Why it's hard to lead

This reflection comes from reading the book The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. Towards the end of the book, the author suggested that a manager needs to have the ability to answer three simple questions:

  1. What needs to be changed?
  2. What do we want to achieve?
  3. How do you cause the change?

In the context of the book, manager == leader since the story happened in a production plant. In our workplace, a leader can also be individual technical leads that are responsible for leading projects without being a people manager.

These 3 questions resonated with me very deeply, especially during the current tough time. I've observed first handedly leaders suffering from pressure from all directions (myself included). Skepticism and criticism like "Why are you working on this?" "Why isn't your team delivering?" "Why don't you take the team to work on X instead?" are the most common things that leaders hear on a daily basis. Those doubts are merely the reflection of some deeper problems in the organization. And as in the title the reason why it's hard to lead is that a leader has to answer ALL the 3 questions above in order to succeed.

However, this note is not about how to answer those 3 questions, since I don't believe there can be a generalized framework for that. Instead, I'm sharing some reflections that I have when going through these 3 questions. I hope this is useful to you if you are going through the same journey.

"What needs to be changed" is usually obvious, but only knowing this is not enough as a leader.

When things are going wrong, or a new opportunity lies ahead, it's usually not that hard to spot these problems or opportunities. Calling out these obvious things verbally can make people look like a strong leader, especially when other people are nodding along (since it's obvious), but ultimately it's the leader's job to think through it, create clarity and drive towards execution. In fact, repeatedly pointing out an issue or an opportunity without personally investing in solving the problem can lead to the deterioration of one's credibility very quickly. So, don't do that as a leader.

"What do we want to achieve" needs to be concrete and measurable, it has to be a step towards the north star, but should not be the north star itself.

The 2nd question gets immediately harder to answer since the answer needs a level of accuracy to be meaningful. Being able to describe the lofty mission and the ultimate goal is an important responsibility of a leader, but what is needed at this stage is to describe a concrete, tangible milestone that is aligned with the mission. For example, using the production plant story in "The Goal", the thing that needs to be changed is that the plant is losing money. If the leader answers the second question as "We need to start earning money", then it's quite useless. Instead, the more concrete answer that is useful would be something like "Increase throughput by 50%, while reducing the inventory by 20% and operational expense by 30%".

"How do you cause the change" is an exponentially hard problem when more variables are being considered.

This ties back to the pressure that I mentioned in the beginning. When the answer to the first 2 questions are obvious, people who don't have the same visibility into all the context as a leader might assume a simple solution. This is when you will hear people suggest "Why don't you do X?" "Why don't you stop doing Y?" but in reality, what the leader will need to face is not a simplified black-and-white problem, instead, it's usually a trade-off problem with many shades of gray. And as you add more variables to this trade off, things like customer satisfaction, people's happiness in the team, impact vs feasibility of the project, XFN relationship, etc. The complexity will explode exponentially and quickly the problem will become unsolvable. Unfortunately this situation doesn't have a perfect solution, some variables are inevitable, so the baseline solution might still be extremely complex. However, it does help to weed out some of the non-essential variables. For example, it might actually be ok to ignore customer happiness for a period of time to focus on product improvement with the promise of a totally new level of quality in the future.

To wrap up:

if you are a leader of a project/team/organization, know that your job is hard, but that should be expected.  Use the 3 questions to navigate through the challenges and hope those nuances that I noted above can be useful. 

If you work with a leader in a project/team/organization, have some empathy with them since their job is hard, but at the same time hold them accountable by demanding clear answers to all these 3 questions, not one less.

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