Principled Centered Leadership
I recently remembered this book whilst musing on something, I read it a considerable time ago now, and I would recommend it to anyone who is in or is aspiring to move into a management/leadership role. I felt at the time it reaffirmed a lot of things I felt instinctively and helped framed the way I thought about managing people. Remembering it brought some relevant thoughts about what approach I try to take when managing people and building team cultures.
Core values
In any kind of management role or structure it is really good if you define a set of core values that mean something to you that will help guide you and those around you. Putting them down on paper can be very helpful as a lot of the time these will be instinctive, and when things get stressed or difficult, having gone through the process of writing them down can help you refocus and remind you of what is important. I find when managing (I don’t actually like the term management as I see it more as helping, leading and guiding) people I have to constantly asses and reassess what I am doing as it’s easy to get lost in the detail of a project and making sure things get done on time, to quality etc.
In terms of a team or a company this will form the basis of the culture of that team or company. How you treat people, how people treat each other, what values you bring to customers and clients, these core values define what is expected of people at all levels. They can take the form of goals/objectives, priorities or a mission statements. When Cohort Studios was being formed I started to write a ‘manifesto’ for want of a better word, but then boiled it down into a page of core statements when I realised no one wanted to read through pages of this stuff. I could have optimised this a lot more but the point was that discussions took place about what company we wanted to be and what culture we wanted to build which gave us direction.
Honesty, Communication and Trust
Honesty is literally the best policy, if you are continually lying, misleading or misrepresenting a situation, not being straight with people for whatever reason it will always catch up to you as an individual or company. Once people know that you haven’t been honest with them then you will lose their trust and respect and how will you ever motivate or inspire them again. When there is an issue that needs to be resolved then discuss it honestly, do not try and manipulate the situation to get what you want without actually addressing the underlying issue. Every time you dishonestly manipulate a situation you are building up toxicity within the relationship and team culture. Obviously honesty can sometimes be very difficult, when facing issues about yourself, your organisation or individuals, but it is far more preferable than dealing with the toxic mess when lies start unravelling.
You will get managers that will literally say anything to get what they want out of a situation to attain short term goals, if they need people to work extra hours they will make promises they know they can’t keep, you’ll get a bonus or a promotion, or a pay rise that never turns up. I call this the scorched earth approach, they may be able to manipulate things to get where they want, but when they look back everything has been burnt, and in terms of building teams you have effectively destroyed it.
Communication is key to any team and organisation, it is something that cannot be taken for granted and needs to be constantly monitored so that people have the information they need to do their job effectively. This is needed at both a team and company level. For example, if a company has a business strategy to sell or float on the stock exchange in 5 years then this really should be communicated to the teams, and everything they do should be geared to helping making this a reality. Managers of sports teams don’t have game plans that they don’t tell the team. The same for projects, if a team is working on a game, and the company has a commercial goal for the product such as monthly revenue to be profitable then this should be part of the design brief or user stories. For people to make good decisions they need to be informed.
Trust is not just about being told the truth, trust is about feeling safe and respected in your working environment. A fundamental to any leadership role or company organisation is having people believe what you say, but they also need to feel safe. By this I mean people can express their opinions or do their work without fear of retribution, that they don’t get bullied, ritually humiliated, get bad mouthed or stabbed in the back.
So for example, if you have encouraged a culture where team members ‘rat’ on each other, “so and so was a half hour late for work this morning”, as you see this as some way as being informed about what is going on the team. Apart from creating an environment where people can use this to manipulate your opinions of others, what you’re actually doing is causing team members not to trust each other breaking down any team spirit.
Another example would be talking behind peoples backs, if as a manager you are dealing with a performance issue with an individual, they need to feel assured that you are not going to be bad mouthing them to others in the company, destroying their credibility with their peers in doing so. They shouldn’t be called out publically for mistakes they make, being ritually humiliated in front of their colleagues. Mistakes happen frequently as its human nature, you should try to minimise them and address repeating errors but people shouldn’t fear this. I generally find it best to diffuse the situation by making a joke out of it and then check the reasons for it.
If you do not have trust then you not only have a toxic environment but a highly inefficient culture which will cost any organisation in time and money.
