The Leaflet #110
1. high leverage retreats 2. adding a leader (and layer) 3. hiring and managing experts
ONE: High-leverage retreat structure
Retreat activities that I think of as high leverage, in order of appearance:
A kind of “state of the union” address at the beginning from the leader that essentially allows people to feel momentum by pointing out wins. Find some authentic way, either in that moment or immediately after, to recognize people for their contributions to those wins without making anybody feel left out. Search for everybody’s contribution.
Getting on the same page with a group on strategy and priorities. To do this, you really do think like a good teacher. When you’ve been taught a set of concepts that you didn’t know before, how did people do that for you?
Often this involves some constructivism. Rather than giving them a memo with your ideas, you’re presenting them with perhaps a higher level version of what you’re accomplishing and asking them how they would make sense of that at a more concrete level, or giving them options. I think the best way to do this is to somehow lead them on the journey that you took in arriving at this.
If I were doing this with, say, a group of math teachers who I was going to give a new curriculum, I would probably lead them through the following: here’s some instruction I saw in your classrooms that was working and here’s some that wasn’t working. What conclusion would you draw from that? They’d be like, “Oh, we need different material.” Then I’d continue to walk them through that so that there is a narrative supporting what you arrived at, not just a statement. Narrative is more memorable. A narrative makes sense. If one of your goals is to give them the confidence to make decisions, knowing the back story—literal story—is going to make them a lot more able to do that.
Clarifying and improving the work this strategy will require. I would backwards map from the next retreat: How do we bring these things to life? How do we bring them to the next level? For this, you’re probably mixing the modes of the work. The format goes from lecture Q&A style to maybe breakout groups or partners, people coming back and presenting to each other, and so on.
Brass tacks planning. This is especially useful when you can separate it from the more story- and strategy-driven first day, ideally with a night between the two. When we wake up tomorrow, we’re actually going to talk about what it means to put all this into actual practice and what we’re going to plan. To get to the brass tacks, I would give them very simple questions with a lot of autonomy:
When we celebrate our success in this at the next retreat, we are celebrating what? What did we literally put in our calendars between now and then to make that happen? What did we change about how we work as a group to make that happen?
Use breakout teams. Have people go off on their own for a while or with groups to work on this and feel the weight of it personally, rather than just letting it hover above the group.
Final presentations. I do think the best retreats end in changed calendars and actual real thoughts from the team that we’re going to really implement this. Like, I can tell that we’re going to implement this because we made it concrete somehow. Having your breakout groups share even rough, informal drafts with the rest of the team is a way to make it concrete.
Finish with some sort of gratitude for specific contributions people made to the plan for what’s next and maybe give folks a chance to articulate what they’re excited about.
-ben
TWO: Adding a new leader (and layer) to your organization
I think it’s really useful to treat adding a new leader to your organization like any fairly significant change management challenge. If you were going to radically change your strategy or move the offices to the UK, for example — what would be all the things you would anticipate and proactively deal with?
In this case, as in all change management cases, usually the biggest gap that bites people is that the team is not informed and not aligned with the leader’s reasoning for why the change is happening. In this case that would be: we are adding a leader in this role for the following reasons, and we chose Eric for this role for these reasons. To whatever degree somebody does not know what’s in your head about that, that’s an opportunity for them to resist, push back, or fall into a negative space about it.
So the big picture thing is: does everybody know why he’s here? Not just at a high headline level, but why this person in particular was chosen for this. For example, if you do expect him to hold more people accountable, you can say: one of the reasons I chose this person specifically is that I had every expectation that they would raise the accountability level that you’ve been experiencing, having only reported to me so far. So now your team is actually predicting that as one of the consequences of this change and is not being surprised when it happens. I think it’s worthwhile to have a good think about that and make sure the team is aware. It’s probably good to put some of this in writing for them to refer back to: We’re bringing Eric onto the leadership team and here’s my reasoning.
I think the biggest move you can make long term is freeing up your time such that the number one thing on your schedule, whenever a new leader joins, is you making sure that person is successful. Your attention and time on this are going to be more valuable than everything else.
It’s also useful to establish a skip level type of structure, if you don’t have one already, where you’re in conversation with folks who report to the new leader, specifically asking: how’s it going with Lars? As these skip level meetings unfold, you remain pretty close with Eric. You hold fairly frank conversations about how everything is going on at least a weekly basis. So you’re getting insight both from his internal point of view and from others’ point of view. If you are noticing in between those meetings that this is impacting your workload in ways you don’t like, then that becomes an agenda item for your next meeting with Eric.
-ben
THREE: Hiring and managing an expert
There’s a personality dynamic that I see a lot when somebody is hiring somebody who’s had high performance in a general role or competency before. That new hire clearly identifies as an expert in the domain you hired them to run / operate within. Perhaps you explicitly hired them with that understanding: that they’re an expert. You and the new hire share a belief in the new hire’s expertise.
The danger in hiring somebody as an expert is that if you’re not actually ready to give them full autonomy to exert their expertise, they might have resistance when you assert yours, or guidance of any kind.
The expert faces a dilemma when you tell him, “I don’t know that I agree with your instincts here.” They can say, “Thank you, I appreciate that, I will take your direction,” which seems like a decent compliance move to make with your boss. But – doesn’t that prove that they were the wrong hire? Didn’t the leader want somebody who could come up with this themselves? So maybe I need to push back. Maybe I need to disagree. Or I lose the only value they thought I brought to the organization.
Whether or not this is true for your expert, I think it is helpful for you, as the leader, to get out of this situation.
Generically what I’d say is: the way to help the expert succeed if he’s in that dilemma is to help him rely less on the identity that he was hired as an expert, and help him rely more on the identity that he’s joined the team to collaborate and learn together how to do this most effectively. “Actually, the person we wanted to hire here was definitely somebody with your background and your passions, but we didn’t presume that you would already be an expert on how we do this. In fact, we presumed we would build that together. And that’s what I’m trying to do with you now.”
When you say this, you release them from one part of the dilemma — that he needs to protect his expertise or your vision of him as being expert.
Ideally, you would have found out in the assessment process, before you hired them, whether their intuitions about what the most important things were aligned with what was most important for your organization. So the best upstream move here: run a hiring process that helps you identify whether somebody truly is an expert. If they are, they’re going to get massive amounts of autonomy, such that when you disagree, you’re ready to trust them instead of you. If somebody is not in that position, you’re not hiring them as an expert. You’re hiring them as something else that’s good, but not an expert.
-ben
COMPELLING QUOTATIONS
Blogger extraordinaire Seth Godin on creativity:
We don’t make stuff as much as we make decisions.
Journalist (and mother) Kelsey Piper on hard things:
An important generalization for parenting and for life: You don’t get extra virtue points for doing things that are hard, and in fact, the most virtuous thing is usually to make an up-front investment in making things easier, so that going forward, you are not making high day-to-day expenditures of your patience, energy or happiness. A lot of people get this wrong when it comes to parenting, and it makes them miserable.
Songwriter John Darnielle on proximity to disaster:
The details of everything around something big are, for me, the places wherein the poignancy of a given scene can be most deeply sensed. Not the cars crashing but the person a block away who hears the crash. Not the fire but the way the room looked before the fire. Not the moment of the overdose, but the dozen things the man who overdoses, beloved by so many and with so much more to do in the world, will do, without thinking about them, for the last time on that day.
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