Your primary job as a leader is to get results. Deceptive in its simplicity, it truly forms the foundation of your leadership scorecard—whether it’s explicitly stated or not. Everyone in the organization, your leadership, your peers, and even your own team, is judging you by your ability to get things done.
But what kinds of things should you be getting done? That can be answered in any number of ways which can make life as a leader confusing. Is it a happy team? Is it your ability to sell your ideas? Let me simplify it for you—the only results that matter are the results you’re getting for your internal customers.
Depending on how your organization is structured, this might be different groups within the organization, but I’m pretty sure you know who your customers are. They are the people that are asking you for your help. These are the people that your business analysts are gathering requirements from, and the ones who will benefit from your developers’ magic. What you do for your internal customers is all that matters.
I was recently working with a front line manager, a very talented manager with good leadership instincts. He came up through the ranks, starting as a developer, and when I met him he was managing a team of about twenty people. He looked a little distraught one day, so I approached him in private for a little coaching. He mentioned to me that for the first time, he received a performance review that was not that satisfactory. This would of course affect his chances for promotion.
I was a bit surprised at the assessment myself. I knew first hand that he ran one of the most productive teams in his area. With his relatively small team of twenty, and a shoestring budget, he was able to produce amazing value into the organization quarter after quarter. Of course, I asked him what the exact feedback was. He responded by saying, “they appreciate that I can get things done, but they say I need to do it in a nicer way.” My advice was that he should fire his manager.
This is complete nonsense. As a leader, you’re not there to make friends, you’re there to get results. I don’t know what seminar his manager just came from, or what leadership model he just read about, but this kind of guidance, which I hear about all the time, can undermine the integrity of the whole organization, and confuse great leaders in the making.
Therefore, first and foremost, if there’s any confusion with your manager about how your results factor in your assessment as a leader, they should be cleared up right away. Resist any manager’s attempts to be vague and nonspecific about this. Part of your manager’s responsibility is to clearly establish the conditions and criteria by which you are to be scored as a leader. The results that you provide for your customers must rank high on that list. I’m very suspect of any organization that isn’t in alignment with this fundamental line of thought.
A popular school of thought advocates that the manager should set their own goals, and the attainment of those goals would be the basis of future evaluation. If this is the case in your organization you have a great opportunity to establish customer related outcomes as your yardstick. If instead your management is pushing down strategic goals from the top (as they should), ensure that customer results play a big role, and they translate specifically to your assessment.
How do you do this? Well, it depends on how the current strategic goals are passed down to your manager. If your manager’s goals are tied to customer outcomes, then your job is easy. These goals simply flow down to you. When you succeed they succeed, and that’s the way it should be. If however your strategic goals are somewhat perpendicular to business objectives, which is common for an IT organization, then you can simply work with your manager to “fit” them into proper customer oriented results. For instance, part of your IT strategy may be to provide quick response to the needs of the organization. The conversation with your manager would then include a dialog where you appeal to their “common sense,” agreeing that quick response is important, but it wouldn’t produce much value if we quickly gave the business something that wasn’t useful. Therefore, both the response time and the quality of result become the metric.
So, once you and your manager are clear on the value of customer-oriented results, your next job is to orient your team to focus on results. As indicated in a previous article, one of the key transitions a leader makes, especially on that started out as a developer and / or business analyst, is that the capacity for delivering results shifts from them to their team. If you cannot motivate your team to deliver results, you cannot succeed as a leader.
I wouldn’t disengage completely from contributing to the output though. I see a lot of great technical people become leaders, then divorce themselves from all technical development. I think this is a mistake for a couple of reasons. First, you will lose touch with what’s going on at the ground level. Let’s face it, the only way to really know what’s going on, is to be right in the middle of things—to be in the trenches. Remember when you were in the trenches, and your manager would say things that showed their obvious lack of synchronization with the real world? I once had a manager ask me the progress on a project that had been completed two weeks ago. You don’t want to be this manager.
There’s a second and more important reason for continuing to punch keys with the team. There’s nothing more inspiring than having your manager out in front of you in the development. There’s nothing more comforting than knowing that your manager is probably the most technically adept person on your team. And although you shouldn’t put yourself on the critical path (i.e. assign work to yourself that might hold up the delivery of the project), you should get your hands dirty, to show your team by example, that you’re just as committed and capable as the rest of them.
The rest of your job in creating a team oriented around customer results is in clear communication of expectations. Do not ask your team what they would like to accomplish, tell them what you need to accomplish, and tell them in terms of customer results. This means, your internal customers’ satisfaction and ability to function, is priority one. Have your business analysts clearly explain the business benefit of each effort from the business point-of-view, or one better have the business explain it to your team directly.
Your team should respond positively to this, especially if their high-grade developers. Developers have an intrinsic need to know how they’re contributing to the larger picture. If you make this explicit for them, that taps directly into their motivation. As a bonus, by becoming clear on your expectation, you’re providing much-needed focus for the team, and they will drive you to success.
Finally, lock down on the what, but be very flexible about the how. What I mean by that is this. We all know how important it is to get requirements locked down to avoid scope creep, but the other thing we focus on, which tends to be over-emphasized, is our own process for getting things done. The business doesn’t care how we get anything done. They don’t care about our process or our architecture; they just care about their result. I’m not saying to throw process out the window, but when it gets in the way, it’s better to reinvent than get gridlocked simply because “that’s the way it’s done.”
This is where your customer-oriented focus will be put to the test. In too many organizations, I’ve seen lines drawn between IT and the business, as if you’re in some sort of competition with each other, and somebody will win at the other group’s expense. Do not allow your team to get caught up in this posturing. Once the business starts fighting with you to get results, it’s the beginning of the end for your team. Instead, do whatever you can to partner with the business. It’s about their requirement, not your architecture or following your process, so don’t let these things build barriers in your relationship with your business partners.
Focusing on results sounds like a simple obviousness, but it’s a lot more challenging than it seems. In spite of the challenge, it’s a worthwhile leadership pursuit, as the ability to produce results is a time-tested hallmark of all great leaders. Start by ensuring the alignment on customer-oriented results with your own management. Then engage the team with clear communication on a results-oriented focus, leading by example with your own technical prowess if you can. Finally set laser-like focus on the outcome, but stay flexible on how you get there. Even the best laid plans don’t work out, and you’ll need to be open to explore alternatives when you hit roadblocks.
With a new quarter right around the corner, now is a good time to start putting plans in place for a renewed focus on your internal customer. Plan the next meeting with your manager around how they might be able to support you in delivering outstanding customer results. Their support will set the stage for you to build one of the greatest talents a leader has—getting customer results.
John Weathington is President and CEO of Excellent Management Systems, Inc., a San Francisco based management consultancy that helps companies turn chaotic information into profitable wisdom. His clients include Fortune 100 firms such as Sun Microsystems, Cisco, and eBay. For more information, please visit: http://www.xmsystems.com.