Before I became a manager of people, I worked with a gentleman whose work style I didn’t really love. He would push the cross-functional team in ways I felt were unnecessary (read: highly public!), drifting from the “praise publicly, critique privately” mindset that I had accepted as a hallmark of a great leader. By the time I left his organization a few years later, my perspective had shifted significantly and I came to appreciate the clarity with which he led.
The team I was on then was very good at getting things done that our business partners asked for. We were shipping and congratulating ourselves for great “say do” ratios and delivered work. But we weren’t great at connecting that back to the business value — and that’s where there was a tremendous disconnect.
While we were patting ourselves on the back for shipping at a steady pace, our business partners, for whom we were supposed to be delivering value, were steadily watching their key performance indicators slip. The problem was a tale as old as time: we were measuring success by how many outputs we delivered, but not by the outcomes we were delivering. Arguably, tracking outcomes is much harder.
That leader pushed us to be more outcome-oriented with clearer goals/targets. But he didn’t just say “you need to do this” and hope we’d figure it out, he also backed it up by setting up the structural support we needed to measure and track our outcomes. What felt like an overwhelming thing to measure was now a new team’s responsibility. We were now responsible for looking at those measures regularly and pulling the appropriate levers to reach targets including designing experiments if needed to test different approaches to engaging the customer.
And, once we had aligned goals in place, it was so much easier to have conversations with our business partners about what was truly important. I recall one scenario where a business partner requested a feature that would have no direct impact on the success metric we were aligned on driving. My leader at the time was clear we were allowed to respond with, “No, we aren’t doing that as its a distraction from our aligned priorities.” Talk about truly being empowered! And, to his credit, he backed me up, when the escalation inevitably came his way.
So, when I say “clarity”, what he really offered was clarity of purpose. What I realized over time was that the critique I was taking issue with wasn’t this leader critiquing the team publicly but actually the team’s purpose. Was the team actually focusing and honing in on something that will move the needle? Or was the team being highly reactive?
As a manager of people, I now know the best thing I can provide to my team is the clarity of purpose on where they should assign their focus. This looks like telling the team where they need to arrive and not being too prescriptive about how they get there (as long as we get there on-time). And, in doing so, I need to always provide the grounding context that can sometimes get lost in the day-to-day work but is critical to ensuring the team is driving outcomes forward over just checking off items on a “to-do” list.