Unfiltered Observations on Leadership Roles in Tech (And How To Be a More Effective Leader Yourself)

0:02 I am not saying every problem is a leadership problem what I am saying is perhaps the biggest attitude change for unlocking higher levels of Effectiveness is to view every problem in your org first and foremost as a leadership problem the reason this becomes important is because this ties very closely to the idea of ownership and frankly I want to say certainly over the last 10 years or we have just particularly in PM leadership we have

0:33 lost this idea of ownership more and more I see people who do not think like owners they think like employees but even more particularly they think like children they don't think like full formed adults regardless of their age they could be 45 50 60 years old but they are still thinking like a child not like a full formed adult at the same time I have encountered many 25y olds and some some even 20 yearolds who think

1:01 like full form adults so age has something to do with it but the correlation is not nearly as strong as you think it may be because when you create and build the mindset of viewing every problem in your or as first and foremost a leadership problem what that does is it forces you to take on agency assuming you are a leader within the org it forces you to think about yes this problem exists now there is a separate

1:32 question of whether just the fact that the problem exists does it mean that it is worth solving I would argue in a majority of cases it does not mean just because a problem exists that it is actually worth solving as a leader but let's assume that this problem exists and we have deemed it important enough that it is worth solving in that case what I encounter very regularly is leaders who don't view it as a problem

1:58 of leadership they View it as a problem of coordination they view it as a problem of executive Clarity they view it as a problem of lack of resources they view it as an other problem and what happens in these situations is that we confuse the source of the problem and the agent of the solution the source of the problem could be anything it could be a difficult employee it could be a difficult cross functional counterpart it could be a difficult executive could

2:26 be a difficult boss it could be infrastructure that's really old really the source of problem could be anything but the agent of the solution if you're a true leader you have to understand you have to view yourself as the agent of the solution because that is the only effective way for us to move forward as Leaders if what we really value is ownership and if what we really value is progress I will call out that in many

2:54 many companies including some really tier one organizations this is not necessarily the path to Optimal Career Success what I just said so the common path in somewhat dysfunctional but still very talented and fairly high growth companies and orgs is leaders who are very vociferous in calling out these problems they create a lot of structure around describing the problem they call a lot of meetings they do many many

3:25 escalations to describe the problems usually the description of the problems is done we are an excuse for why their team is not performing as well as they would like or for why their team does not have the resources or the agency that they would like or for why they themselves are not being able to meet some of their boss's expectations the classic one being I want you to be more strategic the strategy is unclear to the

3:52 CEO Etc and their response is look at these problems right and they keep going back to Executives multiple times with these problems now of course they bring some solutions first of all they magnify the problem then what they do is they present a set of rational options usually one of the options is oh if this came into my scope it would be much easier it would be much better again that's done very strategically they go through multiple rounds of

4:21 troubleshooting This And discussing this and trying to make a decision around this many proposals many documents written and then perhaps after several weeks several months a decision gets made around how this problem will be solved and then they go ahead and solve it or they may not solve it that doesn't matter but if I operate in this way as a leader what have I accomplished by going through all of the song and ads what I have accomplished is two things one I've

4:53 made the problem sound harder than it actually is and two I have involved leadership and Executives so closely in this problem that they can't help have a sense of ownership and attachment to the problem so when it comes to promotion time I will be viewed very favorably because I did this in an alternate universe if I had just taken more ownership had that agency had that courage had the skill to identify the problem notify Executives about the

5:26 problem but just go ahead and solve it in a matter of hours or days is using my skills using my influence I would not get nearly as much credit for solving this problem one can fool even worldclass Executives and world-class CEOs with this tactic there are very very few CEOs who can see through this stuff very few just because the complexity at which we operate within an organization is tremendously high so that is the default path that most

5:53 people choose especially these days as management has gotten a lot more structured if you will and and people are following more and more these incentives of tell me what I need to get promoted and literally there are many people the way they operate the only thing that's mainly driving all the work they do and the choices they make is how do I get to the next level that's it this is very common in places like Google meta various other places nobody

6:18 talks about this but this is how a lot of these director level VP level people operate you have to understand that now I'm not saying everybody operates that way I would say in my experience about 70 % of middle managers director VP levels operate in this manner and the remaining 30% do not so this message is for that

6:48 30%