A Mason's Work

I want to take a couple of minutes in this episode to talk about leadership.

And leadership is a complex and there's just a ton of study that's done for it.

So understand that a lot of us, what I'm going to say in this episode, you're going to

find that it's been studied to death probably elsewhere.

So the anecdotal stuff that I'm giving you here may work for you.

It may not.

There may be evidence for it.

There may not.

I've had positive experiences working in this way.

So here you go.

One of the first things you want to do, like day one as a leader, is identify the places

where there is organizational friction and find the quickest possible winds.

Right?

So congratulations.

You're now in charge of the lodge.

You're now in charge of your company, whatever.

There will be a ton of places where folks are dissatisfied with the way things are going.

This is normal because human beings have this comparison engine between their ears,

where they are always looking for better, easier, smoother ways to do things.

And they will sit on them and suffer in silence until that pressure builds and they complain.

Usually it's not a lot of pressure before the complaints start.

So when you are a leader on day one, you really want to start the scientific sort of discovery

process where you talk to folks and you find out what is going on.

It is important to collect as many data points as it makes sense to do.

So as many data points as it makes sense, if you've got a staff of 12, you want to try

and maybe sit with all 12.

You have a staff of 200.

That's both impractical but themes will start to emerge once you get past a critical

mass, 5 to 10 people.

So interview folks.

Sit next to them.

Do their work with them?

Watch them do their work?

Have them narrate what's going on in that process.

That sitting down and engaging with them in the context of what they do is where you're

going to discover the most good stuff.

Now people are going to feedback without really understanding what they're saying.

They're going to talk in the language of their complaints, not in the business language

of the issues that need to get solved.

For example, somebody might complain that they don't know why they have to fill out maybe

a certain field in a document or somebody at large may complain like, why do we have to

do this one part of the thing every time?

Why do we have to do this in the meeting?

Well, can we just skip that part?

As a leader, you're going to have better insight as to why all of these things are required.

Or you might not and you'll start asking those questions and that in and of itself will

be good discovery.

But that discovery process will require you to have good conversations in a non-judgmental

way.

You'll start talking to the folks that you're responsible for leading and find out what's

going on in their world.

Those questions need to be human questions.

They can't start with on screen 5, subsection 12, what is the click the lay?

That's a nightmare scenario stuff.

What you really want to do is just talk to them about the experience of being in the

role they're in.

What are the best parts?

What are the worst parts?

If this went away, how much better would your day get?

If this was different, how much less work would it be or how much better outcomes would

you have in terms of the client experience?

Or if this went away, how much easier would it be for you to enjoy the meetings that you're

going to in the lodge or what have you?

Those kind of conversations are going to yield a lot of useful information.

When your job as a leader is to go take that information and figure out what is signal

and what is noise.

A lot of the noise is going to be personal stuff like I personally hate XY or Z.

While that's important, most people's personal preferences are just that.

They're not useful in determining an organization's direction or goals.

Just because I don't like the color of the screen we chose for XY or Z or just because

I don't like that we have to do one given thing in a meeting.

It doesn't mean that that's really a meaningful lever to go pull.

Now if you get that same feedback from a significant majority of your people, that's a different

conversation.

You can say, okay, look, maybe we're not doing a great job explaining organizationally why

this is really important that we do this.

We need to develop a communications program to increase the understanding out in the field,

how this problem impacts the overall operation of the company or the overall operation of

the lodge without which if we didn't operate well or didn't solve this problem consistently,

none of us would have any money because the company would go under or the lodge would fail.

As you're able to better understand the nature of these relationships and the stories

that people are telling you, you're going to get a lot of that useful information and

it's going to help you determine on a relatively easy matrix what is both highest level of

friction and easiest salt.

Always do highest friction, easiest salt first.

There may be big, hairy problems that take a lot of effort to solve and they could be

high impact, but it's always easier and always better to realize the short term easy

wins as fast as possible that have a high impact.

Even if that means that you undo them later on in some of the longer term projects you

have to develop or some of the longer term relationships you have to cultivate.

Getting that friction right away buys you one of the most important things as a leader

that you need to have which is social capital and that is the ability or the sort of amount

of risk people are willing to take on your behalf.

That social capital is huge and you need to get as much of it as fast as possible in early

leadership roles so that when you are asking people to do the hard stuff later they know

you have helped them with a lot of the stuff that came before.