Josh Boyles

What one leadership book should you read?

I’ve been asked a few times for book recommendations, especially for new or aspiring leaders. So I decided to write a blog post about it! But like most my posts, I’m going to throw a twist in, because the truth of the matter is there isn’t ONE book every leader should read —

(except Parent Effectiveness Training, which everyone should read regardless of what they do for work or whether they actually are parents)

— because every leader’s needs are different, and that’s because every organization and every team is different.

Even previous leadership success doesn’t mean anything on a new team (as McCall illustrates so effectively in “High Flyers“). The very things that were strengths in a different role can end up being weaknesses in a new one.

A big part of management is figuring out which of your traits can help your team, figuring out which traits are harming, and need to be improved, and which traits are harmless, and can be ignored.

To successfully do that you need to figure out what your team should be doing, where they’re falling short, and then what you, personally, should do to help change things. Again, that might be doing something you’re already good at, but it’s more likely you’ll recognize that the reason your team is struggling is because of something that you aren’t currently prepared to handle.

So what should you do?

What’s wrong, buddy?

How do you know what you should be working to improve in yourself? Well, it’s a relatively simple process:

  1. Figure out what your team should be doing
  2. Figure out where they’re falling short
  3. Perform root cause analysis to figure out WHY they’re falling short
  4. Figure out what skills you can bring to bear to address the root cause
  5. If you already have those skills, do it!
  6. If you don’t, build a skill!

There’s an easy way and a hard way to do this process. Let’s look at both of those:

The Easy Way: You have a manager you trust

Typically a good manager can tell you a few things:

  1. They can tell you what your team should be doing
  2. They can tell you how they will measure the success of your team (and thus how you should be measuring it yourself)
  3. They can tell you where your team is falling short (or where you appear to be struggling)
  4. They might even be able to help you know how to improve something

You may notice a decent amount of overlap between that list and our process for finding out what you should work on above. In fact, a good manager should always be able to basically give you 1 and 2. They can probably help with step 3. And they might be able to help with step 4-6. Man, a good manager comes in handy.

The Hard Way: You’re on your own

You may be in a situation where you have a manager you don’t trust, or isn’t particularly consistent, or is unavailable for some reason (maybe they have a lot of responsibilities and dedicate less time to you and your team). In this case, you’ve got to do the process above on your own.

Luckily, I’ve been writing about this stuff recently! So let’s see how that stuff layers onto our process for finding out what you need to learn:

  1. Figure out what your team should be doing
  2. Figure out where they’re falling short
  3. Perform root cause analysis to figure out WHY they’re falling short
    • Okay, the closest I have to this is a post about solving problems which talks about root cause analysis, but it’s a couple years old and not a perfect match. If I write something better about RCA (which I really should) I’ll try to remember to update this
  4. Figure out what skills you can bring to bear to address the root cause
  5. If you already have those skills, do it!
  6. If you don’t, build a skill!

So we’ve got some idea of what to do until step four, which isn’t bad. The most crucial step is finding the root cause, which can be really tricky. A lot of things that might look like a cause are actually symptoms of a deeper root cause.

I’ve told this story before, but I once worked on a small helpdesk (maybe five or six people). I worked differently from everyone else — I would typically get the problem from the user, tell them I’ll call them back, hang up, solve the problem, then tell them it was done.

I did this because I felt like it was more respectful of our user’s time. Also, I hated putting them on hold and then coming back every three minutes and going “still working on it, buddy.”

When I was off the phone, but working on a user’s problem, I would put myself as unavailable. Some of my team members noticed I was on “unavailable” more than them, so they thought I was slacking off. Several of them got together and complained to our manager about me.

He called me into his office and said “Hey, some of your coworkers have complained that you’re not pulling your weight.” To which I replied “That’s weird. What does our ticket report say?” So he looked it up and found that I closed, on average, twice as many tickets as the whole rest of the team combined. So I excused myself and went back to work.

Guess what? The team kept complaining about me, so he called me into his office to dress me down for continuing to do more work than anyone else. Anyway, that’s when I decided to get a new job.

NOW! There was a problem with our team. What was the problem? There were several:

  • The team didn’t trust each other
  • We were all obviously doing the work very differently from each other and didn’t understand one another’s workflows
  • They didn’t trust their manager to be on top of managing workloads
  • Clearly there was no reporting about how much work was actually being accomplished

Which one of those is the main problem? And what was the root cause of it? It could’ve been an issue of training (if we all were told to work the same way there’d be no ambiguity). It could’ve been an issue of culture — if we trusted and communicated with each other they probably would’ve asked at some point why my phone patterns were so weird. It could’ve been an issue of leadership. It could’ve been an issue of misaligned metrics.

Do you see how tricky it can be to disentangle a root cause from intermediary causes and symptoms? That’s why that’s the most crucial, and most difficult, step.

Either Way: You still end up here

If you’re finding purposes, measuring, and doing root cause analysis on your own, or if your manager supplies it, you still end up in the same place. There’s something wrong, and you may or may not have the skills to fix it.

If you do, great! Go do that. If you don’t, well, here’s where we get to the book recommendations! I’m going to outline a few scenarios (with some symptoms) and offer a book (or more than one) you can read that could help you develop the skills necessary to address the root cause. Let’s go!

Physician, Heal Thyself

Let’s go through these problems one-by-one (and I’ll offer a couple suggestions for if you just don’t know where to start at the bottom).

  • Problem: One-on-one communication
    • Symptoms
      • You often find that people don’t understand you, or you don’t understand them.
      • You leave conversations feeling you’re not on the same page, or worse, you feel you ARE on the same page, but then the person does something that surprises you.
      • People fail to do tasks you outlined for them and, when you ask why, they indicate they don’t know that’s what you wanted.
      • People frequently bring up the same issues over and over again
    • Books
  • Problem: Toxic Culture
    • Symptoms
      • People often complain about each other behind their backs, even though meetings are almost too friendly
      • Discussions about problems always devolve into finger-pointing
      • High Turnover or Low Job Satisfaction
    • Books
  • Problem: Uneven Productivity
    • Symptoms
      • It’s not whether projects are late, it’s by how much
      • Smaller tasks and projects fall through the cracks with little progress for weeks
      • You have to bug people multiple times to get something done or get you information
    • Books
  • Problem: Lack of Strategy
    • Symptoms
      • When you ask people why we do what we do, everyone gives you different answers
      • There is no long term picture of what things will look like in the future
      • Projects start and stop, cancelled for reasons that aren’t entirely clear
      • You’re not sure how to set team goals or tie your work into organizational priorities
    • Books
  • Problem: Lack of Team Focus
    • Symptoms
      • Even though you’ve created a clear strategy, front line workers don’t know it
      • You find your team members are often spending time on tasks that are less important at the expense of those that are more important
      • Projects often take longer because of push and pull between team members about what matters more
      • Each team member deals with customers in a completely different, sometimes contradictory, way
    • Books
  • Problem: Finding Root Causes
    • Symptoms
      • You know there are problems, and you feel like you’ve tried to find the root cause, but the problem persists
      • After implementing a fix for something, dysfunction appears in other parts of the workflow
      • You find yourself overwhelmed trying to find a root cause for a particularly tricky problem
    • Books

And if you’re unsure of where to start? Well, remember when I talked about how important root cause analysis is to this whole endeavor? It would make sense to learn that really well first, in which case the one book I’d read if I didn’t for sure know what problem I was tackling is TOYOTA KATA by Mike Rother. Come on down, Mike! Collect your prize!(?!?)

(I’m actually linking you to the essential bundle, which includes the practice guide. Even when I limit myself to ONE BOOK I end up getting in two books via a technicality. I’m the worst)

I’m curious, though. If you are like “None of these problems match MY problem” then just drop your problem in the comments and I will see if I have a book recommendation for you! Good luck!

joshaboyles

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