There is simply no place for a big ego in any position within any company. While it is true that there is a high degree of correlation between passionate inspirational leaders and people who have a need to talk about how great, intelligent or successful they are, we would argue that it is also true that those people would be that much more successful if they kept their need for publicity or public recognition to themselves. The concept isn’t new and is embodied in Jim Collins’ concept of Level 5 Leadership.

CTOs who need to talk about being the “smartest person in the room” and CEOs who say “I’m right more often than I’m wrong” simply have no place in a high performing team. Such statements alienate the rest of a team and very often will push the very highest performing individuals – those actually getting stuff done – out of the team and out of the company. These actions and statements run counter to building the best of teams and over time will serve to destroy shareholder value. The best leaders give of themselves selflessly in an ethical pursuit of creating shareholder value. The right way to approach your job as a leader and a manager is to figure out how to get the most out of your team in order to maximize shareholder wealth. You are really only a critical portion of that long term wealth creation cycle if your actions evolve around being a leader of the team rather than an individual. Take some time and evaluate yourself and your statements through the course of a week. Identify how many times you reference yourself or your accomplishments during the course of your daily discussions. If you find that you are doing it often, take some time to step back and redirect your thoughts and your statements to things that are more team rather than self oriented.

It is not easy to make this type of change. There are people all around us who appear to be rewarded for being egoists and narcissists and it is easy to come to the conclusion that humility is a character trait embodied by the unsuccessful business person. But all you need to do is reflect on your career and identify the boss to whom you had the greatest loyalty and for whom you would do nearly anything; that boss most likely put the shareholders first and the team always. Be the type of person who thinks first about how to create shareholder value rather than personal value and you will succeed!

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?

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.

In my earlier article I used the sports management analogy to make the case for actively managing the skills, skill levels and composition of your team. In this note I’ll discuss the topic of how to manage those activities. For this, we’ll leave sports and use a gardening analogy.

Even a novice gardener would not expect to rake some soil, throw some seeds, pray for rain and wait for a beautiful garden. Your team is no different; you must undertake the same activities in managing your team as you would in creating a successful garden.

Seed

Selecting the right flowers for our garden means paying attention not only to how they look, but how they will interact with the other flowers in our garden; will they steal too many nutrients or will the soil properly support their needs?

Managers in hyper-growth companies spend a lot of time interviewing and selecting candidates but usually not very much time on a per candidate basis and even less time pondering where they’ve gone wrong in hiring in the past. Finding the right individual for your job means paying attention to your past failures in hiring and correcting them. We might interview for skills, but overlook critical items like cultural or team fit. Why have you had to remove people? Why have people decided to leave?

Candidate selection also means paying attention to the needs of the organization from a productivity and quality perspective. Do you really need another engineer or product manager, or do your pipeline inefficiencies indicate additional process definition needs, tools engineers or quality assurance personnel?

One final point here is that far too often we try to make hiring decisions after we’ve spent 30 minutes to an hour with a candidate. We encourage you to spend as much time as possible with the candidate and try to make a good hire the first time. Seek help in interviewing or add people whom you trust and whom have great interviewing skills to your interview team to increase your chances of a good hire the first time. Call previous managers and peers and be mindful to ask and prod for weaknesses of individuals in your background checks.

Feed

Feeding your garden means spending time growing your team. Of all the practices in tending to your team, this is the one that is most often overlooked for lack of time.

The intent of feeding is to help grow the members of your team who are producing to the expectations of your shareholders. Feeding consists of coaching, praising, correcting technique or approach, adjusting compensation and equity and anything else that creates a stronger and more productive employee.

Feeding your garden also means taking individuals who might not be performing well in one position and putting them into positions where they can perform well. However, if you find yourself moving an employee more than once it is likely that you are avoiding the appropriate action of weeding.

Also, feeding your garden means raising the bar on the team overall and helping them achieve greater levels of success. Great teams enjoy great but achievable challenges and it’s your job as a manager and executive to challenge them to be the best they can be.

Weed

While you should invest as much as possible in seeding and feeding, we all know that underperforming and nonperforming individuals choke team productivity just as surely as weeds steal vital nutrients from the producers within your garden. The nutrients that are being stolen in this case are the time that you spend attempting to coach underperforming individuals to an acceptable performance level and the time your team spends compensating for an underperforming individual’s poor results.

Weeding our gardens is often the most painful activity for most managers and executives and as a result it is often the one to which we tend last.

While you must abide by your company’s practices regarding the removal of people who are not performing (these practices vary not only by country but very often by state), it is vital that you find ways to quickly remove personnel who are keeping you and the rest of your team from achieving your objectives. The sooner you remove them, the sooner you can find an appropriate replacement and get your team where it needs to be.

Professional sports teams know that having the right team to accomplish the job is critical to reaching their ultimate goal each season. Furthermore, they understand that the right team today might not be the right team for next season; rookie players enter the sport stronger and faster than ever before, offensive strategies and needs change, injuries plague certain players and salary caps create a pressure on the total value of talent that can exist within the team in any year.

Managing team skill sets and skill levels in professional sports is a constant job requiring the upgrading of talent, moving personnel to different positions, management of depth/bench strength, selection of team captains, recruiting new talent and coaching individual high performance players.

Imagine a coach or general manager faced with the difficult task of needing to bring in a new player at a high salary to fill a specific weakness in his or her team. That coach is likely already at or near the team’s salary cap. The choices are to remove an existing player, renegotiate one or more players’ salaries to make room for the new player’s salary, or to not hire the necessary player into the critical position. What do you think would happen to the coach who decides to take no action and not hire the new player? If his owners find out, they would likely remove him, and if they didn’t find out sooner or later the team would atrophy and consistently turn out substandard seasons resulting in lower ticket sales and unhappy owners.

Our jobs as managers and executives are really no different. Our salary caps are akin to the budget approved by the executive management team and reviewed and approved by the board of directors. In order to ensure that we are cost effectively doing our jobs with the highest possible throughout and an appropriate level of quality we too must constantly look for the best talent available at the right price. Yet most of us don’t actively manage the skills, people and composition of our teams, which in turn means that we aren’t doing the right thing for our company and shareholders.

What about a coach who refused to spend time improving his players? Can you imagine such a coach keeping his or her job? Similarly, can you imagine walking into your next board of directors meeting and stating that part of your job is NOT to grow and maintain the best team possible?

The parallels in professional sports to the responsibilities of team building for corporate executives are clear, but often under appreciated and all too commonly ignored. To get our jobs done, we must have the best talent possible for our salary caps – or in our world, our board authorized budgets. We must constantly evaluate and coach our team to ensure that each member is adding value appropriate to his level of compensation, find new and higher performing talent, and coach the great talent that we have to even higher levels of performance.

In an upcoming article, I’ll talk about some techniques for actively managing your team.