Week 7: DON'T be Steve Jobs

Is it just me or do you also get annoyed when you excitedly bring an idea to the table only to be met with someone who points out all of the flaws or potential risks?

Now, leadership enthusiast Dawn would tell annoyed Dawn that she should use that feedback to help refine her idea and mitigate risks ahead of time. Annoyed Dawn usually just wants to make sure that person isn’t invited to future meetings.

Annoyed Dawn is a work in progress **🤪.

At the onset of our plan, we learned that in order to survive the full adoption of our change effort, we must learn to manage our environment and ourselves. This week’s lesson falls squarely in the managing ourselves category. Specifically, it addresses the need to restrain our desire to control and our need to feel important.

We have spent the last six weeks learning how to get buy-in for our change efforts. It goes without saying that once we reach the point of needing buy-in from a wider group of people that we have a lot of confidence in our effort. However, this week we are reminded that we can’t get so attached to our ideas that we block any outside influence that can improve them.

Reading Persuading the Unpersuadable by Adam Grant for the third time, I was surprised to find that the article echoed some of the same challenges for overcoming resistance to change that we learned in reading the first chapter of The Catalyst:

1. The Ask a know-it-all to explain how things work section of the article reflected the benefits of guiding someone to recognize a gap in their own understanding.
2. The Let a Stubborn Person Seize the Reins section emphasized the power that asking questions instead of giving answers has in overcoming people’s defensiveness.
3. If we reflect on it, the Disagree with the Disagreeable section helps us to recognize that introducing friction when dealing with someone who is energized by conflict may be beneficial.

In the article, Grant uses Steve Jobs and Apple as an example of change efforts that face an influential decision maker as the opposer. You could gain many insights from this article but the most important for our success as organizational change leaders is in remembering that there is value in being challenged. Steve Jobs initially outright rejected the idea of streaming video and the idea of a mobile phone! Thanks to those who around him who didn’t shy away from the courage required, and endurance needed, to successfully challenge him, the world now has the AppleTV and iPhone.

We’ve already talked about bringing an idea only to an 80% solution before involving others as a mechanism for maximizing buy-in. Now, we flip that coin on the other side and recognize this as an opportunity to welcome and encourage challengers.

At the start of this plan, I found it very humbling to admit that I need to manage my need to control. We never describe people as controlling with a positive connotation. I value my ability to take charge and to move things forward towards a goal and my view of ownership and control helps me to do that. However, the phrase overcome his own worst instincts are haunting me as does this quote from the article: “…plenty of leaders are so sure of themselves that they reject worthy opinions and ideas from others and refuse to abandon their own bad ones.”

As I reflect on how I will ensure that I don’t get too attached to my own change ideas, I can’t help but wonder how I might define criteria to separate challenge that reflects a worthy opinion from that which is just complaining. I will think more on this but it reminds me of how complex leadership is.

I want to incorporate the right voices…

I know I need to take time to find them…

I also know that means I will accidentally waste time on the wrong voices…

And time is something that leaders never have enough of!

I’m ruminating on a rubric to address this. If I develop one, I’ll share it with you in a future post.

Stay tuned…

A Note on Developing Technical Leaders

At the start, I promised you that I would share my professional development plan and also provide alignment to leading in a technical organization. I haven’t done much of that but I haven’t forgotten and promise to do more going forward. This week, I wanted to share a few thoughts on using our new knowledge when developing other technical leaders.

Socrates said “the more I learn, the less I realize I know.” I used to get annoyed by new grads. They enter the workforce having spent at least 4 years of intensive learning…and they were usually very arrogant. As a more experienced professional, I knew that they’d merely earned the admission fee to a career where their success would be tightly coupled to their continued learning. I enjoyed watching them come to this realization as they struggled to apply their theoretical knowledge to real world problems. After our 9 months of working together, we’d discuss how much MORE they’d learned since graduating. Often, they’d equate their 9 months of real world experience to having learned as much as all four years of college.

The leadership journey is very similar. New leaders are often very arrogant yet immature in their leadership acumen. As a more experienced leader, we can preemptively help them advance the learning curve by paying attention to two predictable follies.

First, new leaders often abandon their professional development in areas of leadership. Thrust into a new world that requires constant attention, context switching and the exercising of a lot of new skills, they likely don’t make the time. This is a mistake.

Solution ⇒ Assign a mentor at the time of promoting a technical contributor to a new leadership position. This mentor should be responsible for

👉🏽 being a sounding board or source of advice when the leader encounters unexpected challenges

👉🏽 ensuring the new leader carves out time to continue to deepen their leadership acumen

Second, new leaders tend to think they are expected to know all of the answers and solve all of the problems alone. This brings us back to this lesson. If we can instill in our new leaders the mindset that the best leaders leverage others in the right ways, we can help them to value those who challenge them in order to make the best decision.

Leadership is complex.

Thank you for reading!