Leaders are not paid to solution
Opinion: Senior Leaders who spend more time figuring out how to support teams get better results, faster.
Visionary leadership and passionate endorsement are critical elements when we’re setting up teams to do hard, meaningful work, like service design and delivery.
Every time I’ve kicked off something others thought couldn’t be done, we’ve made sure senior leaders were in the room. We needed the teams of people to believe that they’d get what they needed from leadership to be successful.
You know what they don’t need? Leaders who decide they know better than the team.
This is a tricky spot for me that I’m openly reflecting on because I’m naturally a doer. I LOOOVVEE a complex problem to dig into. And I mean dig. Like, sure, I’ll google how to code that thing if you need me to.
I’ve avoided structural leadership positions because I believe those roles are (should be) removed from the problem solving space. Why? Because these roles are often far removed from people experiencing the service delivery.
Of course, sometimes you get very knowledgeable and experienced people leading teams. I have 20 years to offer experience from a variety of disciplines. Even as a senior director, it makes sense for me to pitch in from time to time.
What I want to explore here is when we get out of balance, because I’ve seen it happen.
There is a tipping point where we let teams down. Where we don’t give them what they need to be successful in discovering what the right solution really is. It is good to know the warning signs and how to pivot.
Disempowerment Feedback Loop
I suppose I’ve observed a simple, sad loop that looks like this:
The overly simplified idea: when an initiative starts with musing, and leaders don’t figure out how to ACTUALLY deliver, well, not much happens. In the middle of the animation, I clicked the resources a few times, to indicate resources getting unblocked somehow. Eventually we get to delivery, and leaders no longer need to muse.
This seems obvious right? And silly? Well, I’ve tested my observation with others in the delivery space and guess what. WAY too common.
Would you double down on this? Or, not your experience? Leave me a comment! I’m mostly running on anecdotes, here.
Here is another layer to the dynamic:
Here, I’ve added the excitement that comes when leaders spend some time musing. I’ve seen this lead to resourcing, which is great!
You know what else it can lead to though? Uninformed solutions.
This is where someone at the leadership table knows someone who did a thing with [insert cool tech thing here] and they can’t wait for the team to get started because they are excited.
Most structural leaders are not going to spend one real work day actually solving the problem. They won’t do the user research. They won’t design or code the product that has to meet multiple, diverse user needs, which requires feedback to prove out.
They will anxiously demand status reports wondering where their wonderfully obvious solution is at, though. 😰
The easy path is naming a thing and telling staff to do it because it’s been done somewhere before.
Perhaps this is fine if you’ve spent a good bulk of your time at the leadership table also resourcing a bunch of people to go trace down the feasibility of an uninformed solution and to write reports… but it’s not a great use of time (I’ve seen this happen before too).
To summarize:
Leaders who spend too much time discussing (usually ill-informed) solutions can get caught in an unfortunate feedback loop.
When they don’t prioritize resourcing and supporting teams properly, and instead, hand them directions about solutions, they disempower them and create sub-optimal delivery conditions.
As a result, these leaders do not have high performing teams. They have turn-over instead. In addition to being anxiously under pressure, they are more inclined to continue to spend time in the solution pondering space because they don’t trust their people.
This is a critical cycle to break.
So why do leaders waste time discussing solutions more than they should?
First: they are people too. Humans like puzzles. It’s fun to feel right about ideas your peers might nod along to.
So, empathy. I’m writing about this because it is common and I have direct experience with it. I love the “what if” solution space. I’ve even spent some time building things (like, 5–10 years ago). So I’m even MORE prone to this trap.
However, much of the time spent solution-ing at a senior leadership table is an expensive waste. That air time conjuring the specter of what might be possible is simply that: hot air.
Meanwhile, the people who deserve empowerment and resourcing to solve the problem are waiting. Waiting is waste.
I’ve realized that if I am to take a pay bump to remove myself from the team solving the problems, I’d have to get excited about a different type of problem solving.
Get Excited about Awesome Teams
I’m still not the most passionate about negotiating budget sharing agreements and paying attention to multiple facets of org health and administration that are required to clear a path to productive problem solving.
I have an eye on the prize though: watching a small, cross-functional and high performing team fly is exhilarating. Like, watching your favourite sport team score the winning goal. 🏆
Of course, there are contexts where leaders should understand the solution options and be equipped to confidently endorse an approach the team takes. This is a good time to “walk the floor” and spend time with the team.
Sometimes you’re not in charge of solving a complex challenge, and the direction is actually clear or discernable by an expert or two. I won’t go into this tricky spot too much. I’ll just say that knowing what type of problem space you are in is critical, so you know when to build a proper team.
I think it is also okay to briefly spitball at start-up, particularly if there is a delivery pattern in the organization that architecturally and financially makes sense. These can be lightly offered to the delivery team for consideration, especially if you’ve got credible experience or knowledge.
Most importantly, in the service delivery space, this needs to be supported by a foundation of user research. Nothing useful really happens without knowing just enough about people’s needs and expectations to start testing a hypothesis.
From there, it is the leader’s job to cheer on the team, while holding them accountable for demonstrating what they’re building (live product demos). This might also include paying attention to the goals or milestones they committed to, so that if they slip, the leader can offer ways to support.
As we start to see delivery taking shape, we might further get excited about what the team is learning… which often diverges from our early assumptions. If the team is doing solid user research and getting feedback on product iterations as they go, then we can get excited that we didn’t direct a path that lined up with that early (wrong) assumption.
Phew. Bullet dodged. Thanks team.
For people that have never worked with a modern (often digital) service delivery team before, some of this might sound entirely foreign. If you are intrigued though, reach out. Or, read more here: https://digital.gov.bc.ca/
Know when to pivot
Inevitably, leaders will find themselves in a space where they are asked to solve a complex problem and they’ll personally lean in to thinking about solution pathways.
If the first pathway isn’t “build and support a team to solve the problem,” well, there’s time to practice that one…
The second best move is to pivot as soon as possible from musing to “well, we can agree this feels like a worthwhile and feasible problem to solve: how might we equip a real, live delivery team to solve it?”
This goes deeper, and wider, for leaders than just my own musing here.
Jumping to solutions and hesitancy to dig into the more challenging work of figuring out how to direct a complex system of people, HR policies, funding limitations, and conflicting priorities is, well, understandable.
As much as I have slagged on leaders for often falling into the solutioning trap, the picture I’ve painted is overly simple. I intended it that way so that we could see a signal in the noise.
Smarter people than me have written about the “phantom workload” that prevents leaders from getting the results they desire.
Phantom workload is the unintentional work created when people either take expedient but ineffective short cuts… Leaders unwittingly create a vicious cycle where the workload produced by solving these additional problems leads to increased pressure, which in turn leads to greater stress and a further reluctance or inability to engage in difficult tasks (see “Phantom Workload”).
The article by Marilyn Paul, Ph. D. and David Peter Stroh I pulled this from addresses multiple additional dynamics that make a leader’s job difficult. It is mostly about time management and avoiding hard stuff.
We be human.
And, the humans that get paid more than the other humans are on the hook for figuring out how to navigate this.
Call to action:
You might find yourself in one of these leadership positions, perhaps surrounded by peers with a mounting pressure to deliver. If you do, you have an opportunity to do the less obvious, less sexy things that can lead to:
- Better business value.
- More engaged staff that you retain.
- Increased capacity to deliver more.
I’m not saying it’s easy, or as fun as getting hands on with the problem to solve. I might suggest that getting away from those executive tables and hanging out with the team for a moment might satiate a bit of that.
How? Attend demos. (Demos, not memos.)
Ultimately, figuring out how to resource and support effective delivery teams will get better, more exciting results, faster.
H
