Preachers won't last long.
To prove this, i won't give you an example, instead I'll ask you to think of a leader that you appreciated, that you look up to, and one in the opposite corner, the leader you don't want to be. Now, take the phrase i wrote above and see if it matches.
What is leadership for me? It's not giving orders, directions, overviewing or being responsible for the overall project. It's inspiring the team, keeping them focused on the same thing you are, having the same joys on success and ambition on failures.
Joys on success. If you don't enjoy the wins with the team, you'll become an ivory tower leader. To put it simple, when there's a go-out, chances are you won't get invited. (I myself still work on making time to enjoy the wins.. i'll deny the hypocrisy here, and say that i'm a recovering preacher on this one). I'll quote what i've learned on a leadership training as well: people tend to remember the spikes in a relationship. Make sure as a leader you don't let the good ones pass by.
Ambition on failure. I think the easiest game to play is the blame game. It's a natural human behavior to escape punishment at all costs. I think this is when a leader really has to step up.
Bad sprint, under delivering, upset client, production bug, application went down for a whole day, and the list can continue. Sure we need to ensure this won't happen in the future, but it's critical that in the hard times, the team feels they have a leader to steer. During hard times, things can easily go south. The common ground the whole team should be on, is: we can recover!
Not who's to blame, not my job, not my fault, i saw this comming etc. No! We'll recover and we'll make it better.
If you manage to sell this ambition in the team, i think you'll be that inspiring leader to look up to.
A good way to keep the team working together is to have the vision, transparent. A phrase, an icon, a set of values that are emphasized etc.
I'll quote a lead i've read once (might have not been the same word for word): make sure the project's end result is what we all work for!
So i've worked on a large project once, a financial product, massive product. The company did follow these rules, they had a phrase they were using to keep the goal common, but they felt empty (at least to me):
The end result for that project was to deliver a high quality service to the customers, and to provide them with relevant information.
(i've rephrased it not to give away sensitive info)
Did i lose you ? are you asleep already? :))
For the average developer of course this is massive bull crap.
Business: Yo, developer! Do we build quality in our products!?
Developer: Hell yeah sir!
Business: Yo developer! Do we promote innovation and continuously improve?
Developer: Why every day i may say!
Business: Yo developer! Do we provide the most relevant information on our product??
Developer: Only the best!
:)
These questions are like, if you answer them different than the above, you'll probably get fired! :))
If you've worked on a project, any project IT or other, you know, that each project has it's own challenges! And some are not so easy to fix. Setting silly project goals like that will just promote a religion in the company of never challenging the leadership.
What if i were to rephrase this goal to click better and get the people to literally work WITH the business to achieve the SAME goal, felt be everyone?
I'll give it a shot, and bare with me, it's not about the words or how marketing or business phrased it:
Our project's goal, what we will try to do here, is to improve our code, that may or may not be perfect. To try and build the best user stories we can, considering the business requirement and our existing platform. And let's try to refactor as much as we can as we go, just so that future work will fit better and we will still be in synch with the latest technologies, trends and patterns.
It's almost as i were giving a tour of the project to a new developer that has joined the company.
Business: Yo, developer! If we were to invest more time, do you think we can improve our product?
Developer: Actually, it will require a lot of time! Maybe we can rewrite some ?
Business: Yo, developer! How often do we revisit our frameworks to see if they are obsolete or not?
Developer: Well, not that often.
Business: And how would you see this going further?
Developer: Maybe twice a year on criticals?
Business: How hard was it to deliver the business requirements in your past sprints? Was the platform fit for purpose, or you had to put in crazy hours?
Developer: ... [dev's response irrelevant for my point here]
Do you see the difference in these two examples?
The point is, i can claim we are a team, and that we share our goal via a slide, but it's a totally different thing when you include the people that are in the same team as you, in decisions which frankly are theirs to take!
All of a sudden they'll be more than happy to chip in, as opposed to building features in a product and blaming legacy for any problems that may show.
Ok, different angle now.
So we got the team to work on the same goal, all's good now what?
I tell you something i told every person i've worked with: No matter what field you're working on, anyone can do it! EASY! It's when the going gets tough, that you can actually tell the best of the best!
In terms of leadership, this is critical. If your leader is angry, the team will be angry. If your leader is pushy your team will be pushy (well probably will take the #notmyjob attitude) and so on. It's these hard times that you as a leader have to take a stance and LEAD!
This means both when you as a team are in trouble or when you personally are.
This is what i meant via "joys on success" and "ambition on failures". It's only natural to fail every now and then. The difference is how to handle it. And this goes both for wins! If you never celebrate success, the overall feel will be "well the project was.. ok i guess. but we messed up a few times!".
I'll give you an example that happened to me a while back, for the sake of not diving too deep in the case study, i'll keep this vague. I basically made a decision for the team, that was wrong! It was so wrong that it was escalated to our management and we basically got told off.
Now.. as a leader, as the leader that made the choice, what do i do? It was the whole team that got told off, not just me. Do i push back, and side with the team? Do i side with the business and betray the team?
No.
I showed what else can you do in situations like these, lead by example. It was a mistake I made, but in the name of the whole team. So once I understood why it was a mistake, and how my decision and an impact on our project, I admitted the mistake and made sure I've shared my thoughts with the team also, and why it was wrong. We've all agreed that we'll do things better next time, and how we'll mitigate the challenge next time! (ambition on failures).
Naturally it was not pleasant, and the need to blame someone else was there and probably for everyone in the team (we've had plenty of justifications to play the blame game: "other teams do it!", "it's not that big of a deal", "there wasn't a big impact on the project! (or so we thought)" and so on).
It's your job as a LEADER to mitigate this, and keep the team focused on the same goal, and not fight the business but understand the reasons, and improve.
In our team, we've all learnt to be honest about the wins and the f...-ups. This transparency will lead to a real team effort to mitigate anything, instead of playing a blame game or doing just the required work for a task.
To my surprise what happened next, baffled me. This is the end game prize when talking about leadership material.
I really loved that team, and i know I've given this example before in other presentations I held, but here goes:
It was during the delivery of one of our projects, when i personally had a major challenge to tackle on the project (something that only one person could do), that i saw the team-work this team did. They all stood with me up till 9PM and just trying to help however they could (deploys, regression, etc), even if the actual work was a one man job. No overtime was requested, nobody even considered walking away and I never asked for their help. Yet, we were a team, that had a challenge, and we all did our best.
I was so deeply impressed by their reaction that i always present this example when i talk about leadership! Good job again guys! Excellent team that was!
I honestly believe in this one line t-shirt quote: "be the change". Whenever i tried to change something (let's not say improve, because there are so many way you can do a good job..) and each time it worked, was when i was doing it, or i believed in it so bad, that my passion for that change spread.
You want the team to be transparent? Make sure you don't punish mistakes but praise the lesson learnt!
Lead by example!
You want the team to exceed the quality output? Make sure you praise the behavior of going that extra mile for quality!
Lead by example!
You want to end a conflict? Don't engage in conflicts yourself!
Lead by example!
Happy "trial and error"-ing!
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