I am a manager who wants to get better at managing. How I've learned to get better in other roles was to increase self awareness and challenge my own behaviours and assumption. I'm hoping this document can help me better understand as well as exhibiting to others my true self.
Happiness and fulfillment is most important in life. Challenging my friends, my coworkers and my self constantly is how I know to build a culture of happiness and fulfilment.
The core directive of any company is value delivery to customers. A company is comprised of organizations each with their own value add. My job as a leader of one or many of those orgs is to maximize our long-term value add. I do so by building highly functional teams with fearless exceptional leadership at every position. Building these teams requires leading by example, constructing and selling a vision I'm confident in, and creating processes that encourage highly functioning teams.
This is a common question I get and is fairly difficult to answer. I've boiled it down to setting and enforcing expectations in all directions. My direct reports, my peers and my manager. I never want to play the boss card and tell someone what to do. I try to lead in a way that makes committment obvious for all parties. I do that by clearly communicating the following in descending order of priority:
WHY
Why do we need to solve this? Why is it important? Why is our team responsible for this? Having all stakeholders be able to understand and recite this is critical to any project and team success. This knowledge allows you to make quick decisions on your own and keeps you focused on a common goal.
WHAT
What problem are we solving? What kind of solution does this require?
WHEN
When does it need to be delivered?
HOW
How do we solve this problem? This is the least important to me personally. I trust my teams fully in deciding implementation details. They are closer to the problems than anyone else and will have the best insight into what will, and won't, work.
Leadership, enthusiasm, and curiosity. If you have these traits, everything else can be learned easily. Give a damn and question everything.
Very thought provoking read on the history of humanity. Spurred an interest in anthropology, psychology and their applications in business.
Verbalised a lot of leadership qualities I value most. A fun read that motivated me to be a better leader.
Industry standard of the foundations of a highly performing and growing team. The idea that all highly productive groups of humans are built on trust resonates with me. I think my most valuable skill is building trust with people across backgrounds, cultures and profressions. Inspiring theory around trust building into accountability, lack of fear, and results that I find myself going back to study it regularly.