Good Leaders are Great Speakers, but Great Leaders are Great Listeners

The Problem:

The famous corporate iceberg problem, the higher you are on the leadership chain, the smaller becomes your view of the granular problems seeping into the system. These problems are subtle, silent, and often blur, but your teams face them every day, and these are serious enough to bring the entire system down in a quasistatic way.

Peter Drucker, a late business management guru had put it best in his words — “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” One of the quintessential mistakes enterprises do, is to look outside for strategists to come in and fix a seemingly broken system, using corporate methods and business strategies. But these problems are often deep-rooted into the ‘engine layer’. ‘Engine layer’ is what I call the large community of individual contributors — developers, testers, sales reps on the road, support and delivery specialists in the field, etc — that form the core of the company. This is the heart of an organization that is directly responsible for the overall brilliance, credibility, and market value proposition of your business. These are the people that build the final product with their own hands. They define and design the end value experience, that the company offers to the outside world. This is the layer that needs to be most protected, cared for, appreciated, and above all ‘self-actualized’.

‘Self-actualization’ is a term that holds profound meaning deep within its definition. Dean Leffingwell mentions this term briefly in the SAFe literature, but when I first read it in SAFe guidelines, it took me on an exploration journey where I pealed this concept more and more, and explored how it applies to an enterprise or a team. A ‘self-actualized team’ is a completely self-organized, self-managed, and self-led team, that performs at its best, effortlessly in the most optimal way. While it sounds quite mystical, we see these teams all the time. These are the teams that win World Cups, do groundbreaking inventions, bag gold medals in Olympics, send missions to outer space, release Oscar-winning movies, invent lifesaving vaccines, produce state of art technological advancement, and every amazing thing we see every day. So how do we take this leap, this transformation, from going from being good to becoming the best of the best?

The Solution:

John Maxwell, one of the finest leadership Gurus, gives you the answer in just five words — “Winning is an inside job”. This is a profound statement and all it means is to look inwards. All the answers are inside. Whether you are an individual performer, a team, a group, or a full large-scale enterprise, the concept applies beautifully and unanimously. Roger Federer said that it is easy to become number 1, but difficult to stay number 1. The idea is quite simple but surprisingly underestimated. While market analysis, competitive research, and understanding the dynamics of external factors are all important, the real winning transformation values can only be found inwards. In a marathon, you can keep looking at the position of your opponents, to eventually overtake them at one point, but then your reference frame will always remain restricted to other competitors. On the other hand, if you focus inwards, and transform your performance to truly self-actualize, you will be so far ahead in the game that you would not even see the next best, even if you want to. Steve Jobs made a bold public statement once — “My customers don’t know what they want, because I have not shown them yet.” As pompous as it sounds, imagine the astronomical amount of hard work, focus, determination, and teamwork that would have been expensed behind that statement. Truly self-actualized teams can dare to do just that. These are the teams who do what others won’t. They can do the unimaginable — like bringing back the rockets that just launched a mission to orbit. While many software companies are struggling to optimize their Cycle time, SpaceX is about to launch rockets with a Cycle time of a few hours. What sort of mind-boggling standards they are setting for the entire world? Would it be possible by analyzing the competition? Absolutely not, all answers are inwards. We just need to find them.

So what can leaders do to bring a true transformation of their teams to achieve ‘Self-Actualization’ at an enterprise level? Here are the most important transformation methods, that focus inwards, address the not-so-obvious, and hit the core of the issue:

1. Shed the old skin: There were times when those old methods worked. There were times when pressure tactics, boss culture, tough deadlines, leading from the top, and many more such methods actually produced business results. Those days are gone now. Leaders need to accept the new modern age of working, that strives for complementary collaboration and not just individual excellence. Today teams excel with operational independence, freedom of creativity, and true empowerment. This new age of transformation is bi-directional. Oftentimes companies struggle with this transformation because teams are not ready for it. They are reluctant to take responsibility for “being empowered”. But teams need to shed the old skin where they are conditioned to follow instructions, but not make critical decisions (even if they are best equipped to do so). Self-managed teams are the fundamental building blocks of a large-scaled Agile business enterprise. On the other hand, leaders need to incubate a new environment where teams feel protected, empowered, and uninhibited. Under great leaders, teams will come out of their shells and break boundaries, do the extraordinary and achieve the impossible. If that is not happening every single day, it's time to think about cultural transformation.
2. Listen to the ‘Engine’: No matter how good the KPIs look, if you enter your office floor and you find even one person feeling stressed, dissatisfied, or frustrated, something is definitely wrong somewhere that needs to be fixed right away, before it all comes crashing down. Ignoring subtle red flags can lead to catastrophic consequences even if you see no bad numbers on the stats. In the words of Mark Twain: “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” I am not asking to discard the numbers, but what I am really saying is that measuring cannot be a substitute for listening. It is really hard for me to understand why most leaders are so hard-pressed against listening to their own staff. How many times have you seen business leaders and senior executives breaking bread and having candid conversations with individual contributors? Conversations where they are not speaking but listening. The problem with our corporate culture is that the flow of information is uni-directional. We always tell, tell, and tell some more, and then wonder why are we not seeing the results we projected. We need to understand that putting a mere process in place — like 360-degree feedback, anonymous surveys, etc is not going to cut it. You need to quite literally spend time with your teams, and talk to them like a teammate. This is best exemplified by the story of Hamdi Ulukaya — founder and CEO of Chobani, who literally painted walls of the factory with his staff, broke bread with them, and just talked with them. He had no plans to turn around the falling yogurt business, but the bond of trust he built with the staff was enough to do the impossible. Plans are always there, it’s the intent that needs to be hard found.
3. It’s ok being stupid: Real creativity comes out when you think crazy and stupid. Almost every groundbreaking-invention-idea, ahead of its time, was considered outrageously stupid, before those transformed into reality. But in today’s revenue-driven, high stake environment, leaders are under a lot of pressure for value delivery. That is a reality that comes with the fast technological transformation of the world. But real leadership requires absorption of this pressure within this layer and not letting it seep downwards. As leaders, we need to let the teams play their natural game, give them space, opportunity, and comfort, to feel free and become autonomous. Teams should feel that they have the flexibility and independence to make their own game plan and still feel protected by the leaders. There should be room for mistakes and it is ok to ask stupid questions. Typically those are the ones that clear the greatest misunderstandings. This is all about building a culture where every member of every team is looking forward to his/her day and creating truly amazing work. If you are a business leader, the first step towards building a high-performance culture is to loosen the grip. Amazing things start to emerge as your teams start becoming self-managing. And eventually, you will see an environment where teams’ default nature would be to love their work and give their best. Professional soccer team manager Pep Guardiola when became the manager of the Barcelona soccer club, told his team, “I don’t want you to win the titles, all I want you is to give your best.” With that, he built a high-performance culture that was not focused on titles, but a culture where individual contributors brought out the best in them. In the two-year duration of his leadership, this team won 14 out of 16 competition titles.
4. Team first: How many times you have heard the phrase “Customer First”. In almost every organization, in every industry, you will see leaders waving the flag of “Customer First” high above all values. This phrase almost came into existence like a storm of new-age transformation, with a surge of companies adopting this idea into their culture. So here is my question, and I think every leader should ask this question in retrospection — When we are doing everything to make customers the ‘first’, why is the customer not truly feeling being ‘first’? If every company believes in this motto, then why are there customers with low indicators for ‘Customer Experience’? Did your NPS score truly take a turn around with the adoption of this moto? How are we measuring user experience, and is that measurement a true reflection of their real experience? Most companies that don’t manage to win, in reality, fail on providing a user experience that is above and beyond expectations. And it’s not that they didn’t try hard for it. It’s possible they focussed hard on their customers. But maybe that is part of the problem in the first place. In large enterprises, especially in a B2B relationship, customer experience is the hardest KPI to score on. We focus so hard on this objective of ‘customer first’ that we miss out on employees. And oftentimes we forget that the true user experience we are striving to provide is built by the hands of our own employees. The researchers that innovate, the developers that write the code, the testers that test our product, the delivery specialists that deploy and configure the solution, the support engineers who solve business-critical problems, and many more individual contributors whose moral is directly proportional to the resultant user experience. So we get into this vicious circle where the solution we are trying to implement becomes the cause of the problem. What we need is a radical shift in thinking that unless we put Team first, our customer’s experience will never be above and beyond expectations. On the other hand, if we go team-first, build a high-performance culture, a sense of pride and trust between employee and employer, eventually we will see the enterprise self-modulating into a state where it builds truly amazing products and experiences that would sweep customers off their feet. As John Maxwell said, “Tend to the people, and they will tend to the business”.
5. Upright the tree: I remember a visit to a different company’s business site, and walking down the corridor I saw these cabins of huge offices, followed by smaller offices, followed by big single cubicles which were then followed by smaller and shared cubicles. The next thing I noticed was everyone appeared stressed and unhappy. That company no longer exists as it went bankrupt. Aren’t we tired of working in this obsolete upside-down tree model yet? I think it is time to upright the tree. And I’m not just saying metaphorically. We really need to 180 degrees rotate every organizational chart in the organization. Start from the bottom-up, show the managers at the bottom, and the reporting team members at the top. After all, that’s how nature functions. The function of leaders and managers is like a root to supply nourishment, resources, stability, and strength upwards to the branches and leaves, that grow freely upwards while doing the hard work of photosynthesis. We as leaders need to act as enablers, provide protection and strength to our teams, save them from instability and pressure of business, and let them work together in unison towards the common goal. I have seen amazing team players perish due to the culture of pressure and power, where bosses think they deserve bigger spaces to store their massive egos. A high-performance culture can only come from empowerment, independence, and protection of the ‘engine-layer’. A culture where a junior team member doesn’t need to think twice before speaking candidly, questioning old methods, or trying something new. A culture where an employee and a manager can interchange their thinking hats, and exchange ideas. The new age of thinking demands new ways of working and collaborating. This new age demands ‘Systems thinking’, where the entire system thinks as a whole and not just relays commands top to bottom. There are no silos in such a system, it is powered by cross-domain synergy and constructive collaboration. It is high time we upright the tree, and let the teams flourish high with the independence of thought and outrageous creativity.
6. A higher cause: The problem with money is that you seriously limit yourself the moment you make it your primary goal. Most companies’ ultimate scale of achievement is how much money is made. Quarter by quarter, year by year, we keep our eyes peeled on the revenue and profit numbers. While it is a good indicator of progress and success, watching this number in isolation is like watching your checking account balance as a measure of your achievements and growth. Another issue with money is that, making it your target goal, will impede your drive when you don’t make it enough. This, I think, is the single most critical mistake that enterprises make more often than not. In other words, if you closely observe the enterprises that make the most money, they never had it as their primary objective in the first place. So what do all these amazing companies have in common, that makes them survive during the toughest economical times, and always make money raining from the sky? A higher cause. It could be technological transformation, education, health and well-being, next-generation innovation, conservation of energy resources, or anything that can be for the betterment of humankind. Then money becomes a bi-product of your journey, and it will be effortlessly surplus. As a result, your motivation, your drive, and your success will no longer be governed by money, it will just flow in sheer abundance as a bi-product of your mission to the higher cause. To put it in context here’s a story. Alon Musk approached some companies in order to send some payloads to space for a philanthropic Mars project and was interested to purchase some refurbished Russian ballistic missiles called ICBMs. Astonished by the cost of those, he decided to start his own space program, not just to serve his purpose, but the solve a clear problem — economical and reliable space missions. The idea was so outrageous for a private company that Elon told his friends to not invest as he thought he might lose his own money. “I thought the most likely outcome would be that we fail,” Musk said. “And the first three rockets did fail.” But epic failures result in epic learnings. Although it was a no-go venture, the dream was linked to a higher cause with a clear vision of progress and technological evolution. They changed the space research approach completely from being “BDUF” to “fail-&-iterate”. Today NASA sends astronauts, along with multiple countries sending their payloads on SpaceX rockets. Money is falling from the sky, while the boosters are landing safely back on the ground. No matter how absurd your dream is, with perseverance and determination winning is just a matter of time. And in the endeavor of chasing a higher cause, sometimes it is necessary to de-focus on the money and stay on course with an unrelenting attitude.
7. Self-inspire: I have known some co-workers who were a treat to watch working. Just being in their proximity, and observing their energy, drive, and conviction left me no option but to get inspired. When you work in such a team, you get inspired every day to perform at your very best, not to compete, but to collaborate and add value. As a result, you start feeling this sense of belonging to the team and its goal. Gradually, the entire team becomes this single living unit that self-inspires and improves day by day. But we all know that it’s not a perfect world and you might not be so lucky to land into such a high-performing, self-sustained team. But then, you can be the first one to carry the torch in your team. A positive attitude is very contagious. And leaders of such teams need to ensure the environment is perfect to nurture such collaboration. Different individuals have different styles of working and have different needs, some enjoy anonymity while others appreciate hand-holding. Measuring everyone with the same ruler is a colossal mistake. Therefore managers need to strike a critical balance between ‘delegation’ and ‘direction’. It is almost an art, for great leaders it comes naturally. These leaders build leaders. And that’s how teams start to self-actualize and lead themselves into a high-performance culture. Leadership coach Graham Andrewartha said, “Leaders get the followers they deserve”. And so managers get the teams they deserve. The good part is that high-performance culture in a team can be scaled up by cross-functioning collaboration. High-performing teams inspire other teams. And this happens when teams feel a sense of belonging and ownership to the common goal and vision of the enterprise. This comes by inculcating ‘Systems Thinking’ at an enterprise scale. But there is no set formula or procedure to get there. It is all about creating and maintaining an ecosystem where high-performing individuals with positive attitudes are highly encouraged, as well as rewarded. Teams are kept immune to unnecessary politics and external pressure. All impediments and speed bumps are proactively removed by leaders including unnecessary red tape, laborious processes, and low-value meetings, to keep the teams focused on the real thing. Eventually with the right cultural equilibrium maintained, you will see your teams metamorph themselves into self-inspiring, self-managing, and self-organizing autonomous systems.

What better way to conclude the discussion than a great quote by famous author and thinker Ram Dass — “The quieter you become, the more you can hear.”