Leadership Culture

I often get asked a question, in a few different ways, but ultimately getting at the same thing. “What is your team like?” “What’s it like working for you?” “Tell me about your team culture.”

Ultimately, I think people are wanting to know two things about a people leader. 1) Are you safe? and 2) What do you expect from me?

Any leader who can clearly articulate these things in word and deed will have world class teams and programs follow them wherever they go.

Does this mean that I always succeed at this? No, in fact I failed at a few aspects of this today. Does this mean that I do this perfectly? No. Does this mean that I can create my own culture within an organizations culture? Yes, but ultimately and organizations culture will have influence and if its bad enough, will prevent the culture from taking root. I can say from experience, though, that a team culture that shines within or amongst cultures that don’t, becomes the target of envy and becomes easily and readily apparent.

Since I am asked this often, I took the time to put together some Andrewisms and things that I do fairly consistently within my teams. Most people I’ve asked to review this have pointed out that they distinctly remember me saying or doing most things on this list.

Ultimately my role as a leader is to ensure that teams have the tools and expectations they need to do their job and to remove roadblocks preventing them from being successful.

A Guide to Understanding How My Mind Works

Plan | Communicate | Own Your Work | Escalate Road Blocks | Learn and Grow

Accountability – Say what you mean and do what you say.  Measure it. Own it, success or failure.

Everything is Always on The Table. It doesn’t matter if it’s my idea, it’s the CEOs idea, it’s something we have always done, we think it’s working well, or what.  It is on the table to discuss whether it has merit, adds value, or is worth doing.  We may not always change it, but we should at least know where we stand with it.

Anticipate the 2nd and 3rd questions. In everything I communicate, and that my team communicates, I expect the 2nd and 3rd questions that our audience may have to be prepared.

I reserve time for my team. I don’t buy into annual performance cycles. I am constantly working with and getting to know my team so that performance is a constant conversation and not once a year. 

Know it well enough to put it in a bullet point. I try to communicate the most relevant facts to the audience.  Not everything is important, and assume the reader only has a few seconds to digest. I also prefer to be communicated to in this way.

I appreciate direct communication rather than indirect communication. I tend to overanalyze indirect communication styles. Therefore, direct communication works best for me.

More Communication > Less Communication. Whether remote or in office, I am constantly chatting, learning, and bouncing ideas off others.  I respect time and space, but I want to communicate early and often because I do not like redoing a task.

I love self-improvement and constructive feedback. I work best with and expect open and honest feedback. I provide a safe environment and I take it seriously.  

I love asking questions. Oftentimes, I may ask a ton of questions. I do this to understand the thought process & logic of decisions / projects / concepts. Asking questions for me does not imply disagreement; if I disagree, I will say so.

Directed Independence. I work best when a vision / goal is explained to me, and I have independence to achieve that goal. Micromanaging makes me lose focus of the bigger picture and often stumps my creativity / thinking. Ultimately it will make me frustrated and disconnected.

I work best with clear expectations. This does not mean specific detailed instructions but rather clear definitions of done and expected timelines and a clear enough understanding of the box within which I should work.

I will protect my team. I do not track butts in seats nor do I track hours worked. I track quality and delivery. And if quality and delivery is taking too many hours, then we either have too much work for the capacity the org has given us, unreasonable deadlines, we don’t have enough people, or I am failing to establish work mgmt. routines within the team. 

Unplanned work is the killer of teams. I do not support when the majority of work is “we need this right now, and I don’t care what it takes”. Heroism is unstainable. I present clear decisions on if this has to be done now, something else must drop.

I expect a psychologically safe environment.  I push myself and my teams so that we will fail. If we aren’t failing, then we aren’t setting high enough expectations. 

Fail Fast. I need to be able to try something, fail, and adjust.  I expect to work through problems, not ignore them. I need to be able, and I expect my teams to, bring up problems that don’t always have solutions so we can work together to solve them. 

I eat my own dogfood. I expect myself and team to follow any process or request that we make of others.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Waiting for something to be perfect almost always leads to never delivering it.  I prefer to deliver something good enough and iterate.  Always define MVP.

Keep it simple. I’m an engineer, and without pause, I will always try to over engineer something.  This goes with don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, and I am constant reminding myself and my teams to keep solutions simple.