Oh man, now there’s a title for you. Sure, I’m going to define the topic of leadership right here and now for you all. You best move on to smarter places like here, here or here if that’s your expectation.

I’ve been in a few common positions in relation to leadership, possibly in chronological order:

• Bottom of the food chain wishing someone would bestow a leadership role on me.
• A ‘manager’ supposedly leading teams.
• An ‘owner’ working to build leaders within teams.

Those experiences have given me some entry level insight into what leadership is all about. So what do I know today about leadership? Here’s my completely made up on the spot list:

1. Assigning, or being assigned, leadership almost never works.
2. Leadership isn’t a role or title.
3. Good leaders are natural leaders.
4. Natural leaders don’t wrestle, hoard, or covet leadership roles. They see voids in leadership and naturally gravitate towards them.
5. People won’t become leaders until they’re ready, which is different than crap like leaders are born, etc. Tomorrow’s leader is today’s plain old team member.
6. Good leaders are most excited about seeing plain old team members become tomorrow’s leaders.
7. Leadership isn’t a destination.
8. Leading is NEVER about making big decisions.
9. In fact, good leaders make as little big decisions as possible.
10. Natural leaders work themselves out of their roles. They see themselves as training wheels to help teams move forward until they’re no longer needed.
11. Good leaders allow acceptable voids in leadership.

So good leaders gravitate towards voids in leadership naturally, when they’re comfortable. As a leader, the ideal way to find leaders is to allow this natural progression by opening up tolerable voids in leadership within your teams. This is in contrast to creating roles and assigning them. Have I created roles and assigned them on teams? Yep and I will again, however, I view those occasions as failings on my part. Have I been on every side of every fence I describe above? Pretty much.

If you’re a plain old team member who wants to become tomorrow’s leader then my advice is to watch closely for those voids in leadership on your team. Don’t clutch and grab at them. Identify them and work with your entire team to help them move forward on those issues. When you see these voids, the worst you can do is sit back, bitch and moan about the terrible job you’re current managers are doing.

If you’re a leader trying to grow your next crop of leaders. Strive not to assign leadership roles. Think about these voids and try opening some up on your teams and see who naturally steps in. When you see someone stepping in then do everything you can to support, encourage, and make them successful. Oh, and grow a thick skin and be prepared that some people may see these voids as failings on your part.

I like this quote from Jeff Bezos, found link from Mark:

“Communication is terrible.
When Jeff Bezos’s people said they needed to communicate more within the company, he shocked them by shooting back: ‘No, communication is terrible.’ To promote his decentralized vision of the company, he created ‘two-pizza teams’: highly autonomous task forces with five to seven people — no more than can be fed with two pizzas — who innovate and test new features.”

The key for me is the “highly autonomous” part and I’ve seen that overlooked a lot when this approach is tried. Almost every company I’ve worked for has tried some form of 2 pizza teams, however, none have stuck with allowing them to be truly been autonomous. I’d hazard to guess that a highly autonomous 6 pizza team is still better than lipservice autonomous 2 pizza teams.

Chip Wilson, founder of lululemon was on The Hour last night. He made a comment about doing great things. He said that mediocrity fears great things and therefore people doing mediocre things will always attack people doing great things.

While the scales are significantly reduced, my experience tells me Chip’s bang on. I’ve witnessed this over and over again in my limited circles. People who aren’t skeered will look at someone attempting great things and think ‘how can I help? how can I be a part of that?’

So if you’re truly attempting great things then expect attacks and don’t be deterred. Keep an eye out for people who support and rally around you and don’t stress the rest. Hey, maybe you should just say thanks to an attack and take it as a compliment? Look at it as a sign that you’re doing something great?

Back to not doing what you know is right, I’ve managed to drift back into email hell. My intent is to gain back control which means I’ll be working my way back to checking email twice a day and once (maybe) over the weekends. That means that your best way to reach me, if you need immediate responses, is this little device we call the teleeefun.

It’s amazing how some deadlines and the need to be aggressively productive can quickly expose email for what it is, a massive waste of time. The point being I’m not doing this to be a recluse prick, although I can’t say that’s a ‘negative’ side effect, but instead to get better and more intentional at what I decide I need to do.

Quick primer. At boc we have no formal process for hiring. Some may wrongly assume that’s because we’re small, immature, and haven’t locked things down yet. While all those things are true, don’t mistake our lack of formal process as being unintentional.

Okay, we don’t have any rules but we do have a history:

• We’ve never hired someone from a resume.
• We’ve only ever hired people who’ve been referred to us by someone on our team.
• Since I’ve been involved, I have yet to seriously read someone’s resume. Man I love that! I wasted too much of a previous life reading resumes.
• We don’t consider someone to be a full-on boc’er until they’ve attended one of our retreats. At a retreat they’ll have no choice but to meet most of us, cook and eat food with us, talk about work and non work, roll an ankle or blow a knee etc.

Anytime I attempt to explain how we hire to someone with more traditional ideals I always feel like a hippy flake. Look, the bottom line is that we literally hire like cavemen, err cave people? New people must gain acceptance by our established group and it’s more about admitting members to our tribe than hiring new recruits. Is that crazy?

Ummm…no. These tribal leanings have a much deeper history than any new HR policy created last week. We hire in a time tested, tribal fashion. What’s crazy to me is companies that leave hiring decisions to a small group in HR, provide limited exposure to the people who must accept and help make these newbies succeed. The most I’ve ever had in my experience of hiring, or being hired, is a quick lunch with a select member or two of the team. I’ll stick with our caveman ways thanks….

Years ago, during the first dot com boom, I worked at a little web company in Toronto. That company made the decision to bring in some old school boys to run things. Some guys who know how to efficiently operate a growing organization. Is there a ‘tongue in cheek’ emoticon? That particular experience didn’t exactly inspire my confidence in the old guard. I butted heads more than the opposite.

One case that came to mind was office layout. With a few new hires coming in the door, we’d outgrown the layout of one of our floors. There was some heated discussions with some people having strong opinions about how things should be laid out, where their “office” should be, who should sit near who, etc, etc, blah, bored, blah…

So the part that really blew my socks off? Our man in charge at the time took it upon himself to stay late that evening and draw up the new office layout with no real consultation with the people involved. The next day he handed the new office layout over to the office manager for implementation.

Occurrences like this drove me bonkers and I generally got nothing but cow-eyes when I’d raise my concerns with the ‘powers that be’. Stereotypical managers actually view this kind of useless crap to be their job. At this time, this guy would have been one our highest paid people and he’s being paid to write seating plans for grown ups?

In this case my only question for ‘the man’ was “how old are your children? Does their teacher issue them a seating plan at school or does she trust those 6 year olds to figure it out themselves?”

I recently read something from Ricardo Semler, speaking about exactly this issue. Obviously he has pretty much the polar opposite take on it…

“Sure, I’m the main shareholder, so I always have a loaded gun in a drawer and the right to fire it, but understanding the benefits of our system is my self-restraint. I know that there’s only one bullet in the gun, and if I fire it off in a fit of pique, I’ll only get one shot at overriding a popular decision, after which I’ll be disarmed. At that point, I’d lose everything I’ve worked for..”.

If you’ve only got ONE bullet, do you really want to use it on a seating plan issue??

Ricardo Semler, writing about what’s left once you reach the realization that mission statements and credos are bullshit:

“Quite a lot, starting with what we stand for, the way we do things, the facts on the ground, the we are perceived, and the satisfaction and success of those involved. In other words, judge us by what we do, rather than what we say we do. Judge us by standards drawn from a peaceful, civilized, cooperative, and humane society of equals..”

I wish I’d written that and like to think that somewhat describes what we’re up to at boc. Sure it’s hi falootin stuff but so what?

PS, I have some istockphoto credits that are expiring hence the unrelated image. Check out that guy’s shadow, I think he’s Australian?

Quote from IDEO founder David Kelley about their guiding philosophy,”enlightened trial and error outperforms the planning of flawless intellects”.

Quote from Hard Facts referring to the single most important quality of a leader, advisor, or team. To travel “through life with an attitude of wisdom - the ability to act with knowledge while doubting what you know”.

Timothy Ferriss is getting a load of press these days for his recent book. He also has a nice preview of the book available in the form of a ChangeThis manifesto.

I haven’t read the book so I can’t comment on it directly. I do know that one of his key suggestions is to take control of email. I’m in complete agreement with him on this, however, I’ve managed to drift away from the practice in the past two years.

The basics? Close your email client. Only open it once or twice a day at explicit times.

I first began practicing what is essentially the same thing Timothy suggests back in my MKS days. I was inspired to do so after reading The Tyranny Of Email, written back in 2003.

In short, I’m working my way back towards this. The migration is less about my email habits than it is people’s expectations of my habits. Everyone’s used to me responding almost instantly so I need to work them towards a new pattern. Or technically an old pattern that I somehow abandoned.

If you’re in a rush to get back to your email, Ole has a great summary:

1. Turn your email client off. Pick the moment at which you’ll be interrupted.
2. Never criticize anyone in email, and avoid technical debates. Use face-to-face meetings or ‘phone calls instead.
3. Be judicious in who you send email to, and who you copy on emails.
4. Observing some formality is important.
5. Don’t hesitate to review and revise important emails.
6. Remember that email is a public and permanent record.