Successful leaders understand their context and rules of engagement
Like many leaders, I’ve spent more years in established corporations than as the entrepreneur of my own venture. Yet entrepreneurial years feel like dog years! And so does the accumulated experience and gained wisdom. These past months spent building The Product Sherpa, and advising all kinds of businesses have been the richest ever.
Many of us talk about the stark contrast between established corporations and the startup world. Yes, differences abound, but what it takes to win in any of these environments is incredibly similar. It’s all about understanding your context and the rules of engagement.
A variety of factors contribute to success, but I’ve seen the most thriving leaders know how to avoid four specific traps:
Trap #1 - Exclusively focusing on strategy
It’s an area where entrepreneurs often have an edge because they need to alternate between higher strategic levels and everyday execution constantly. As leaders grow and progress in established businesses, they typically steer away from the pure execution part and operate at higher strategic levels. Where I’ve seen them fail was when they became disconnected from how things indeed got done.
Successful leaders would still keep doing in addition to guiding their teams. They were the ones who could effectively switch back and forth between operating at “stratospheric strategic altitudes” and executing the most mundane tasks at “sea level.”
It doesn’t mean you should micro-manage every single aspect of your business. Just look for where you’ll have the most significant impact. For instance, I’ve always paid specific attention to how my product managers generated Product Requirement Documents (PRDs). These deliverables are critical to the ultimate success of a product. I took the time to dive in, commenting, challenging the thinking and the assumptions. I eventually guided the managers to deliver the best possible deliverable.
Whatever the size or maturity of the organization, the best leaders challenge the status quo, get their hands dirty, and genuinely understand how to get things done. It is not the same as micro-managing, however. Every team member deserves the right to drive their part. But the right leader will build enough intimacy with how things get done to form an informed judgment on how aligned everyone is.
Trap #2 - Obsessing over planning and not experimenting
Once you have found a winning formula and know how to replicate it, your focus is naturally moving to perfecting and tuning this great foundation. That’s fine. The trap is to fall victim to the planning you establish and not try things out anymore. It’s where most established businesses have a big lesson to learn from startups. Instead of assuming the winning formula is here to stay and that all they have to do is planning the execution steps, they’ll be better off accepting that the winning formula still has ways to go and is under constant threats. Instead of taking months to plan, they’d rather maintain some form of paranoia on the disruptive forces out there.
So, whatever the state of your business, you’ll gain in experimenting new approaches, learning from these, and adjusting as you build a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t.
It’s one of the best lessons I’ve learned from the entrepreneur and startup world: don’t spend all your energy preparing the perfect plan. It doesn’t exist. Instead, find ways to iterate and continuously improve your execution by experimenting in small increments. It requires some tolerance for failure. The good news is that more established businesses are now opening up to such a philosophy. If you’re still facing resistance, start by incorporating tiny experimental chunks in your plan and progressively expand these vs. solely focusing on building that perfect plan. The best leaders I’ve seen were actually the ones to try new ways and approaches on a small scale first and then assess how these can expand if they start to see traction.
Trap #3 - Encouraging bloated processes
Once a business meets success, there is a tendency to build an organization and processes that will protect the franchise at all costs. Some believe that such approaches are making it harder for innovation and disruptive thinking to happen. The increased complexity makes it harder and slower indeed.
But processes are here for a reason, and they’re not the source of the issue. The real cause is how bloated some of these processes are and how opaque organizations can be. It makes cross-functional collaboration harder.
Sub-goals are put in place and become so specialized that you’d think some teams are working against each other. How do you overcome such tension?
It’s where the strength of a unifying vision and its impact on operational planning and organization comes into play. Suppose you have a common language for the definition of success. In that case, you’re better off choosing relevant metrics for success that won’t contradict each other. The key here is collaboration, transparency, and shared accountability.
It takes leadership courage to challenge the status quo and dysfunctional processes, but it’s a necessary move. The startup world is more straightforward, as no function has had time yet to build its “castle”. It’s all fresh. You’re still on a mission to discover what will work. In any case, don’t forget to keep it simple. What led you to success was your ability to keep things simple and execute with minimal means and time. Keep that hunger in mind when you revisit your processes as an established business. Processes are not evil, but they tend to bloat over time, and the worst red flag is when no one in the company can explain to you why they put a specific process in place. It means it’s time for an overhaul.
Trap #4 - Only addressing the chain of command
Addressing the chain of command and getting executive buy–in is necessary to get things moving, but it’s not enough. Both starting businesses and established corporations have their chains of influence. They differ, but it’s equally critical to understand and master them.
Let me share a sadly familiar story in big corporations. For months, I had tried to move the needle with my latest business turnaround plan. I didn’t understand why I wasn’t getting much traction. I thought I had the chain of command under control: I had the CEO and a few key executives’ attention monthly. The business plans I presented made perfect sense to them. Yet, I wouldn’t get the execution I needed. The answer was simple: I did not understand how the chain of influence truly worked. It took me a deliberate effort to deconstruct and understand who the key stakeholders were and how much attention they needed to get things done. Most of these enablers were middle managers across different functional areas. The lesson learned is that addressing the chain of command alone isn’t enough.
Whether large or small, businesses can have a rather complex chain of “influence.” And if leaders don’t understand it, they’re likely wasting their time. So, pay specific attention to the enablers in your company. They’re here for a reason. They are protecting what the institution is standing for. They’re the guardians of the company’s cohesion and survival. They will likely meet any of your disruptive ideas with an eyebrow. It doesn’t mean you should not take the initiative. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t innovate. You need to understand how to find the keys to either get them on your side or have them neutralized with some senior executive help. And if you’re in a startup environment, you’ll still encounter some form of a chain of influence. It’s just not as internal because most of you are working towards the same survival goal: discover and secure a replicable way to succeed and scale. But, you’ll likely have an external chain of influence you need to understand and master too.
Make sure you avoid these four traps!
The quest for the right and scalable model that most startups are after means they’re prone to action, and time truly is of the essence. On the other hand, most established businesses have at least one repeatable success under their belt. They develop a framework to protect that success, but if they solely focus on such protection, they’ll die eventually. The key to success for leaders in both environments is to find the right balance. They need to balance protecting or building the franchise while staying hungry for new and disruptive approaches.
So remember these four rules if you want to lead your organization to success, no matter what size or stage of its lifecycle
- Get your hands dirty and do your part on execution
- Don’t obsess about building the perfect plan. Experiment, learn from it, and repeat
- Don’t fear processes, but keep them as streamlined as possible
- Understand the chain of influence to get things done
Keep digging, and if you come to a point where you feel stuck, don’t hesitate to reach out to tanguy@theproductsherpa.com. Let The Product Sherpa be your guide!