6 Strategies for Consistently Producing Phenomenal Results

Episode #371 6 Strategies for Consistently Producing Phenomenal Results

EVEN THE BEST ARE PRONE TO BULLSH!T

This episode started with a Simon Sinek post on LinkedIn and ended up being one of the most practical, implementation-focused episodes that I’ve ever done.

The Sinek article was titled, 5 Things Managers Do ThatLeaders Never Would. I didn’t even need to weigh in on this one. Another leader stepped up and called it for what it was.

Daniel Sullivan from Denver, Colorado made this comment:

I have to call BS on this post. One of the many who would agree is No Bullshit Leadership author Martin G. Moore, because his mythbuster podcast, (Ep.267: Management vs. Leadership: What’s the Difference?) concludes:

“Everyone wants to work for a great leader, but if that leader isn’t also a good manager, you’ll experience the downside impacts pretty quickly. So, the next time you see that banal LinkedIn graphic explaining why leaders are good and managers are bad, [Simon Sinek, he’s calling you out], “You’ll know better than to be sucked in by it. Without remorse or apology, I’m happy to use the terms interchangeably.”

Well, thanks Dan! I’m genuinely glad that you dragged me to this discussion.

It got me thinking more fundamentally about the nature of leadership and management. The best leaders understand why high order management skills are core to their success.

In my early executive roles, I was a much better leader than I was a manager… and that was a real problem. On a few occasions, I was blindsided by substandard performance.

My path to success wasn’t about becoming a better leader. It was about working out how to manage my people more tightly, without becoming a micromanager and without over-functioning for them. In this newsletter, I share that journey with you.

I start with the leadership versus management dilemma that so many people are fixated on; I take a brief look at my own journey to improving my execution capability; and I finish with 6 tips that will help you to consistently produce phenomenal results.

IS “LEADERS VS. MANAGERS” REALLY A THING?

Simon Sinek’s blog makes some very black and white distinctions between management and leadership. The “five things” that the title of the article refers to are these:

1. Managers hoard information, leaders overshare;
2. Managers weaponise policy, leaders bend the rules for their people;
3. Managers fire fast, leaders coach then help their people land softly;
4. Managers avoid hard conversation, leaders run towards them;
5. Managers reward compliance, leaders reward dissent.

Let’s be real here. These aren’t “management versus leadership” things. They’re just differences between people.

I could just easily substitute the words “some leaders”, wherever the article uses the word “managers”… and I could substitute the word “others” wherever the article uses the word “leaders”. Let me show you what I mean:

1. Some leaders hoard information, others overshare;
2. Some leaders weaponise policy, others bend the rules for their people;
3. Some leaders fire fast, others coach then help their people land softly;
4. Some leaders avoid hard conversations, others run towards them;
5. Some leaders reward compliance, others reward dissent.

Now, doesn’t that just make so much more sense?

One of the quotes from my mythbuster episode on leadership versus management explains this phenomenon pretty clearly:

“Leadership and management live on a continuum… within a spectrum of subtle gradients. They’re intrinsically linked and they can’t be separated by black and white distinctions. You can’t be a great leader unless you’re also a good manager, and the converse is true too: you can’t be a great manager unless you’re also a good leader.”

I didn’t genuinely understand the difference until I was able to recognise the flaws in my own execution approach and put the work in to correct them. My journey, which probably lasted for about two decades, taught me that high order leadership acumen blended with strong management skills is the only way to consistently produce phenomenal results.

REVEALING MY OWN BLINDSPOTS

When I use the term “execution excellence”, I’m referring to how effectively you can take the resources that you have at your disposal (people, money, and assets) and use them to deliver exceptional results.

I thought I was brilliant at execution. My teams delivered incredible outcomes, and I built a strong track record of successful delivery. I may have even started to believe my own bullsh!t.

But humility is just one failure away.

This goes all the way back to my early days as a project manager in the software industry. After a few years of what I’d now describe as complete ineptitude, I finally learned how to get results (I was already applying an early version of what became the No Bullshit Leadership framework), but there were still some big holes that I couldn’t yet see.

For the most part, I could deliver outcomes in incredibly challenging circumstances, but interestingly, I had an Achilles heel: my style and approach worked perfectly well when I had high quality people reporting to me.

I’m not talking just about high performance; I’m also talking about people who exhibited the right values and behaviours. People who already understood accountability, and were strong enough to bring any big issues into the open when they needed to be addressed.

Because these were my own values, I tended to hire a lot of people who had the same behavioural biases as me… but not everyone was like that. As we know, hiring is an imprecise science.

What I worked out was that my particular style worked superbly for my high performing direct reports, who were strong and confident. But for others it just wasn’t that effective. And I hadn’t yet worked out that I needed to adapt my one-size-fits-all style – the one that mostly worked for me – to a more consistent, surgical approach.

For a start, the fact that I was very open and direct, which I did (and still do) consider to be a great leadership strength, was probably a little intimidating for some of my people. I can see now why they might’ve been a little reluctant to fess up to a problem, particularly in a group setting.

As I look back now, I reckon I was always pretty good at a few things:

• Setting challenging but realistic expectations;
• Giving clear, direct feedback;
• Aligning tasks to the big-picture objectives;
• Being a sounding board for my people to solve problems and make decisions;
• Staying out of my people’s day-to-day work;
• Bringing motivation and pragmatic optimism to every situation; and
• Remaining calm and relaxed in the face of challenges, adversity, and crises.

That’s a pretty good laundry list, right?

But now let me tell you where my blind spot was: I didn’t inspect the outputs thoroughly. And because of that, there were a few situations where I got a nasty surprise: a project that wasn’t quite as far advanced as I’d been told; a deal that hadn’t quite been signed and locked down; a scope of work that wasn’t quite contained; a milestone that hadn’t quite been met; a budget that wasn’t quite under control.

I just want to reflect for a minute on where we started: the difference between leadership and management. The parts of my toolkit that I was very proficient in would have a bias towards leadership. The tools that I was lacking would probably be more classified as management.

It was here that my growth had to come, and I have no doubt that becoming a better manager infinitely improved my leadership performance.

SIX THINGS THAT CONSISTENTLY PRODUCE PHENOMENAL RESULTS

I knew I couldn’t just paper over the cracks; I had to rebuild how I worked, so I adopted the classic Ronald Reagan quote as my mantra: trust, but verify.

I had the “trust” part sort-of nailed, but the “verify” part was still really weak… and I paid the price for it on more than one occasion!

I’m going to take you through the six things that I chose to focus on so that I could consistently produce phenomenal results. Remember, I was already pretty good at this, but it wasn’t the predictable performance sausage machine that I would’ve ideally liked.

Just for sh!ts and giggles, I’m going to give you a sense of my progress with each of these six elements over the years: I’m going to award myself a 1-10 rating for where I think I was when I realised I had a hole in my execution capability; and I’ll give myself 1-10 rating for where I eventually managed to land a couple of decades later.

If nothing else, this should give you the sense that you can change anything you want to, if you focus on it methodically.

To make this easier for you to sort through the process, I’ve produced a free PDF downloadable that you can use to rate yourself against these criteria.

Before I dive into the six things, just remember all of this assumes that you’re working on the right things: that you’ve isolated the most valuable initiatives, tasks, and activities, and that you are focused only on delivering those.

If you aren’t working on the right things, you’re going to deliver nothing, brilliantly!

1. Adapt for individual capability.

I used to assume that everyone was smart, competent, and diligent; and most of the people I hired actually were. They knew what their job was, and I was there to support them if they needed me. I’d give them direction and I’d make sure I had their agreement that they knew what they were doing, and they knew how to do it.

Here’s problem number one: when you ask someone if they understand something, they’ll almost always say yes. Which is fine when they do understand it, but when they don’t, it’s sort-of a problem.

Leaders often dismiss this as simply a communication breakdown. But more often than not, people just aren’t prepared to tell you what’s really going on for them: they want to seem capable and competent.

This is where I started to rely more on Situational Leadership Theory. I worked out how to adapt my style depending on the capability and the maturity of the person I was leading.

For people who were less experienced, I was more prescriptive… for people who were more experienced, I tended to let them go… some were so far out of their depth that I had to put them on short interval control, which means I met with them regularly to make sure they were on track.

Of course, we’re going to pick up this bit later when we start talking about accountability.

When it came to adapting my style for individual capability, at the start of my executive career, I reckon I was a 6/10, but by the end, I reckon I’d turned that into a 10/10.

2. Make your expectations abundantly clear.

Giving people extreme clarity around your expectations is vital. I used to think that this meant I had to give them a brilliant explanation… once!

After I’d explained, in excruciating detail mind you, what I was looking for and then got them to say that they understood, I just tended to leave them to it.

But seeing how many gaps in understanding this left, I learned to constantly refine, clarify, and question people to make sure they understood their objectives. More often than not, there were mismatches in our respective understanding.

But I found out as time went on that with careful attention and many conversations, I was able to largely close those gaps. This clarity of objectives and expectations is driven in your one-on-one meetings. You may feel like a broken record, then, just when you think you’ve explained your expectations more times than you could possibly stomach, explain them once more for good measure.

When it came to making my expectations abundantly clear at the start of my executive career, I reckon I was a 7/10, but by the end I reckon I’d turn that into a 9/10. Mind you, there were still times when I found mismatched expectations.

3. Give your people autonomy.

Let them do their thing and don’t step in over the top of them all the time. I was never really one to interfere or micromanage.

In fact, I was probably the opposite. I tended to give people too much trust, too much space, and too much autonomy, when they hadn’t really shown that they could handle it.

There’s an old expression that if you give people enough rope, they’ll hang themselves. I found, though, that when I gave people too much rope, they just disappeared into the distance and I couldn’t see them anymore.

This one’s tricky because you want to make sure you liberate your people’s talent. You want to give them room to move and to demonstrate their capability and performance, and you want to be able to stretch them.

If you’re a bit of a perfectionist or a bit of a control freak, you may struggle with this one. Giving your people autonomy is the antithesis of being a micromanager, but it doesn’t mean you should ever take your eye off the ball.

When it came to giving people autonomy, at the start of my executive career, I reckon I was already a 9/10 and I managed to maintain that throughout. I was happy to be doing something pretty well.

4. Track progress through time.

This one’s a little weird, actually. As a project manager / project director, I reckon I was pretty good at this… I had a pretty good discipline when I was running projects because everything was so milestone-dependent. But I seemed to lose it a little when I became a general manager.

When I talk about tracking progress through time, I’m referring to the importance of having a keen sense for how long something has been on the go.

For example, when you’re really busy, things just tend to slip, but you lose your sense of time duration: sometimes you don’t realise how much time has passed since you touched a particular problem.

I found this to particularly be the case when looking at decision-making. As a leader, you probably have decisions piling up in your inbox as we speak, and you know you’ve got to get back to them. But you deal with them in priority order. How else can you manage?

For things that aren’t essential, you might not touch the subject for three weeks, but because you’re so busy, it only feels like a couple of days. This is why it’s so important to track progress over time.

One of the tools we have in Leadership Beyond the Theory is a decision-tracking template for the express purpose of making sure that critical decisions your people rely upon aren’t just languishing on your back burner.

When it comes to your people’s deliverables, making notes from your one-on-one meetings is essential. That way, when you raise an issue and think to yourself, “Shouldn’t this have been done by now?” you’ll be able to go back and see exactly the dates on which those conversations occurred, and exactly what your direct report had promised to do.

When it came to tracking progress through time, at the start of my executive career, I reckon I was probably only a 6/10, but by the end I’d probably built that up to being an 8/10.

5. Trust but verify.

I really had to adapt this one, and it was a key mental shift. People didn’t necessarily like it when I started to do this. Why? Because it left them no wiggle room at all; there was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

Trust but verify became an essential part of being able to execute consistently. So what was this change? I had to modify my approach from saying, “Tell me”, to saying, “Show me”!

This has an impact almost immediately. When someone tells you they’ve done something, in the majority of cases, look, they actually have. But occasionally they haven’t, and you want to know when that is.

Why would a good person tell you that they’ve completed something when they haven’t? Well, there’s a heap of reasons:

• Maybe it’s because they don’t want to have the conversation about why;
• They may not want to expose a poor performer in their team;
• They may not want to admit that’s something they clearly should have done, hasn’t been done;
• They may not want you to think less of them;
• They may think that, even though they’re a little bit behind, they’re going to catch up.

Well, here’s the truth: you never catch up. You can either cut scope or burn resources, but you never catch up.

When I started asking people for evidence to support their words, I got a completely different type of response when it came to the whole “trust but verify” mantra.

At the start of my executive career, I reckon I was a 6/10, but by the end I’d give myself a solid 9/10.

6. Maintain ironclad accountabilities.

I was always pretty good at the accountability side of things, but because I wasn’t doing the “trust but verify” thing as well, by the time I managed to get visibility of some of the problems, it was too late to meaningfully recover the situation…

The damage was already done, and exercising accountability at that point was just too little, too late.

Single-point accountability is the foundation of execution excellence. I always knew this and I’ve worked feverishly to make sure that people have clarity around what they have to deliver and that they’re empowered to deliver it.

When I held my people to account, they felt both the sweet rewards and the sting of consequences for their performance. This was really just about making sure that there’s an outcome tied to the ultimate performance of every individual.

When it came to maintaining ironclad accountabilities, at the start of my executive career, I reckon I was an 8/10, but by the end that was a 10/10.

CONSISTENCY CREATES UNSHAKEABLE CONFIDENCE

I hope you can see how these six things can help you to consistently produce phenomenal results. At the start of my executive career, the weaknesses in one or two areas were costing me, but because my results were outstanding most of the time, it didn’t occur to me that I had a problem.

Once I learned how to make this predictable and repeatable, it completely changed the game for me, and for my people, and it gave me more confidence than I could have ever imagined.