Note from Art: My recent post, “Things I Wish Someone Would Have Told Me When I Became a Leader,” seemed to strike a familiar chord for many. I’m thrilled that it struck a chord for someone that I’ve invited to guest post for quite awhile and until now, couldn’t quite convince to put pen to paper. A good colleague and friend, Joe Zurawski, joins us today with his thoughts on early leadership missteps and lessons learned the hard way.
I’ve known Joe for a dozen years over several organizations now, and he’s come a million miles from the first-time leader described in this post. Joe is a first-rate leader and mentor as well as an outstanding technology and business strategist with a great marketing mind. He’s the complete package. I’m hoping we can pry some more outstanding content out of Joe now that he’s come clean and shared his early leadership missteps and lessons learned. Joe’s contact and bio info are at the end of the post.
What I wish I would have known when I took my first leadership position-Joe Zurawski
“STOP ACTING LIKE A CONSULTANT AND START LEADING!”
That’s what “Bob” shouted at me at an after work social function after a few beverages. I was stunned; I thought I had been doing a great job being a leader for our newly formed business unit. What was he talking about? Uh, I think there is something somebody should have told me about how to lead when I took this position….
The instance above was shortly after I met Art and we had many conversations on what I needed to do to grow into my leadership position (Art was in a different group at time and became my leadership mentor).
Here’s the situation: After earning my MBA, I joined a large management consulting firm during the heyday of process reengineering in the mid-90’s. The one skill everyone learned was team/group facilitation.
I became very experienced at leading a group through a change process: you served things up in a certain order, let the group digest the concepts and help them see the changes they need to make. The idea was they would take more ownership of the solution because they were the ones that eventually came up with it. Hey, there’s nothing to managing and leading!
After leaving consulting and joining an electronics hardware manufacturing company, a new President formed business units for the first time and I was offered the leadership position for the OEM unit. I was the acting general manager and responsible for leading this team, with direct responsibility for marketing and product management, and indirect responsibility for engineering, finance, quality, and manufacturing.
As a team, we needed to form a strategy, set-up our P&L’s, and create an operating cadence with quarterly reports to the President and senior staff. “Should be just like running an engagement”, I thought, “just lay it out there and they’ll run with it.”
And that’s exactly where the problems started: I acted like a facilitator. My “leadership” style was to ask a lot of questions of the group and assume they would develop the answers. Except they didn’t.
The team had no idea what I was doing or attempting to do. We didn’t make progress and our team meetings were starting to get contentious. Uh, this never happened before and I don’t know what to do!
Bob’s “start leading” comment, and his follow on “tell us where we need to go and what we need to do” really hit home. After sharing the experience with Art and with the company President, they helped me come around to what leadership really means.
Here are the things I wish I would have known in that first leadership role:
- Leadership means leading. It seems obvious, but it wasn’t at the time. The team wanted someone to tell them where we needed to go and how we were going to get there, not someone to serve up abstract questions to provoke “deep thoughts”. Set a clear path, layout clear tasks, and constantly tie it to the end goal.
- Don’t expect that everyone on your team speaks your language. I was using words and talking about things in a context completely foreign to what they had previously experienced. I was talking “consultant speak.” I had to learn to bridge the gap and approach things from their perspective.
- You are not “one of the guys” any more. I wanted to be liked and didn’t want to come in and be some outside tough guy that doesn’t listen. I wanted us to be a harmonious team that had fun together. The reality is I was now “management” and was treated as such. You don’t have to be mean or evil to lead, but don’t expect to have several new best friends either.
- It’s OK to seek help when things go awry. While I have as much pride as anyone, I knew things were going poorly and I really didn’t see where to go. Having a supportive, but not intrusive, President, and an outside-the-company mentor like Art, were both very helpful to vent, gain perspective on what the team was seeing in me, and what I needed to do differently.
The final point:
Learning to lead with no up-front guidance was difficult for me. While we eventually came around and had solid results, it was a longer and more difficult path than was necessary.
If you are headed for a leadership role, do yourself a favor and do some homework (like reading Art’s book), adjust your style and monitor how people are reacting to you. And don’t forget to ask for feedback from your boss, from your team members and from peers. Last and not least, it is a great help to have a mentor/friend lined up to keep you on track.
About Joe Zurawski: Joe is a strategy and innovation executive with a career that has spanned strategy development and execution, whole lifecycle product innovation and management, demand generation marketing, and global alliances. He has worked in electronics companies (including Motorola), software (Firstlogic/Business Objects, SPSS), and spent several years in management consulting at Ernst & Young. You can reach Joe at [email protected].
What did you see or hear from the team that led you to interpret, “The team wanted someone to tell them where we needed to go and how we were going to get there?”
I’m puzzled by the advice that leading = telling, which is how I would sum up the post.
Perhaps I’m confused about your meaning for the word “team.” Do you mean a team as in a basketball team, whose members are highly interdependent, or as in a track team, whose members are independent? The basketball team has to work together to score points and stop the other team from scoring points. Track teams win based on the total of points scored by its individual members.
I can see how the advice might be effective for a team (really a group) that functions like a track team. But I see big problems applying this advice to teams that function like a basketball team.
I’ve been a member of many highly effective teams that functioned like a basketball team. They worked together brilliantly to produce results. These teams would have liked hearing their leaders (management) inform them about targeting information, but they would have flat rejected any attempts at telling them how to hit the target. No one person could know more about how to produce the results than the collective wisdom of the members of the team.
I think its vital to know what type of team you are leading and adapt leadership style accordingly? What do you think?
Steven, nice job baptizing a first-time guest blogger with some tough questions! : ) I’m certain Joe will respond and share his thoughts in short order. Thanks, Art
Steven,
Thanks for the questions and opportunity to clarify.
We had just formed a business unit management team with functional managers as the members. Some of our initial tasks were basketball-like (develop a BU strategy together), but most were more track team-like (engineering improving the product, manufacturing implementing lean processes, etc).
In my 1:1 meetings with the President, I developed a clear vision of how he wanted the BU’s to operate. What I failed to do was communicate that in a clear manner whereby the BU team could have a shared vision. My mistake was to “lead” the team by facilitating – asking open ended questions, challenging their comments, and doing this over the course of several weeks. They became frustrated because they really didn’t see where we were headed or what the end state was to be.
The “telling” comment didn’t mean dictating their individual tasks, but rather it meant providing clear guidance on what their function needed to do to contribute to the BU. The engineer would say “tell me what engineering needs to do to support new OEM customers”.
What I failed to do upfront was say: “we’re going to develop a strategy, which will include where our market is headed, what our competitors are doing, what new customers we are going to pursue, how much new revenue we can generate, etc. Your task, Engineering Leader, is to come up with ways to support these business objectives.”
So to summarize, I failed to “tell” the targets and objectives, but instead tried to facilitate the team to come up with those, which is what didn’t go well. I agree that telling everyone what to do is not effective, but I do think you need to tell them where you’re going and how you’re going to get there.
Joe,
Thanks for sharing, and I have to agree that consultant speak doesn’t work when you are a leader in an organization. Maybe you can expand upon the “new leader” topic and talk a little about leading in a distributed organization. Certainly one of the things every leader wishes they were told upfront is how challenging it can be to work with people separated by long distances.
8/5/09: Midweek Look at the Independent Business Blogs…
Every week I select five excellent posts from this week’s independent business blogs. This week, I’m pointing you to posts on dealing with a good person who’s a bad culture fit, advice for new managers, learning from experience, workplace flexibilit…
Joe – I enjoyed the article. It made be think about how successfully you helped lead change when we worked together. You were excellent at setting the vision and direction – and you certainly were not a micro-manager. I’ll look forward to more blogs from you! – Best, Eric
Congratulations! This post was selected as one of the five best independent business blog posts of the week in my Three Star Leadership Midweek Review of the Business Blogs.
http://blog.threestarleadership.com/2009/08/05/8509-midweek-look-at-the-independent-business-blogs.aspx
Wally Bock
Thank you for the clarifications, Joe.
Knowing more about the context helps me.
I agree with you about the benefits of upper management sharing with the team of people who head the individual business organizations what they are expected to produce.
I also agree with you about the benefits of upper management sharing how they see each organization’s work fitting with the other organizations’ to produce the desired result (how the organizations will work together).
I’m still pondering the difference between consulting and leading. There is a difference, but I believe both roles require the quality we call “leadership.”
Best regards, -Steve
Wally – thank you very much for the nice pick-up. Hopefully someone can benefit from avoiding my mis-steps.
Dave – I think remote leadership would be an interesting topic to explore. How does someone maintain effective leadership when you are not physically in the team’s presence very often?
Steven – You raise another good topic for future discussion. With consulting, you lead a client team through a change process, maybe some implementation, but at some point you move on. The further discussion point would be exploring the differences in leadership for leading a department versus leading a company project team versus a consultant leading a client team. I think that could be a good one.
Joe
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