Premise
One of the things that every leader is expected to do is to find ways to drive significant value from their teams. Good leaders are always trying to look for opportunities that can unlock significant value creation.
If you know me at all, you know that I am a big fan of the work done by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt, the creator of the “Theory of Constraints“. He had this belief that the biggest constraint that any business faces is Management attention.
If we rephrase this, the biggest constraint that any organisation faces is the paucity of their leadership team’s attention.
In this video, Rami Goldratt, Eli’s son, shares more about this.
So, we assume that this is correct, then the easiest way for us to find opportunities to unlock significant value and drive high performance is to (a) avoid things that waste our attention and (b) pay attention to the right opportunities.
This leads us to the question – How do we waste our attention?
Local Optima vs Global Optima
When we look to improve everything that could be improved, we are looking at optimisation at a local level. Just because we can improve something doesn’t mean that we should work on improving it.
As leaders, we need to understand the difference between improving a part of a process vs improving the output or as Eli Goldratt called, the throughput of a process.
Focusing on improving individual parts of a process could not only not improve the throughput of a process but can actively hinder the overall performance of the process.
This is the reason, as we grow higher in the organisational hierarchy, we need to start thinking more and more abstractly and learn to look at and understand the bigger picture.
We need to learn that the place where a problem shows up is usually the symptom. The real issue that is causing the symptom might not be at the place where the symptom shows up.
So, every time we try to solve a problem, we should stop and think if what we are seeing is a symptom or the root cause. We need to go to the root cause and decide if it is worth solving it at this level or go one more level up and do something that can eliminate this root cause all together.
And once we understand this, we need to learn to communicate it to our teams in a way that they understand the same as well.
Obsessing about Results rather than Enablers
As leaders, we need to quickly learn the importance of focusing on how we act rather than on the results of these actions.
A big mistake that a lot of leaders make is to tell their teams that the destination is more important than how we got there. Typically, this shows up with statements like – “I dont care how you achieve the results as long as we achieve the results!”.
Great leaders understand that end results have the potential to be both beneficial and harmful to our teams. How we achieved these results determines whether it was beneficial or harmful.
Great leaders know we can get lucky and achieve our goals and we can do everything right and yet be unlucky enough to not achieve our goals.
They understand the difference between when we are lucky and when we have actually done the work. They obsess on the process and the work and not on the results.
They recognise people who have done the right work rather than just recognise people who achieved the goals.
This enables a culture where people are focused on doing the right things (leading to long term success) rather than trying shortcuts (leading to long term harm).
Building this culture unlocks significant value leading to high performance in the long term.
Managing Conflict
As leaders, it is inevitable that we will come across conflicts in our work.
The way we resolve these conflicts can have a significant impact on our performance and has the potential to either unlock significant value that can drive high performance or suck up a lot of energy and resources leading to burn out.
Every time we come across a conflict, it is important to step back and try to understand the reason for the conflict.
In most cases, the reason is a fundamental misalignment of beliefs and assumptions held by the people in conflict. Making the invisible visible can lead to a common ground from where we can find a solution that can be a win for everyone involved.
Too Busy to Notice New Opportunities
A big mistake that we can make as leaders is to become so busy that we miss noticing new opportunities to unlock significant value for our teams.
I have noticed that every now and then, we are presented with an opportunity which has the potential to significantly improve our effectiveness and value creation.
Sometimes, this presents itself as a problem that needs to be solved. Sometimes, this presents itself as an idea from someone on the team. Sometimes, this presents itself as an innovation that has the potential to change the game for us.
All that is required from us is to spend some time and attention to figure out if the potential is real or not. We can do this by running small controlled experiments.
However, this requires us to have time on our calendars that we can use for these. If we have a calendar that is already full, we can be sure that no one will be looking for these opportunities nor will anyone else on our team have any free time to think or experiment.
Conclusion
In conclusion, where we focus our attention as leaders has a disproportionate impact on the value our teams create. So, we need to be very intentional about the same.
If you looked at everyone of the things that we discussed above, the common theme is for leaders to be able to take a moment before we respond to any situation.
This moment is to reflect on whether this issue is worthy of our attention (does this have the potential for an outsized impact on our performance or value creation)?
a) If it is not worthy, then we either delegate it to someone for whom it is worth spending their attention or ignore this.
b) If it is worthy of our attention, then we need to reflect on where do we spend this attention. Do we go find the root cause? How do we ensure that we are optimising for global optima rather than local optima? And finally, what are the assumptions we are making and if those are in fact correct? Is our underlying belief right?
All in all, we need to respond with thoughtfulness and not react with impunity. I know that it is easy to say this but difficult to do this in real life.
However, if we want to transition from an average leader to a great leader who can unlock significant performance on a regular basis, we need to become intentional about looking for these opportunities on a regular basis.
