The other day, I had the idea of re-inventing my website to admit my interest:
Heusser on Leadership
Improve your organization’s Capability and Maturity ...
... without the pain.1
Thinking about the web-site re-design got me to wonder: Just what is my core philosophy?
I should design the web-site around that, right?
My number one assertion is pretty simple:
Real leadership is not Conventional Wisdom. In fact,
Optimus Prime was a bad example of leadership.
Where did that come from? Well, do you remember Transformers: The Movie?
In the opening sequence, the Decepticons (Bad Guys) had a sneak attack on the Autobot (Good Guys) city.
Optimus Prime (The Leader) was away at moon base alpha. The Good Guys get TROUNCED by the Bad Guys.
Finally, Optimus Prime flies down from Moon Base Alpha, trashes the Decepticons, and beats Megatron
(The Bad Guy Leader) in a one-on-one duel. The Decepticons, beaten, turn and flee. One Autobot is
heard to say "Prime did it; he turned the tide."
Think about what this means: The Autobots were WORTHLESS without their leader.
Prime didn’t teach them instead, he allowed them to become dependent on him.
That may be the way the popular media treats leadership but it just isn’t right.
My assertion about leadership is very simple. First, there is a time in any organization when you
need a leader out in front to rally the troops. However, the leader has to do more than just lead,
he has to teach the unit to function as a team, and teach others to lead the charge in his absence.
In other words, A true leader works to make himself obsolete.
The Capability Maturity Model (CMM)
The CMM is a standard created by Canegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute2
to evaluate how a company develops software. The first level, or "initial" level,
is Ad Hoc Development. In other words, people just sort of throw things together and hope they work.
Ad Hoc Development relies soely on Heroics to get the job done.
While heros who solve ambigouous problems can be good, relying on heros is abdicating leadership. Overly relying on heros means the organization has no plan, and can burn out hte very people you need the most.
All of the additional levels of the CMM are an attempt to get away from this reliance on heroics, and developa systematic way of doing things. Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), project plans, training documents,
detailed job descriptions, peer reviews, and informal training can all help change the "he’ll figureit out" assumption to become "he knows what to do." Additional levels of CMM are repeatable,
Defined, Managed, and Optimizing.
Peopleware3
While the CMM has some good points, it also has several weaknesses: Hopefully, you select your team so that it consists entirely
of good people. All the methodolgies and CMM in the world can make a team with bad players "not
that bad", but they cannot make that team great. A great team needs people with Passion
and Professionalism who are willing to think, learn, study, and work. We’ll spend a good bit of time
talking about management, and while management and leadership often overlap, they are not
the same thing. In the case of information workers, I do believe that one legitimate role of management
is to pick the best people, keep them happy, and run around, re-arranging the furniture so the team can
get things done3.
"If I give my life; if lay it down ..."4
Two weeks ago, a visiting parish priest said something that surprised me. Speaking of Christian
Philosophy, he asked "Do you know why Jesus Christ won’t stay dead? It is because the central
core of his philosophy was that if you want something, you have to give it away. And what did he
give away? His life."
That sums it up about leadership for me: Leading from the front is good, but if you want to make
a change that will sustain itself after you're gone, you will you have to lay aside the credit,
and the glory.
A Civil Air Patrol Example
In Civil Air Patrol, I am a Leadership Officer. This means I teach Military Cadets things like how to
drill, how to wear a uniform, and who to call "Sir." When the organization gets a bit of
maturity, I step back and let the Cadets teach these skills, and I "train-the-trainers."
Eventually, we have a few Cadet Officers, and I step back again, and I let the Cadet Officers
train-the-trainers, while I offer advice and discuss the philosophy of why certain techniques work
and others don’t.
Every once in awhile, I have to take a complete step back and let a Cadet succeed or fail at something
that I had been doing previously. As any human, I like glory but to make the organization grow it’s
capability, I need to let someone else do the job. Let someone else get the glory, and possibly the
credit. In order to get the organization to do something (that’s pretty much the definition of
"leadership") I need to give up standing out in front and saying "follow me."
(That’s the popular media definition of "leadership").
For the past two years, my Squadron (Boulle-Norman Memorial) has won the Michigan Wing Academic Bowl.
Would my team do better job this year at competition if I went and coached the Cadet Commander?
You betcha. Would I be teaching them to rely on others instead of themselves? Probably. So, in order
to get something, I had to give it up.
Conclusions
As I have alluded to above, "Conventional Wisdom" isn’t.
When it comes to leadership, we aren’t going to be able to rely on "Full Metal Jacket"
or "Platoon" or "Star Wars." We are not going to be able to rely on Cliches.
John F. Kennedy is credited with saying, after the Bay of Pigs invasion, that "It is a kind
of moral evil to trade one’s opinions for someone else’s."
As Josh McDowell said in one of his books "Don’t check your brains at the door."
Want to learn about leadership? We’re going to have to think for ourselves, to study, learn,
and adapt. We’ll talk about leadership, teamwork, maturity, capability, passion, professionalism,
history, and more.
It’s going to be quite a ride, but I think it’s worth the trip.
Footnotes:
1) Yes, I took some ideas from http://www.joelonsoftware.com
2) http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmm
3) For details, I highly recommend Peopleware by Timothy Lister and Tom DeMarco
4) From an Album by Jennifer Knapp