Is Trust an alternative to Transparency ?

As a leader of leaders you always are out of detailed insights on all work streams / initiatives  / projects within your organization yourself and you lean on your next level leaders to take care of things. However, as a review mechanism to ensure the team is headed in the right direction and has the right level of support, we time to time review the progress, ask of details, challenge things etc. One of the things i have struggled at times is teams / leaders being offended to be introspected, asked for details and pushed to retrospect;  

A common element in all of this has come in my two decades of experience, i.e. "Demand for Transparency is perceived as a sign of Distrust"; I have asked this question to myself multiple times when i have experienced this and today i have this question for you, Is Trust an alternative to Transparency ?

So, is really trust an alternative to transparency and if you trust your team, you should not ask questions and audit things; Well i don't think really trust can be a alternative to transparency, rather transparency is a road which will leads you to build trust; And this works both ways, there are some common pitfalls leaders themselves fall into where their teams find themselves not trusted -

Observing and managing closely multiple leaders now, i have found some  common mistakes made by leaders when they ask for information which leads to be perceived by their leaders as distrust -

• Not building enough context of why details are asked, which also partly is because of not having clear expectation setting 
• Asking question more from a position of authority rather than a position of curiosity
• "Pretending" to be out of ground reality; At times leaders know the reality of why things are the way they are, but still chose to ask the "right" question;  
• Blaming team / leaders if things don't look clear are not progressing as expected
• Not spending enough time to help the team fix for transparency. Let them know what is really needed; Setting clear expectations;

Over 20 years of experience and with last 10 years managing leaders, i have found leaders who embrace transparency and proactive about sharing info even when things might entail tough conversations being trusted a lot more than leaders who believe in only indexing on an update of the end result; So if you are leader of a team and / or manage a large org, be comfortable sharing information; Create processes which gives top leadership, partner teams self serve ways to always be able to review things and suggest changes; The more you do, the more you would be valued as a leader and trusted;

Premortems - New Generation Mantra to Success

Premortems - New Generation "Mantra" to Success

With time as leaders, we have all become "experts" in learning from our mistakes. That's the classic question we ask anyone "What did you learn from your failure ?" & as long as we think we have learned from our failures we believe we have done our part and have better chances to succeed in future.  But does that happen, not for me yet :). The hard reality of a dynamic and everyday changing landscape around us is that neither the problems would be the same nor would the mistakes , so graduating from a school of failures is not anymore alone a recipe to success in future. 

So what do we do, stop learning from our mistakes :), definitely not ! We will continue to make mistakes and get better always learning from them, however in the generation which I call as the "Working Backward Era" your failures has to be Informed failures. You really should be able to predict your failure objectively and be able to plan ahead to avoid and/or manage the failure.  It's like doing a pre-mortem rather than a postmortem to diagnose a disease rather than curing the disease.

Your new "Key" to success 

Doing a pre-mortem of a business strategy, an architecture choice, a change request or an organizational decision is your new mantra to predict failure and as part of the discovery device checkpoints / mitigation steps to minimize chances to failure. In next section we will talk about how to do a pre-mortem -

Doing a Pre-Mortem

Pre-mortem is about fore playing disaster well before it happens, think about worst case and all possible ways in which things could go wrong. Learning back from my Amazon days, we use to do what we call as COE (Cause Of Error) documents for all business impacting incidence, and ask five WHY's,  the idea is to keep narrowing down on the root cause until you get to the root of it. If i take the same analogy to the concept of pre-mortems, its about answering the five HOW's, which is ask your self "How this plan could fail ?" "How could this decision go wrong? " and keep doing it multiple times which will force you to think of all critical reasons where the decision could get wrong.  

I have been practicing this as an important framework for a few years now for all of my critical decision making and i was impressed with the critical thinking and increased deep dive in embraced with my teams. We got lot better !! 

The Bandwagon Fallacy

 The Bandwagon Fallacy

One of my favorite topics and the most commonly experienced fallacy, The Bandwagon Fallacy. While before we get there, lets differentiate between Biases and Fallacy. A lot of people understand them the same or at least think Biases lead to Fallacy, which is actually not true. Being Aware of both helps you make better decision, but there is a clear difference between them; Fallacies are mistakes of reasoning, as opposed to making mistakes that are factual in nature, however Biases are persistent and widespread psychological tendencies that can be detrimental to objectivity to a decision.

I am going to talk through this Fallacy more in context of leadership roles which involves making critical decisions and how we get trapped in one of the most common fallacy at times. 

Let me start with some questions for you,

# How many times you got this argument to make a decision, "Everyone does it this way, so we should do the same"? Or

# Everyone did it X way, looks a popular way of doing things, must be the right way ! 

Picking the popular choice does not always mean, that you picked the right one :)  

Bandwagon comes from the idea in old times where people use to hop on to the Wagon when they found anything trendy. People would have blinders to reason aspects leading to make right decision and instead use popularity or commonness of a decision to chose on. 

As leaders we develop our brands overtime and one of the key contributors to the brand value we build for ourselves is based on the decision we make. Your decision reflect your ability to deep dive, your courage to make right decisions and your ability to own your decisions. It is really about you being at leadership position vs you being a leader. 

A lot of times when making decisions we know we are not making the right decisions but still we intentionally lean to choose the poplar one, any guesses why we do that (lets bring some real and discomforting answers) -

• The popular choices would have the minimum resistance, so its a easy battle to win. No one challenges you.
• We shy away from taking courageous accountability of the decisions we make, when choosing the  popular one, we can always blame the unknown for the popular choice not proving right :)
• We are in a hurry to get rewarded for our decisions. Time to know the uncommon decision proved right would be long, so one has to wait for the reward for the decision to realize unlike for popular choices reward could come in advance as well ! 

Ah, so many problems with trying to make "right" decisions and no real upside, so why should I take so  much pain ? 

Well the choice is yours, you want to be in control of your destiny or let the popular choice decide your destiny. Its also the mark you as a leader you want to create for yourself. As a true leader the biggest contribution you could make  for your team/organization, is to help make the right decisions. So if i think as a leader myself, i don't have an option and cant afford to have my team & organization suffer of me making a wrong decision.

So how do I avoid getting trapped in The Bandwagon Fallacy ?

Well its not that hard, few simple things can help you avoid the trap and make the right decision -

Be Aware - Being aware is the first and the foremost thing. One should be cautious of not being trapped in the fallacy and challenge the decision making process. 

Remove Blinders -  Often a times you or your team would have blinders in the decision making process.  Subconsciously our mind tries to find easy way out and when it finds a popular choices available it will try to put blinders around you to ignore facts. As a leader remove any blinders you/your team has and bring out facts which are key to decision making.

Focus on Input metric - One simple litmus test to find out you being trapped in the Bandwagon Fallacy is you focusing mostly on the output metric. People trapped in this setup would spend disproportionate time talking of the solution and very little to actually no time talking of the problem the solution was found for :)

Do A Pre-Mortem - One of the best way to break cognitive traps is to play "Disaster". Visualize the decision going wrong and try to work backward from it. Find out reasons why would the decision fail which will in turn help with things which you missed considering while making the decision. 

Remember DECISION making is the ultimate power you get as a leader and not being able to use your power right is the biggest failure. Decisions can prove "right" or "wrong", but the way you make decisions leads you to "success/failure" vs "Disaster" ! 

Choice is yours, put on your Thinking Cap !

Twenty - Twenty

Twenty - Twenty

While you mostly would have started thinking about a cricket match, its not about cricket but for sure about your innings in your professional career. Let me start with 3 basic question for you -

# How long is your professional Career ? 

# Where do you see yourself when you have 30+ years of experience ? 

# What is the high hanging fruit you have been targeting, have you found one 😏 ? 

I am sure it must have already triggered your #thinkingcap and also may be you just said to yourself, "Shit, i never thought of them" 😃

Well, that's what happened to me a few months back as well and when i answered them i realized ones professional career has always to be planned in two innings, the first half (first 20 years) and the 2nd half (next 20 years); That's how I started calling it the twenty-twenty career planning ! 

I remember when i started my career as an engineering graduate and in interviews if someone asked me,  "Where do you see yourself 10 years down the line ?",  it really stood a tall question to answer back then. The best i could get to answer this question was, "I see myself as a Manager, an Architect etc.". I am pretty sure your story must have been similar and probably your answers were similar too. But wonder if someone would have asked you then "Where do you see yourself 30 years down the line ?",  what would you have thought, probably  it was too early then to answer the question, but the real question is do you have the answer now ?

Anyone's professional career is roughly 40 years long, however very less people plan for the 40 years. Most of us, really don't even realize that our professional career is 40 years long and we keep running after the low hanging goals which will give us what we think "Success" for the first 20 years. This is also one of the key reasons why lot of people get more dissatisfied, feel downplayed, dip passion for their work in the later part of the first 20 years of their career. The real gap is, we keep focusing on the low hanging goals and look for high satisfaction / reward of them.  As you already realize there is a miss match of the input and the output, hence we are bound to feel downplayed and not feel content. 

Well, if you are already in near 20s for your career or even further, its never late - start planning now for your 2nd innings; The reason why i call it the 2nd innings (i.e. the 2nd 20 years of your career) is because you need to plan and approach it very differently that your first innings. The first 20 years are going to be about going and achieving low hanging goals, which you will be able to see ahead of you, be able to meet them in 1-2 years of a time lap & feel rewarded for achieving them. Not to demean your effort of achieving these goals, they will be complex and hard to achieve but will be low hanging. You will need to identify high hanging goals for your career for your 2nd innings; These goals will be ambiguous, will require multi facet skills to achieve, will take long time lap - 3-5 years to achieve and be differently rewarded (e.g. may not be a promotion but a bigger responsibility). 

Talking through lot of people who are in their 2nd innings of their career, what i realized is really 2nd innings is going to be the game play you will be know For & As;  Your grand children are not going to know you as a Software Engineer you were when you started your career in XX company.  So its really worth planning for your 2nd innings.

Thinking Cap ?

I don't think its hard to plan for your 2nd innings, my mantra to get started is asking some questions on an ongoing basis to yourself -

a) What is the high hanging goal I want to target next, how long will it take (should not be promotion, salary hike etc.) ?

b) What is the growth I want to see in myself in next 5 years (should be something like a qualification, new leadership persona for your self, new professional dimension etc.)?

c) What are the things I need to do in a phased manner to achieve my goal ? 

I guess one should ask these questions once every year to themselves and retrospect as they move along playing their 2nd innings. 

                              

                                 Whats in your Thinking Cap on this topic, do share / comment ?

   

The Demise of the COOs

The Demise of the COOs 

Traditionally the key leadership positions for organizations has been modeled between a CEO (Chief Executive Officer) and COO (Chief Operating Officer) function. In a traditional setup COOs is a hands on leader who oversees all operational and administration functions, builds robust operation controls for operations and internal functions & responsible for all programs. Well you must be thinking if COOs are doing all this, what are the CEOs doing 😏

Traditional CEOs were organization heads with total control on the organization and responsible to make all key decision for the organization. The CEOs also acted as a main point of contact for any communication, decision or review by the board (of directors). CEOs were also expected to the public face for the company for any PR (Press) or announcements.

If you look closely on the dimension of engagement between the CEO and the COO, it is designed to be a bureaucratic engagement. The CEOs made decisions which were supposed to be proved right & successful by the COOs. Most of the time COOs proved to be the scapegoats for the CEOs for any decisions going wrong, it always turned out to be the execution of the decision rather than the decision.  

As the industry evolved and workplace philosophies like open environment, flat organizational structures, transparency, ownership became organizational realities, the dimension of CEO and COO function  changed as well. Not only boards tuned their expectations with CEOs, but also the new generation CEOs aspired and desired to have deeper organizational insights, having more controls at their end to drive-measure organizational efficiencies and show larger accountability quotient. One of the primary reasons for  the shift was also because most of the COOs as part of succession became CEOs, but never went and hired a COO😉 . The COOs always perceived themselves as "CEO in waiting". Also the board always saw them in the same way, which made the CEOs fairly insecure a lot of times. So the new CEOs started owning the decisions and its results and also slowly diminished the need of COOs. 

New generation CEOs take their decision and own them, they are the new operational leaders for all external and internal functions. COO role is more and more getting merged with CEO role and we are seeing less and less of COOs. While some big organizations still hold COO positions in their leadership as legacy, the phenomena is more picking up across all industries and very common now with new organizations where the CEO is the new COO.   

Few Facts

Amazon never ever had one COO. Jeff Bezos holds the CEO position for the company and his second layer in the organization are business CEOs and Sr Vice Presidents for different functions.

Kevin Tuner was the first and the last COO Microsoft ever had. He led the COO function for Microsoft for 11 years, 2005-2016. Satya Nadella, CEO for Microsoft manages all operational function within his portfolio. 

Thinking Cap ?

While i don't have an opinion yet to have a COO or not, the bigger takeaway for me is a plus for a non-bureaucratic responsibility matrix and flattened organizations. Leaders today are brave as never before,  own their decision and want to take more responsibility, so why should not organizations have their CEOs be the new COOs as well !

Whats in your Thinking Cap on this topic, do share / comment ?