As young leaders serving in the Army, we were introduced to an important concept in both leadership and management: Leaders accomplish their missions THROUGH their people. Neither getting the job done at all cost nor caring about your people makes a great leader; great leaders know how to do both even given the apparent contradictions. Broadly speaking, as public company executives, “Getting our jobs done” means maximizing shareholder value. More narrowly defined, it means accomplishing the tasks specific to your business and in consideration of your competitive landscape that maximizes value.

Effective leaders and managers get the mission accomplished – Great leaders and managers do so by creating a culture and environment in which people feel appreciated and respected and wherein performance related feedback is honest and timely. The difference here is that the later leader – the one who creates a long term nurturing and caring environment is leading for the future and will enjoy the benefits of greater retention, loyalty and long term performance. Caring about people means giving thought to the careers and interests of your employees; giving timely feedback on performance and in so doing recognizing that even stellar employees need feedback regarding infrequent poor performance (how else can they improve) as well as reinforcement on performance that exceeds expectations. Great leaders ensure that those creating the most value are compensated most aggressively and they ensure that people get the time off that they deserve for performance above and beyond the call of their individual positions.

Caring about people does NOT mean creating a sense of entitlement or lifetime employment within your organization. We argue just the opposite within our article entitled “Seed, Feed and Weed to Succeed”. Caring also does NOT mean setting easy goals – once again per our previous articles the effective leader sets aggressive but realistic goals for an organization – see our article entitled “Be A Leader!”

It is very easy to identify “Mission First” leaders as they are the ones who are getting the job done even in the face of adversity. It is not so easy to identify “Mission First, People Always” leaders as it takes a long time to test whether the individual leader has created a culture that inspires people and makes high performance individuals want to follow the person from job to job BECAUSE THEY ARE A CARING INDIVIDUAL. The easiest test to apply for a seasoned leader is to find out how many direct reports have followed them consistently from position to position within successful organizations. “Mission First, Me Always” leaders find that their direct reports will seldom work for them in more than one organization or company while “Mission First, People Always” seldom have problems in getting their direct reports to follow them through their careers.

“Mission First – Me Always” leaders climb a ladder with rungs made of their employees, stepping on them as they climb to the top. “Mission First – People Always” leaders build ladders upon which all of the stellar performers can climb.

What kind of leader are you?

Almost all of our clients ask us the same question, albeit phrased in different ways.   Boiled down to its core element, the question is whether the technology and product teams are moving quickly enough in executing ideas.  In other words, “Is my team good enough?”  Our answer, after some investigation, is almost always the same:  “Your team can do better and be better, but so can you.”

In our experience, there are 5 major reasons for this “C level executive” concern and a resulting 5 attributes or characteristics that would help keep the concern in check and your teams on track.  The reasons range from unrealistic expectations, to not consistently practicing some basic management principles.  Not every issue exists in every company, but we’ve attempted to identify five important attributes that you as an executive, product manager or technology manager can adopt today to ensure that you are getting the best results out of your team.

1)   Understand that Creating Value Should Take (Some) Time
There is not much to say here that we have not already said in our entry Getting from Idea to Product  The key point here is that value creation should take some time and while you should have aggressive goals and you should manage execution aggressively, great things seldom happen overnight.

2)   Seed, Feed and Weed your Garden (Your Team)
Please see our articles on Building High Performance Teams and Seed, Feed and Weed to Succeed.  The important point here is that you must build and maintain a stellar team to maximize shareholder wealth and have the best time to market. 

3)   Be Appropriately Technically Proficient
You do not need to be a technical expert.  See our article on How Technical Does the CEO Need To Be?  But it is your responsibility to bridge the experience chasm between you and your technology teams and to make them more productive as a result of your interaction.   It is also your responsibility to expect that your technical and product teams will move your way and better understand your business and your business drivers. 

4)  Be a Leader
We could not possibly do this topic justice in its entirety in a single blog posting and possibly not even in a single book.  But we think that there are four things that you can do really well that will help increase your company’s chance for success.  In our article Be A Leader, we identify these four areas as:  limiting the churn in your strategy; creating aggressive but achievable goals; instilling a causal mental roadmap to success in your employees; and making timely, sound and morally correct decisions.

5)  Be an Effective Manager
Great CEOs and executives know that the game is not about “adding features”; it is about improving business metrics related to your customer and in so doing maximizing shareholder wealth.  To do that effectively, you need to measure, communicate, and plan.  These three pillars of management are discussed in some detail in our article Management 101.

So you are an energetic and inspiring leader who is beloved by your teams but you are missing dates and the teams are getting frustrated.  What could be the problem?  It is possible that you are not demonstrating the necessary management skills alongside those great leadership skills.  Whereas leadership is all about having vision, developing strategy and inspiring teams, management is about methodical attention to detail in developing a plan, communicating the plan, and then measuring against the plan.  The word methodical should not be confused with the oft- used pejorative “micromanagement”; “methodical” in this context means a consistent and persistent diligence on the details that get things done. 

Plan
We use the term “plan” here to cover everything regarding your product plans; from product vision and product roadmap to the actual project plans that implement them.  The project plan is something that is probably left to your CTO, VP of Engineering, or Director/VP of Project Management depending on your organization but it does not hurt for you to understand what a good project plan looks like.  A project plan can take shape in a variety of forms from an excel spreadsheet to a Microsoft Project Plan to story cards depending on the product development methodology being used (agile, waterfall, etc).  Some factors that are important in determining the level of detail of the plan are the complexity of the project and the maturity of the team (not maturity as in whether your team shoots spitballs in meetings, but rather as in repeatability, see Capability Maturity Model).  The longer the project, the higher quality required, the more modules of code, and the greater the number of engineers are all likely to require a greater level of planning in order that the project complete on time, on scope, and on budget.  A great rule of thumb is that no single task on a plan should constitute more than 3 days of effort.  The reason is that it is difficult to notice if you are behind schedule when given a 5 or 10 day block of effort for a task.  The bottom line here is that the more complex your undertaking is, the more focused and precise your planning should be.

Communicate
Once you have worked with your team to develop the vision, the product roadmap, and the project plan, you must then become the advocate for the plan and constantly communicate with your teams.  You are a change agent and change requires communication.  Most “change consultants” will explain that the most common reason in failing to create change is the failure to communicate.  Simply put, you cannot communicate enough.  You have to take every opportunity afforded to you to communicate your vision, goals, milestones, and most importantly why your plan is important.  Explain and create the causal roadmap and perhaps most importantly ask questions and receive guidance.  Communication, after all, is a two way street.

Measure
Nearly everything you do in the technology and product world can be measured.  You should measure the costs of your initiatives, and their return to the shareholders.  You should measure availability of your product, customer satisfaction, the speed of your product (site speed if you are a SaaS platform), cost of operations to deliver your product offering, time to market, etc.  Do not allow your team to argue that their efforts cannot be measured.  What we do not measure, we simply cannot baseline, compare and improve.  Measurement is an absolutely critical component in attempting to improve teams and it is absolutely your job to demand that it happen.  As emphatically as we believe things should be measured, we also understand that people’s behavior changes because of measurements.  Consider individual’s reactions to measurements and ensure you are motivating the right behaviors.  For example, you may want to have higher quality releases but by insisting on measuring individual engineers might make them not want to work on larger features or not help each other out on bug fixes.  An alternative would be to make quality in this scenario a team goal where everyone gets rewarded for meeting it. 

Not everyone who is a great leader practices or focuses on sound management basics, just as not every great manager practices or focuses on sound leadership basics.  They are fundamentally two different disciplines and focus areas.  It is possible to do both well, but only by focusing on both.  By focusing on the three areas of management above (plan, communicate, measure), you can improve your effectiveness in management and improve your team’s performance.

All too often managers and executives who demonstrate solid leadership miss one of the four behaviors that we consider to be critical.  The net result is that projects get delayed, organizations underachieve, people overspend their budgets, or are incapable of working without managerial direction or organizations find themselves in ethical turmoil.

While the four areas identified below are by no means intended to be an all inclusive list of leadership behavior and traits that will guarantee success, they are areas we think need to be highlighted given our combined experience:

Align Your Strategy to Your Vision and Execute It!
Churn in strategy, requirements, and approach is one of the biggest drivers of late products.  Oftentimes in young companies it comes from the CEO and senior executives.  Be careful of adopting sales leading strategies where every week you are modifying your approach for your next big sale opportunity.  Do not allow the new BSO (Bright Shiny Object) to distract you from your goals of getting your game changing ideas to market.  Every time you change your mind or direction, you are adding cost and complexity to your operation and you are creating morale issues for the people who just want to get things out the door.  Stalled and delayed projects resulting from change in direction are a huge driver of morale problems and employee churn.
“But,” you might say, “we need to be nimble and turn on a dime.  We have to be a speedboat, not a battleship”.  We agree.  But if you are making constant turns weekly, then you are just going in a circle and by definition getting nowhere.  Who is going to remind you of all of the changes you have made and the cost that you have added in doing so?  Maybe some of your turns were a result of not performing enough product discovery, or perhaps your market assessments need tweaking.  Knowing when to change because there is a real business need versus changing because of a lack of focus is one thing that separates the successful executive from the failures.

Set Aggressive but Achievable Goals for Your Teams
Set goals that are aggressive, but achievable.  They should be a stretch (how else can you MAXIMIZE shareholder value), and aligned with your vision and mission. To the point of “achievable” make certain that they are informed by the art of what is possible.  There is a fine line between aggressive goals that motivate and inspire teams and those that destroy team morale and productivity.  Some pushback means that you are probably “dead on”; a team revolt means it is time to reconsider your goals.

Create a Causal Mental Roadmap to Value Maximization
How many members of your team can answer the following question correctly:  “How do your daily responsibilities and actions maximize shareholder value”?  We ask this question quite often in our engagements, and most often we are met with quizzical and even comical looks.  Spend time with your team teaching them how their roles, responsibilities and goals align to the company’s vision and mission and how that in turn maximizes shareholder value.  Doing so will help your team make better decisions and in general be happier about their jobs.  Moreover, it will help them make the decisions YOU would make in your absence.

Make Timely, Sound, and MORALLY CORRECT Decisions
We capitalized the “morally correct” portion of the sentence for a reason.  You are under a looking glass – not just from the outside world but from within your company as well.  Your team will watch how you approach your decisions, what corners you cut and what ethical boundaries with which you may be willing to flirt.  Remember that it is not what you actually DO – it is how they perceive you DOING IT.  Make well informed decisions quickly and be careful to explain how and why you are doing them.  While you may want your team to cut corners to speed up time to market, you do not want your team cutting corners when it comes to matters of ethics.