#003 - The Seven Deadly Leadership Sins and How to Get to The Good Place

Tiffany Lenz 0:08

And it's based on what I like to call a pain to value ratio. So the goal of this survey is actually not a set of data points. The goal, the solid outcome of this is a conversation, if I can sit down with a customer and ask them these six questions, ask them to help me rate their pain to value ratio inside these six questions, and how to improve both how to decrease pain on a scale of one to 10. And how to increase value on a scale of one to 10 I get some good content that leads us to multiple continued conversations that can lead to a different set of SLA is a different set of expectations, maybe even a different statement of work if that's the relationship there. So I've used I used this in my previous role when I was a head of delivery and client experience at my last firm across $350 million worth of business. These were these were conversations that led to good interactions with customers. So we'll read them through really quickly. The first question is, do you believe you have access to the best talent to meet your to meet your needs. So if I am an IT department, and I am serving the business inside my firm, this is a good way to start a conversation of understanding whether I need to hire different people, or whether I'm lacking some skill sets. And and if I'm asking about rate me on a scale of one to 10 what pain is and what value is, then I can have a conversation that sounds like while that value number is only a seven out of 10. How do I get it higher? Can you give me some thoughts around how I could improve that number? This is where the candid conversation comes in. And it might start out a little awkward. But I promise you that if you just suspend disbelief, and ask your customer to just try this with you, you get real meat in this conversation. Question number 2, am I making you successful? Wow, that's loaded. And it is really honest and requires a lot of vulnerability. But the third one is even more vulnerable? Am I helping you make your boss look good? Because really making someone successful means you need to make their boss successful and their boss successful? Where does sponsorship come from? Where does where the resources come from? Where does money get allocated from in annual budgets, it comes from somebody's boss's boss. So if we're thoughtful enough to align ourselves with as high as we can get to the goals of the organization, and making those stakeholders look good, we are more likely to have a clear path to getting what we need to make them successful. Number four, do I act like a strategic partner? Do the conversations we have align more with service provider or partner, thought partner, strategy partner tech partner? Or what kinds of conversations do we have? And how can I make that more meaningful to you? Number five,

do you feel like I'm invested in you? Sometimes this might mean that we need to take this feedback to our HR department and say, Hey, I really need to change the training programs that we have. Rather than following the standard that you have lined up, I actually need to adjust those priorities because my customer needs my team to be trained a little differently. And then the last question is always just a general statement. Can you just rate me overall, how painful is this interaction? Is it with my team? How much value do you really get out of this? By the time you get to question six, this is not a quick conversation. This is a couple of hours. And by the time you get there, you've already had a very meaningful conversation. And you can now break this down into let's let's get examples of how I can make all of my interactions less painful and how I can make them more valuable for you. Moving on to sloth. Sloth goes back to superstars versus toxic employees and my thought here on remedy is, we as leaders have to replicate ourselves. And the way we do that is we build empowered teams with a force multiplier. Now, your force multiplier will probably be different than mine. But I have had to find my own throughout years of experimenting with leadership teams. And I'll share my own one of my my stories here working building a team, a leadership team to build a nonprofit, inside my own for profit company, the firm I was working for prior. So I had the same kind of goals that every business leader has I had, I need to be scalable, I need to be sustainable. And I need to have a triple win. The win win win, because my I'm working in nonprofit space. So my, my funding is extremely, extremely, extremely limited. But I also was blessed with having a very skilled team. But it just wasn't enough. There was no possible way that having a skilled team and business goals was going to overcome the obstacles I had, which were we were a global team, a distributed team. I mean, Hello, COVID. But this is pre COVID, we were a fully distributed team across seven different countries. And why were we distributed that way? Well, our clients were there, our clients were everywhere, from the US to the UK to Bhutan, Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Africa. So if your clients are there, your team needs to be there, otherwise, you're not providing the best possible service. So rather than just have these, these business goals, which were real, I had seed funding, I had to pay back I had money I had to make, I needed something that was more meaningful, that would act as a catalyst, this force multiplier, as an experiment, I chose to look at Patrick Lencioni. His work and and the bottom of his pyramid, his pyramid of the Five Dysfunctions of a team is what absence of trust. So my thought was, if I can build an executive team that, that legitimately trust one another, then I think they can be more effective, more productive and produce better business outcomes than a team that doesn't trust one another. This was a successfully executed experiment, I didn't know if it would be at the time, it took three and a half years to really see the results come to fruition. But how did that manifest itself? Well, we had business goals, yes. But we also had what I called rules of engagement. And these were the foundation of our team and how they interacted with one another. So I'll share mine with you. And you will need your own as you decide what your force multiplier is. But I had three, the first one was we judge positive intent. And I do and I do whole talks on rules of engagement and how to form them, etc. but very quickly, judging positive intent essentially meant that we were going to agree to cut through the noise that comes from not giving one another the benefit of the doubt, this is not toxic behavior. This is simple mistakes, it's when someone doesn't invite me to a meeting or leaves me off of an critical email, or forgets to tell me something, I let my trust in them erode. I allow that to happen because I refuse to give them the benefit of the doubt. And if COVID has taught us nothing, it has taught us that we're just humans, right? We have sick parents, we have burdens with our partners or spouses, we have children issues, we have pet issue we have life going on. And if we can just give one another, a little bit of grace, a little bit of benefit of the doubt, it does actually build trust, and it cuts through noise, noise that distracts us from our business outcomes. The second is talk to one another, not about one another. Now, after this many years, building leadership teams, I have a zero tolerance policy zero for talking about one another. At this point in time, we should be able to train ourselves to talk to each other when we have a problem. To give feedback to one another. It's not easy, but it can be done, we can learn and the best place for me to start was for me to hold myself accountable. And for me to allow my team to call me out when I was not holding up my own rule of engagement. And now I can hold them accountable. So when they when they bring something to me for a solution, a problem they're having with one another, I can turn that back to them and say, but have you talked to so and so. Have you actually tried to solve this yourselves before bringing it to me. And after several months of this repeat behavior, our team learned to talk to one another and to just simply not allow there to be a negative narrative going on behind our backs. Do you know how much relief that brought to our team? I know that whatever is being said to my face is all that being said, you can say it behind my back if you've already said it to my face. It was something that we tried and six years Later, I don't even work with this team anymore. But six years later, I still hear from people that they are using these rules of engagement because it changes the way you interact in an effective positive way. And the third, we make one another look good. So we did change our team goals to be all about team and not about the individual, to the best of your ability, if you can make your goals team focused and not individual focus, you will cut through a lot of noise, a lot of subtle agendas. For us, this built trust and trust was our force multiplier, we were able to deliver software released faster than I would have expected, and that then other folks had had experienced in teams prior to that. So again, what is your force multiplier? How do you build an effective empowered team as a leader? Now, this dovetails very nicely into the next remedy, the remedy for wrath. Which is exhibiting blame mentality, that's not my problem. Look, you as a leader have to own making it work, and you have to address bad behavior. Now, this is a multifaceted solution, because rules of engagement are one. But I want to talk again, about this frozen middle concept, because I actually don't believe in it. I think that people exhibit the behavior that they are allowed to exhibit and they exhibit what they are, what they see in the people who they are likely to become when they get promoted. If they see it working for you, they're going to do it. So I call that a frozen top. The problem lies with us. If we thaw ourselves out, and we change our behavior, the middle will improve, we can't roll blame downhill as leaders. We've earned the right to sit at this table, we've also earned the responsibility of having good behavior. So that is what being in the good place looks like. It

I am open minded, I actually might be wrong, please, let's just talk about this. Here are my thoughts but I'm open to being completely wrong. You are going to get better ideas from just showing that openness, humility is contagious. Humility leads to better outcomes. Moving right along, we're going to land the plane here, envy. When we talk about envy, and measuring our results against our own efforts versus against say, customer experience or customer satisfaction. Remember, the remedy to this is to have all of your priorities end with the customer, your North Star is your customer. Remember what Surinder Singh told us about being obsessed with your customer. And then finally, last, but certainly not least, we have pride. This idea of listening without intent. What we need to do as leaders is we actually need to admit our mistakes and create safety for people to call them out. This will get you better outcomes. HBR called this respond productively to missteps. And they grabbed this particular quote from responses that they saw various governments making during this time of the COVID pandemic. A successful response was one that responded productively to missteps. So let's go back to our plan. And we've talked about plan anti patterns of avoidance and blindness. And effective plan would be diligence, just using a plan for what it is. It's a tool. It's a, it allows us to have a reality mindset. It is a catalyst for a productive, valuable conversation. It's a set of data with contributing factors. And if we are if we are people who espouse to agile methodology, what we're again looking for is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater and not have plans or processes or documentation. But we are looking to have pragmatic flexibility. We're looking to emphasize interactions, customer collaboration, being responsive to change pragmatic flexibility. That is, that's agility at the enterprise level. It's also an agile process. So summing it up. We look at our seven deadly sins we look at what look getting to the good place looks like. We ask ourselves selves questions like but what if I could? What if I could change a process be effective, break a paradigm? What if I could be customer obsessed? This is what will move you from being dysfunctional to being functional, being high functioning to high performing or will move you from being a service provider to a partner. This is what the good place looks like.