I’m going to define management and leadership really quickly to highlight the differences in two terms that are often used interchangeably:

• Management: Utilizing the resources and people available to produce the most value
• Leadership: Increasing the capacity of people to produce value through connections and motivation

Let’s say a person is capable of X amount of productivity.  A good manager will put systems around them and work with them in such a way that they will produce X every single day.  A good leader will help them produce more than X (in a humane manner).

The difference between manager and leader is not a continuum with manager on one end and leader on the other.  Those are two completely different skills, and you can be good or bad at one or both or neither.  I’ve seen many good leaders who could get great effort out of people, but only for a short period of time because they lacked the skills of a manager.

Anyone in a position of leadership should work on growing both skills, but I’m going to make a potentially controversial statement: with few exceptions, in a business context it’s more important to be a good manager than a good leader.

This post will discuss what I consider three key skills a manager should work to develop.

Creating Clarity

You cannot help a team, or an individual, produce the most value if you don’t know what is valuable.  A good manager will first seek to understand a few key things:

• Current situation
  • Major obstacles
  • Workload
  • Outstanding projects/items
• Resources available
  • This includes physical things such as funds and hardware, as well as less obvious things such as the skills of the individuals on the team
• Responsibilities
• Desired outcomes/deliverables

The two last points encompass a lot of data, so we’re going to expand them with the help of Patrick Lencioni.  In his book “The Advantage” in the chapter entitled “Create Clarity” (copyright Patrick Lencioni), Lencioni outlines what he calls “six critical questions” that leaders must answer to give employees “the clarity they need.”  These questions are:

1. Why do we exist?
2. How do we behave?
3. What do we do?
4. How will we succeed?
5. What is most important, right now?
6. Who must do what?

These are excellent questions, and Lencioni expands on them throughout the chapter, going in depth into each one.  I recommend picking up the book, but I’m going to note two important things about these questions:

The first is that these questions must be answered simply to be effective.  Lencioni specifically warns against “generic buzzwords and aspirational phrases” — the type of language often associated with a mission statement (a bad one, at least).  For example, if you run a restaurant and are answering question number one it’s easy to get carried away in the business version of sweet nothings, like so: “Our restaurant exists to create unique, powerful culinary experiences which delight the tastebuds and enliven the mind.”  Avoid this impulse!  Instead, answer as simply and clearly as possible: “We make excellent tacos in an atmosphere that reminds one of home.”

The second is that these questions naturally build off each other.  Why we exist should inform how we behave.  What we do is driven by both why we exist and how we behave, and how will we succeed is dependent on what we do.  If we know how we will succeed, then what is important, right now, becomes obvious.  And finally, if you know what is most important, right now, then all that’s left is to decide who will do what to accomplish it.

Whether you manage a small team or a large enterprise, I highly recommend grabbing a pencil and paper and answering the questions above.  Take some time.  Think about them.  The answer’s should be obvious, which brings me to one of my favorite quotes of all time:

… if the solution to a problem is not yet obvious, it means we have not yet understood the situation sufficiently.  Time to go and see again.
– Mike Rother, Toyota Kata

Don’t rush.  If the answer to a question doesn’t seem completely obvious, take some time and study it out.  You’ll know you’ve got the answer when a thought strikes you and you slap yourself on the forehead and go “Oh yeah!  THAT is why we exist!”

Although all the questions are important, I would like to call special attention to “how will we succeed.”  Lencioni centers the answer to this question around strategy, but I would like to borrow from David Allen’s “Getting Things Done.”  In his natural planning model he outlines a key step, what he calls “outcome visioning.”

… you must have a clear picture in your mind of what success would look, sound and feel like.

Sticking with our restaurant example, it is not sufficient to say “our restaurant will be good.”  It doesn’t give your mind anything to grab hold of.  You must instead imagine exactly what the experience of being in your restaurant on a busy night will look like.  What is happening in the kitchen, and the host station, and at the tables?  What does it smell like?  What is the lighting like?

When you have an image of success firmly in your mind you can break it down into achievable goals.  These goals should have numbers associated with them — you should be able to measure whether or not you are achieving the success you have envisioned.

Of course, the closer you get to your goal the more you may realize that the goal wasn’t exactly right to begin with.  That’s totally fine!  Lencioni says:

More than getting the right answer, it’s often more important to simply have an answer–one that is directionally correct and around which all team members can commit.

You don’t have to be perfect out of the gate, but it will help you get closer to the mark sooner if you can confidently answer Lencioni’s questions, and if you know what success will look like.  When you have that you have information that is “directionally correct” and you can begin iterating towards the right solution.

Setting Standards

Today’s standardization … is the necessary foundation on which tomorrow’s improvement will be based.  If you think of ‘standardization’ as the best you know today, but which is to be improved tomorrow — you get somewhere.  But if you think of standards as confining, then progress stops.
– Henry Ford, 1926

Without standards, there can be no improvement.
– Taiichi Ohno

I like Henry Ford’s framing of what standardization is (“the best you know today”), but I love Taiichi Ohno’s significantly more succinct statement of why it is important.

After you know the outcome you want (by “creating clarity”) you need to try and reach and improve upon that outcome.

Think of a science experiment.  You’re trying to determine how much of a dye you need to put in water to reach a certain shade, but the dye takes a while to work.  So you take ten test tubes, and you put a different amount of dye in each one.

You know how an experiment should work.  Someone carefully measures the water so it is exactly equal in every test tube.  Then they take a precise measuring device (like a dropper) and measure and record exactly the amount of dye put in each test tube.  They leave them all in the same area for the exact same amount of time, then measure the color using an instrument that gives them a numerical results.  By controlling all the external factors you can see how much dye actually makes a difference.

Work rarely functions like this.  Work is more like an experiment where someone puts water in different containers, then eyeballs some dye from a container without measuring it, puts all the containers in different places in the office, and then comes back and tests them throughout the following day by looking at them while squinting to determine if something is “blue enough.”

A good manager sets standards that eliminate external factors.  They make work function the same to enable them to improve it.  That doesn’t mean they micromanage every activity of their team members.  Not only would that not be effective, it is impossible.  Instead a manager standardizes enough to enable experimentation.

The standard itself does not have to be perfect — in fact, that’s the whole point.  It CAN’T be perfect, because you haven’t run experiments yet.  You don’t know everything.  What matters is you have a standard upon which you can experiment.

When I was 16 or so I hiked Mount St Helens with a group of scouts and myself and two friends got lost in thick, freezing fog.  We couldn’t see more than 100 yards in any direction, and St Helens is entirely covered in rock — one direction looks more or less identical to the rest, the only difference being whether you’re heading up or down.

For the first hour or so we wandered aimlessly, looking for the trail we had lost.  We went a few hundred yards one way, then another, then another.  We made no progress whatsoever, and only succeeded in getting colder and more panicked.

Eventually we decided on a strategy.  We would head downhill.  That was it!  That was our whole strategy.  But we went downhill.  We had a direction.  We had a standard.

After some time we hit the tree line.  Should we head left, or right?  Once again, the direction was less important than deciding on action.  We followed the treeline until we took a break to eat and saw, through the trees, the parka of a hiker.  We yelled out, asking if that was the path to camp and when he said yes we pelted down the steep hill, nearly killing ourselves in our joy at finding the way.

I think we chose left, but I don’t recall exactly.  Truly, it didn’t matter, what mattered is that we chose a path and stayed consistent.  We could’ve stayed near the treeline, going back and forth endlessly and never getting far enough to make a difference.  Really, we could’ve continued what we did for the first hour and never found our way anywhere.  That is the power and importance of a standard, and also demonstrates why the standard must change as you discover more information.  But how to change it?

Iterating and Experimenting

The goal in creating standards is not control, but instead to make sure everyone is using “the best you know today.”  This will require different levels of detail for different jobs, but the purpose is to make it so that, by modifying one variable at a time, you can detect changes in performance.

If you know what success entails, and are measuring metrics that will help you reach success, then you can extrapolate out whether or not the current standard is sufficient.  If the standard isn’t sufficient, you can begin iterating on that standard — performing small experiments where you try one new thing at a time to see if that improves your metrics, and brings you closer to success.

One common strategy for this is called a Plan Do Check Act Cycle (PDCA), popularized by Toyota.

In PDCA you carefully select one experiment you want to try that changes one facet of operations.  You predict the effect you think it will have (ideally mathematically, based on your metrics).  You run an experiment and observe.  You compare the results to your prediction, then you decide if you want to standardize on the experiment, or discard it as ineffective.

Then you do it again.  And again.  And again.  And you never stop, because you will always find ways to improve the work.  The nature and scope of the experiments may change over time, but a good manager is always, always iterating and experimenting.

Just like my experience on the mountain, the point is not to have the right answers the first time.  It’s to keep trying new things (with structure and consistency) until you land on the right answer.  It may take a few iterations, it may take months.  A good manager doesn’t stop trying until they get there.

That all seems a little … simple

In the book “High Flyers” Morgan McCall points out that many people think leaders have something special, something that has been called “the right stuff.”  The point of his book is that the whole idea — that some people have “the right stuff” and rise to the top and will eventually lead — is false.  It isn’t born out by decades of careful research.

McCall then talks about what managers DO have in common — he lists 11 personality traits that most leaders have.  I wrote a blog post about it, but I won’t to focus on a few key traits:

• Leaders have the courage to take risks (this appears twice in his list)
• Leaders seek opportunities to learn
• Leaders learn from mistakes
• Leaders seek and use feedback
• Leaders are open to criticism (this appears twice)

We can condense all those bullet points down into two:

• Leaders try new things
• Leaders learn

That’s it!  And the best way to try new things, and LEARN from those attempts is through the three steps above:

• Create clarity
  • know what you’re trying to accomplish and be capable of measuring it
• Standardize
  • Make sure everyone is doing “the best you know today”
• Iterate and experiment
  • Use PDCA cycles to improve your standards

If you can do those three things then you’ll be trying new things, and learning from your attempts.  You’ll already have almost half of the traits McCall thinks are crucial for leaders.

It doesn’t require genius, no more than us getting down from Mt St Helens required genius.  You just need to be organized and then keep trying until you get it right.