Edited: Leadership measure - The Rate of Pleasant Surprise
As a new leader, how do I know I am starting to support my team successfully? I've noticed this subtle thing to pay attention to as I have become a more effective leader.
There's a graduation of effectiveness in the tenure of a good leader at an organisation. It involves a few stages:
Just joined. Learning about the situation the organisation is in and what must be done.
The leader sees what must be done but falls short of enabling the organisation to realise it.
The leader sees what must be done, and it is being achieved.
Everyone can identify relevant opportunities across the organisation, find support, and pursue these so that the organisation achieves even more.
Today's post will focus on this last stage.
It is a leader's responsibility to provide context
When you are leading and actively sharing context that genuinely helps your team, then less and less the ideas of what must be done will originate from the leadership.
By context, I mean helping your team by sharing information that helps them:
Understand what the organisation is looking to achieve,
What the constraints are
And what the pressures and risks might be.
There's a way leaders can monitor how successfully they are enabling this state.
What you can look out for to help understand how much progress you are making and how well you are doing is how often you are pleasantly surprised.
The leader is pleasantly surprised that winning ideas you hadn't even considered are helping make a difference for the organisation.
The leader as a bottleneck pattern
As leaders, whether first-time or experienced, a pattern of behaviour that is easy to fall into is seeing things that need to be done and then getting your team to do them.
This is the leader-as-a-bottleneck pattern. I describe it as your engagement capacity limiting the team and organisation’s progress.
Many leaders make the mistake of thinking they are the ideas people. They have the ideas, and everyone else executes. One of the many problems with this approach is that after hiring many brains to work for an organisation, it's strange to limit decision-making to a small fraction of them.
After all, ideas are cheap. It's the testing them that counts.
This is like buying a high-powered computer and using only a tiny fraction of its power. You wouldn’t do it—it would be a waste of money. But organisations operate like this all the time when it comes to people.
What enables impactful decisions across the organisation?
What limits more people in an organisation from contributing more to the inspiration behind investments that improve its competitiveness?
In the heroic retelling of company histories, the individual is often painted as the genius behind the company's success. On closer examination, those heroes were great at something else.
Is it a leader's brilliance that makes them the best candidate to make all the decisions to help an organisation compete? Rarely.
The more significant difference in many organisations that limit the number of people contributing to substantial decision-making is their lack of context. Their position in the organisation may cause them to lack information about where the quality of a decision could be as high as the leadership.
The informed, engaged, sensing organisation
But it doesn't need to be that way.
More people armed with relevant information can support decision-making networks across an organisation. Thus, intelligent, strategic, and customer-aware decisions can be made.
When leaders focus instead on providing context for teams and the support they need to make significant decisions supporting the organisation’s direction, something incredible can happen.
From the humble beginning, where the leaders had ideas and progress reflected in the instructions from the few, there can be an evolution.
When you give the team more context, the relevancy and quality of ideas across the team increases. You start to observe more ideas emerge from all areas of the organisation. The better the context you’ve provided, the more relevant every idea is to the organisation’s progress.
The frequency of pleasant surprises, that is, the number of ideas that moved the organisation forward, those that you, the leader, had never considered before until they emerged, increases.
It doesn't need to be tracked. Maybe you could—I never did—but it can certainly be something you look for and reflect on on a regular cadence.
Why is this investment occurring? What was its genesis? What was learnt that led to this? What context was used to inform this decision? What additional context could improve this decision further? What is the organisation's ability to sense its situation and respond?
This pattern involves leveraging your organisation's collective brain power for maximum competitiveness. A leader’s purpose is to cultivate this environment.
When was the last time you were surprised by something initiated by your team? How often does that occur? Could you do more to help this happen more often? Share your experiences in the comments.
