critical People Needed Were on Other Projects

  The second most common reason stated for starting projects poorly was that the leaders did not want to move resources from current projects and initiatives until they were complete. This often led to starting projects with the less busy people—who were usually the people with less experience and skills.

  So even if it did many other things correctly, the project still started with a poor base and had subsequent problems, making it difficult to achieve an exceptional finish.

  Explanation #3: We Just Had to Get It Started

  The third most common reason given for starting poorly after I asked the question “Why did you start if you knew it would be a problem?” was a very honest response. Many leaders have admitted to knowingly starting projects poorly just to get them started. They did so for political reasons to show progress. It was the only way to stop having to give status reports when they were constantly asked “Did you start project X yet?”