Leadership – Setting the Tone

Having thankfully (and finally) gotten past writing about IT as a whole, I’ve wanted to write on a dimension I associate with engaged leadership, which is the role a leader plays in establishing the conditions for success.

Before diving into the specifics, I believe everyone in an organization can and should think of themselves as a leader with the opportunity to contribute in meaningful ways (see my “Power of N” article for more on that).  I’m referring to leaders in a managerial capacity for the purposes of this piece.

 

Setting the Tone

First of all, I believe it’s important to acknowledge the personal accountability that leadership involves.

While culture and core values tend to be established at an organizational level, it is the leader who sets the tone and culture for a team, and that is largely a matter of choice.

In a leadership development session many years ago, a key point was made about “externalizing” leadership, calling attention to the situation where a leader would assign blame for decisions they were making on an ongoing basis to a third party such as their customer or other leaders to whom they reported or with whom they were working.  The challenge offered in that discussion was to reflect on that situation and ask why we, as individuals and leaders were not taking accountability for the choices we were making in spite of those circumstances. 

It’s not uncommon in my experience to see this situation occur, with examples along the lines of:

• Difficult or aberrant behaviors of a leader translating to a next level of leaders who work with them, and thereby exponentiating the impact of the overall leader’s behaviors on the broader team
• Challenging customer behaviors leading either to an order taker mentality or similar pattern of unhealthy behaviors within technology leadership that, again, have a detrimental impact on the associated team and work efforts
• Organizational misalignment or lack of collaboration between teams translating into fragmented solutions being defined and delivered, ultimately creating complexity, limiting organizational agility and speed, and also increasing technical debt

The key questions in the situations above is “Where does this end?” or “Why doesn’t someone do something about this?”  The ripple effect of a lack of leadership can be quite substantial and the reason courageous leadership is needed is because there will almost always be some level of negative reaction that occurs the minute the cycle of dysfunction is broken.

 

Leadership starts with each of us and the choices we make every day.

 

The right questions for a leader to be asking in the situations above are rooted in personal ownership and accountability: “What can I do about this?” and “How can I set an example for how things ‘should be’ by comparison with how they are today?”

I’ve certainly been in situations in the past, particularly in consulting, where the client or personalities of a core team were not necessarily healthy or positive in terms of promoting collaboration and partnership.  It has also been the case where the direction I received from the larger organization may not have been in the best interest of my team, the client, or both.  This is, again, where integrity can be tested and doing the right thing is critical. 

In my view, a leader needs to set a positive tone for what is possible, to act in good faith, with integrity, and do their best to insulate their team from the adverse circumstances that may surround what they are doing.  This creates space for culture to be positive, engaging, and effective and for team members to do their best work.  By contrast, when a leader allows those circumstances to dictate their actions in a way that becomes unhealthy, they are effectively punting their accountability to lead in the first place.  Again, it’s a choice, and it’s one that truly matters if you want to pursue excellence and high-performance teams.

Given the above three scenarios, the outcomes of making the right choice can be significant:

• Not transferring dysfunction to the “next level” can unlock the performance and impact of the team that had previously been under-utilized. That could have a positive impact on output, on quality, on morale, on turnover, etc.  The negative impact of poor leadership is fairly well established in terms of operating performance
• Addressing customer challenges with effective leadership can provide greater portfolio stability, less missed expectations (because they are communicated, set, and managed properly), and overall improvement in the health of the work, not to mention the positive team impacts referenced above
• Finally, providing effective leadership in an organizationally misaligned environment can help provide clean solution designs that increase agility, accelerate speed to value, and reduce cost of operations

Wrapping Up

In short, the point of this article was to suggest a moment of reflection. 

What are the challenges you see in the organization in which you work today?  Can you do something about them?  Does that actually require “permission”?  What or who would prevent you from making a positive change?

My experience over time has been that leadership opportunity is always there, in part because you can almost never have too much of it.  It takes courage to step into the void and challenge the status quo where dysfunction exists… and it also takes a degree of fearlessness to truly drive excellence and transformation.

I used to echo a concept to a team many years ago in the interest of encouraging personal ownership and engagement: make a difference every day… no matter how large it is, it matters over time.

Imagine the possibilities if only a fraction of the leaders in an organization tried to create positive change every day…

I hope the thoughts were worth sharing… feedback is always welcome and appreciated.

-CJG 10/30/2021