(Initially posted on LinkedIn on April 3rd 2018)
Introduction and Context
As I am about to embark on the next stage of my professional journey, post Tableau Software, I reflect on some of the lessons learned during my experience at Tableau. When I joined Tableau, back in early 2012, we were a small company (300ish employees) coming out of a startup incubation phase and trying to get ready to change the world and possibly go public too. I was hired by Chris Stolte (one of its 3 founders) to build the program management discipline at Tableau, something he felt was missing to grow it in a scale able and sustainable fashion over the next coming years. And growing we did. I joined with 2 other program managers, Ivo and Dan to support a team of 90ish Developers, QA engineers, and UX designers. Over the next 6 years we would grow 10 folds on all metrics: Revenue, global headcount, Eng. Headcount. As the company grew, many of its leaders’ scope grew with it. Mine was no different. During these 6 years I would build the PM discipline up to about 75 teammates with a couple of layers of managers, before being asked by Chris to take on a multidiscipline organization of about 125 engineers/testers, PM… This group then grow through various reorganizations to 170ish, 250ish and most recently shy of 400 strong. The size of the organization is not important, but every organizational change gave me the opportunity to re-establish a leadership team of different size, different background and different mix of leadership style. I believe that strong leadership team builds strong teams which in result build strong products and support growing a strong company. I believe deeply in the critical importance of building a great leadership team, the first team as we called it. A team of people who trust each other, support each other and know that they can only succeed thanks to the other leaders on the team.
Some of the classic challenges I had to face when building these strong leadership was to inspire them to drive changes to improve their team, even unpopular ones, but also feel confident in their ability to balance between the needs of the company and the desires of their team. It was rarely an easy task.
As I looked through many of the communication I sent to my various leadership team over time and to all the messages I evangelized to them, one, in particular, resonate strongly with me to this day still.
So, I decided to candidly share it with others, only slightly edited for public consumption, in the hope it can be of value to those of you leaders who sometime doubt your purpose as a leader, your approach as a leader, your effectiveness as a leader. I hope it gives you some insights and thoughts to reflect on and hopefully some confidence in the path you choose to lead your team and its leaders.
The advises I provided to the PREX (Presentation and Experience) leaders in the summary section apply equally well to this audience…
It went like this…
“Hi PREX leaders,
This email is NOT tactical, it is NOT about Tableau version 10.0 and it is NOT urgent.
In summary
But it is about my goals and aspirations for H2 2016. It is also about my beliefs and some thoughts on topics that seems to be coming up quite often in conversations recently, such as empowerment and trust.
I chose this format because it allows for a richer articulation of thinking and beliefs that built-up of months.
Read at your leisure, like a book or report. Take your time reading it. Don’t rush through it.
My ask is, take the time to think about these things yourself. Discuss it with others, exchange thoughts, form your own opinions and beliefs system and bring these to the discussions once they surface.
Where are we at?
It has now been slightly over 8 months since PrEx team was formed. We have formed and then stormed. We are learning to work together as we go through a full release together. And what a release with lots of high and a few lows too. Lots of learning for us all including a bunch of learning for me too. I made some mistakes, I am learning and growing from them. I observe us, the teams, individuals whether leaders or ICs and I believe we are right at about transitioning from storming to norming soon.
But there are a few things that I think impede us from fully getting to norming and soon after performing. The following are the 3 topics I want to discuss with you below: 1- Leadership, 2 – Empowerment, 3 – Trust.
On Leadership.
My definition of success, is to have turned this org into one of leaders. It is to have grown many of my reports into people capable of leading a large-scale business in the near future. But for them to get there, they themselves need to have grown many of you into people capable of taking on your next level of leadership respectively as well.
But what is leadership? You’ll find many definitions in books and web sites of all sort. It is a complex and multifaceted thing.
Furthermore, at Tableau we don’t simply embrace leadership, we embrace servant leadership.
Here are my views on leadership.
And these don’t mean I am always good at these myself, I am still learning too. This job is still relatively new to me as yours is still new to you in this new org.
Let’s start with what I believe leadership is not.
· Leadership is not about managing detailed individual activities. That’s project management
· Leadership is not about aggregating information and passing it on. That is reporting. Many softwares are very good at doing that.
· Leadership is not about focusing solely on people happiness and doing what they like. That is usually what new first level managers think their role is about and their duty to their team is. It’s noble, but is not necessarily setting up individuals or team for success in the long term.
· Servant leadership is not about making sure people have enough computers, food, desk dividers ... These are a necessity, but this is not really what servant leadership is about in my mind.
What is servant leadership then?
It is complex and harder than it appears at first. And it takes a lot of guts and courage. So, give yourself kudos when you take leadership decisions or actions. They are not always popular, and you have no guarantee that they will always be 100% right. Unanimous support makes a decision easy to take, but when they are not unanimous, they harder to take, and this is when they take lots of courage.
· Servant leadership is about listening and understanding, both your followers but also the business you support or participate in. One cannot go without the other one. This balancing act is hard, and it is an equilibrium sometime leaning toward the team, and sometimes leaning toward the needs of the business. The needs and wishes of the team do not always align entirely with the needs of the business. That’ when you come in and apply your judgement, your perspective and when your life and professional experiences takes its importance.
· Servant leadership is about helping your team understand the reasons, rationales and benefits for achieving the goals the teams need to reach and accomplish. Of course, it is easier when the team already buys into this goal, but that is not always the case.
· Servant leadership is also about helping the business and senior leadership understand the state the team is in, its capabilities, its performance level, its capacity to respond to the needs of the business and the best way for the team to support the goals of the business.
· Servant leadership is about listening, reading the dynamics between people, observing the mood of the group, assessing where the teams and individuals are at about their enthusiasm for their role, their purpose on the team and the goals of the team. This is where you need to take this information and assess how you can best help the team, or specific individual who are struggling? Are they on the right role? Do they understand the purpose and importance of what they are working on? How do you help them understand their purpose? How can you help them align their role to better fit their skillset and interest while also supporting the needs of the team and the product?
· Servant leadership is also about being an advocate for the team with the world outside the team, whether it is with other teams or with higher level leadership. Of course, you can only be an effective evangelist for the team if you are involved with the team and in touch with what is going on within the team. What pains, what struggles, what challenges they face. You need to be closely familiar with these, in order to be able to help and support the team.
· Servant leadership is also about using your own experience and perspective of the larger ecosystem the team evolves in, to help the team, to look ahead and anticipate roadblocks, issues that might arise as the team progresses on their path toward their goal. You are in the role you are, because your skills, talents, experiences were recognized as something that can be of value to help the team grow and succeed. Your insights and perspectives are the reasons why you were given this responsibility. Use these to help the team. I sometimes hear a leader tell me, “I don’t ask the team because I trust them and I don’t want them to feel disempowered”. While this is a noble thought, what this leader has done in effect, is disempowered himself/herself’s ability to help and serve the team. If you don’t know what is going on, how do you know who is struggling and why? How do you foresee incoming traps, how do you help the team avoid falling into difficult situation? This is a fairly common new leader trap.
· In order to be an effective servant leader, you need to know the people on your team, you need to understand how they think, how they feel, you need to understand their strength and areas of growth. You also need to understand the team’s dynamic, you need to know what technical challenge is currently creating some issues for the team. In order to help the team and each individual on the team, serve them as their leader, you need to be in the know.
You need to know what’s going on. And that is where the two other topics come into play. If the team and folks openly talk with you and you are actively listening to them, you mostly already know what’ going on. But if the team or individuals don’t communicate, then the only way for you to know what is going on is to ask. And asking seems to be received as a mark of disempowerment and of lack of trust at Tableau. Tableau is the first place I see people being so sensitive about being asked for information and reacting with a feeling of lack of being trusted as a result. So let’s take this head on and talk about these two things.
On Empowerment
Bridget, Clair, Ravs, Kyle, Nick and I spend a lot of time discussing our views on leadership and sharing our experiences with one another. It is important to help us grow and become better at what we do. We’ve read a few books together on leadership and discussed our opinions on this. Most recently we read “Turning the ship around” from David Marquet. It talks about a Navy captain taking command of the least effective Nuclear Submarine in the Navy and turning it around into the best performing one. This exceptional achievement happened because he was able to turn all his officers, chiefs and submarine crew from followers into leaders. In effect, he turned his entire team from a “leader-follower” team, to “leader-leader” team. This book resonated particularly strongly with all of us because while a submarine is quite far and remote from the world of software engineering, the human psychology and communication challenges are the same. How do you turn people who feel disempowered and behave as powerless victims into people that take responsibility and act empowered?
This book gave me the words and easily understandable examples I wasn’t always finding, to talk about the very same challenges I see us facing today. I strongly suggest you read this book if you have a chance. It is a fairly short read actually. Out of the dozens and dozens of managements, leadership books I have read in my career, it is my favorite one by far because of how practical and how relatable it is to each of our situation. The solution is remarkably simple conceptually and yet so hard for a large group of people to embrace and live daily.
Before I break to you the crux of it, let’s discuss what role you and I play in this change.
For an organization to feel and behave empowered, it requires everyone at all level to change some things. Behavior change starts on both ends of the leadership chain, with the most senior leaders and also with the teams. The middle man/woman are the key to success. As first or second line managers you are the proxies by which everything happens. You are the ones that can educate, evangelize, encourage, recognize, reward and continuously emphasize the right behaviors. You are also the ones that can shield the teams from un-empowering behaviors that might come from your own leaders. So lesson one, middle management is the key to success for an organization to feel and behave empowered. Here you go, I just dropped it on you J, well on Bridget, Clair, Ravs, Kyle, Nick and myself too because we are also the middle managers to someone else.
So here is the crux of it now.
Empowerment is something that cannot be given, but something that is felt and behaved as.
One does not need to be “given power” to be empowered.
Through communicating intent, action, progress, one empowers oneself.
To simplify it to its most basic: the more someone (individual, team, manager) proactively communicates upward and outward his/her intent for action, his/her proposal for solution, his/her progress towards it, his/her assessment of roadblock and course changes as a result, the more that someone is in control of his/her destiny and the more that someone remains empowered. We hire smart, skilled, talented people, people with the right intentions and passion for our mission. No-one will ever doubt people’s intend to do the best to support the company.
The reverse is also true. The least some communication exist and happen upward and outward, the more it creates a void. That void is inevitably filled by questioning in order for a leader to understand what’s going on (remember the “you need to know in order to help the team” statement above?). The more people, team are asked, the more they feel questioned, the more they feel scrutinized, the less they feel empowered and trusted.
Bottom line proactive communication is the key for team to act and feel empowered. Educate, encourage, coach the team, and individuals to communicate proactively, openly, frequently, without limit of depth, you will bless them with the gift of empowerment. Some teams do it naturally, some teams struggle with it. Observe which teams performs the best, observe which teams are seen as reliable ones, effective ones? Aren’t they also the ones that communicate most openly and naturally outward?
So, we now have an interesting situation. Leaders need to know in order to serve and support their team effectively. Individuals and teams need to communicate profusely in order to act and feel empowered. When these two things happen, magic happens. Things run smoothly and there is a strong sense of trust between the teams and their leaders.
When one or both of these things do not happen, that is when the sense of lack of trust appears.
So, let’s put the “elephant in the room” on the table and talk about trust for a sec.
On Trust
Sometimes I hear a team mate say: “Why can’t the team be trusted to make the decision?” “Why do we have to have other people take part into the decision?”, “Why can’t Chris Stolte, Thierry, Jock, <name-your-favorite-outside-the-team-contributor> trust us to make the decision?”.
This has nothing to do with trust or disempowerment.
Look at this picture below. Each plane’s launching crew + Pilots are fully capable, experimented to launch each plane. The Navy trust them to be able to successfully and safely launch multi-million-dollar planes in the air every single time. There is no issue of trust around skillset and capabilities. But should they launch it now? From which launch pad should they launch? Should they go one after the other or at the same time?... Someone else makes that call.
When, why, where, they should launch each plane requires broader scope, input from folks in the tower that have a long time experience of these complexes situations, a bigger, a broader perspective on the actions going on around the boat, whether it be an enemy attack, other navy boat maneuvering, another plane intersecting the launch path, or other issues happening on board…
It is the same with feature (or scrum) teams. Teams are part of a large boat, The Tableau Dev organization, with people whose job it is to look over the horizon with broader perspective, with lots of experience with similar complex situation.
Wanting to have complete autonomy to make every single decision independently is not reasonable or responsible in such a complex large-scale team. It has nothing to do with empowerment or trust.
I also sometimes hear that “people should just trust”, no questions asked. Or sometimes I hear that any interaction should start from a place with the Trust bank at the max.
When you don’t know someone, should you trust blindly?
Let me ask you. Who between these two people below would you trust with your own life to take you to the summit of Rainier?
Well if some of you picked the guy on the left (which is me), I thank you for your vote of confidence, but if I were you I would pick the guy on the right.
His name is Ed Viestur. He has climbed Rainer over 250 times (I only climbed it 5 times), Everest 6 times and all 14 eight thousand meters peak without oxygen.
He is the very best guide at this time and someone I would trust with my own life to climb a mountain.
Why would I trust him with my own life? Because I know what he has done. He has hundreds of more climb experience than me on pretty much any mountain. Through reading all his books and meeting him, I know how he thinks when it comes to taking risk (he is way more conservative than most current alpinists when it comes to taking risk and thus is a reason why he is still alive in light of all of his accomplishments). I know his skill level and the extent of his experience. Thus I trust his judgement on the mountain way more than mine actually.
I believe in trust very highly. As a matter of fact, like you, I trust commercial pilot every single time I take a plane. And I trust my mountaineering partners every time we rope in together, in the middle of the night when it is pitch black, to go jump over crevasses.
I trust in my climbing partners’ skills and experience and have put my life in their hand dozens of times. And so have they. Yet we still share with each other constantly tons of information about why we believe in a specific course of action or route decisions or assessment of objective dangers… This helps us share and put in common our experiences for better decision making. It also help us catch each other’s judgement mistake and learn from each other.
What people take for lack of trust is not lack of trust in one’s skill set. Instead it is a matter of difference in reading a situation, difference of opinion and judgement based on difference of experience. More often than not it highlights a simple lack of information.
When you as a leader need information from the team, you are not showing them distrust, you are simply trying to assess the situation yourself to see if you’d come up with a different answer than the team and why. If you do come up with the same answers, it allows you to build confidence in the team by supporting their initial judgement call and recommended path. If you came up to a different path, then maybe you saw something they didn’t, maybe your experience showed you something they couldn’t know or see. This is an opportunity for you to help them look at things with another perspective and help them reassess their path. You are helping them grow in effect. And maybe avoid a trap too. You are serving them by supporting their growth.
Bridget, Clair, Rave, Kyle, Nick and I trust each and every one on the team with their skillset, attitude, motivation to be part of this team. We each have a different horizon when we look at things. Our perspective and experience on a situation as well as additional context we often have, may give us a chance to see things that you didn’t see or couldn’t see. And the same goes with you and your teams. So, asking for information is not expressing a lack of trust but merely an attempt to confirm a great decision made by the team or help the team come up with a better one.
But as you saw earlier, ideally leaders should never need to ask for information because they have coached and educated their team in the empowerment benefits of proactive outward and upward communication flow.
In summary:
Upward and outward proactive communication leads to feelings of empowerment and feelings of being trusted.Proactive upward and outward communication avoids creating information voids. Consequently, it also avoids top down information requests that lead to feelings of disempowerment and distrust.Knowing what’s going on with your team is enabling the servant leader to be effective in leading and growing his/her team.Smooth leader-leader communication happens when everyone at all ends of the leadership chain take part to it at the same time and together. They cannot happen independently.Smooth leader-leader communication, empowerment and trust take relentless work day by day from everyone. It is and will be hard work.
I believe we can do it. We have the right people, with the right value and attitude. I really truly believe that this is what will take us right through norming and into performing as an organization. It will be a very rewarding state that I believe everyone will enjoy and feel very proud off once we get there.
Thank you for reading through all this. Thank you for putting some thinking on this. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with others on the leadership team or you’re your mentors or other leaders outside the organization if you wish. I will always find time to chat with anyone of you who want to have a discussion with me on these topics. “