digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: Become a student of leadership, and once you lead, build your team through shared incentives, leading by example, and giving people accountability instead of answering every question for them. Leadership is an always-on responsibility, so the leader's job is to develop others' self-reliance rather than to be the expert with all the answers.
Key Points
- Leadership is a constant responsibility, comparable to parenting: the promotion is the easy part, while the ongoing work of leading is the hard part.
- Great leaders see themselves as students, continuously reading, watching talks, and discussing leadership with others.
- Incentives should encourage teamwork, not just individual performance, and need not be financial; recognition works too.
- Leaders who act as if they know everything signal that others must do the same, which discourages asking for help.
- Over-answering questions erodes people's confidence and decision-making, so leaders take accountability away without realizing it.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions:
- Start your leadership education now if you aspire to lead: read articles and books, watch talks, and talk about leadership with friends or colleagues.
- Reward collaboration explicitly: when you see people helping each other or sharing, call it out publicly.
- Give promotions and recognition for the behaviors you want, such as teaming, and thank people together when they solve problems together.
- Give feedback in the right setting: compliment publicly in front of the team, and criticize privately.
- Model the behavior you want by saying "I don't know" or "I need help," and by working with junior people even when they simply poke holes in your ideas.
- When asked "Should we do A or B?", ask the person what they think the right decision is and let them make it, instead of giving the answer.
- When you are away, tell your team to work problems out themselves and call only in a true emergency where they absolutely cannot find the answer, then stop replying to every email.
- Speaker's anecdote: his former boss, Peter Tomaggio, refused to answer his questions and instead asked guiding questions or outlined parameters, which taught him self-reliance, described as his most valuable lesson.
- When someone complains "I'm doing all the work," the speaker suggests asking them what their colleagues are struggling with, since the colleagues may be facing pushback.
- Accountability tends to be taken on by people when it is given to them, which the speaker presents as the main reason people fail to take responsibility.
Bottom Line
Good leadership means stepping back: teach people to decide and own outcomes rather than making every call for them.
